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Strategies & Market Trends : Mr. Pink's Picks: selected event-driven value investments -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mad2 who wrote (16590)	5/20/2002 10:13:34 PM
From: benchpress550	Respond to of 18998

ooooooo....did I forget to mention I will be picking up some of your buddies cheap nov 20 puts sometime soon as an insurance policy. Go figure on that one.

To: Mad2 who wrote (16590)	7/24/2002 8:35:27 AM
From: Bruce A. Thompson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18998

Benchpress, I believe the price is being manipulated by a coordinated assault by Einhorn and his band of shorters and class action yard dog attorneys. In this market, even the appearance of impropriety is all it takes to get investors to abandon a good stock. Look at MIR selling for a fraction of book and less than 2X eps. MIR is lilly white compared to the real energy villians. MIR has already announced that they beat estimates and will be doing a CC on July 30 to officially announce earnings. I am buying it here and will buy lots more if they drop the price just a little more for me between now and then. I am not worried about the damage Einhorn and crew can do to ALD. ALD has some really great things going for it. First is the fact that they pay zero income tax. Their IRS status requires them to pass 90% of all profits through to the stockholders. They only have 40 years of consistant dividend payments to their credit. Secondly, Einhorn's bitch is over the refusal of ALD to use Mark to Market accounting for their portfolio. Mark to market simply will not work for the illiquid investments they make. As a result ALD values their portfolio at cost basis until the asset sale or repayment then shows the profit and pays the dividend. Using M to M will force ALD to show huge proforma profits that may not be actually realized and would force future "restatements of previous years income" When the class action suit gets around to discovery, these facts will win out. Another fact in ALD's favor is the huge value increase over valuation they receive when the closeout investments. For example, the recent WTI sale to a university resulted in a net profit of $60 mil. WTI was on the books at a cost of $16.5 mil. Another example was the recent IPO of KIRK. This resulted of a gain of $2.2 mil cash plus another $3.6 mil in stock retained by ALD in the portfolio. ALD carried KIRK on the books at the original investment of $96K. I am a buyer here and if it were to drop to $12, I would rent a dump truck to haul away shares to put in the core. 18% dividends are not to be passed over. To quote Clinton,"It's the economy stupid". ALD is precisely the type of investment that Warren Buffett looks for. BT