To: Tunica Albuginea who wrote (2495 ) 8/21/2000 7:08:41 PM From: AK2004 Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 4155 TA I am sure that Dorfman's week old bit is an old news but just in case.... Regards -AlbertNovell, Conseco Are Among the True Stock Bargains: John Dorfman 8/15/0 13:44 (New York) ................... Stock Screens I don't believe there are anywhere near 76 genuine bargains in this rug store, however. After I imposed a series of not-very-demanding statistical tests (price-earnings ratio less than 20, price-book ratio of 3 or less, price-sales ratio of 3 or less, and long-term debt less than stockholders' equity), fewer than a dozen candidates remained. I sifted them down to the following four: ........................ Conseco, based in Carmel, Indiana, may be the most speculative of the lot. Under Stephen C. Hilbert, who was CEO from 1988 until April, Conseco acquired a long string of insurance companies (many of them mediocre), using its high-flying stock as currency. It then centralized many of the companies' operations and cut costs to improve profits. New CEO Conseco's accounting was widely viewed as aggressive, and Hilbert's compensation (he received more than $13 million a year for three years running) as excessive. The company also took on a fair amount of debt, which recently amounted to 174 percent of stockholders' equity. Now, thanks to one last acquisition that blew up in its face -- Green Tree Finance Corp., for which the company paid $6 billion -- Hilbert is out and a new management team is in. Gary Wendt, a respected finance man from General Electric Co., is the new chief executive. I think if anyone can turn Conseco around, Wendt is the guy. I first wrote about Conseco in this column in November 1997, when the stock was at $46. ``Personally, I've never liked Conseco,'' I wrote at the time. ``It has always seemed to me that too much of its earnings have come from financial engineering, that the companies it keeps acquiring are often of dubious quality, and that chief executive Stephen Hilbert's pay is excessive.'' Today, you can pick up shares of Conseco for $7.50 apiece, down 84 percent from when I made those harsh remarks 33 months ago. But if I hated the stock at $46, I like it at prices under $8. .................................