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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Senior who wrote (15726)	10/31/2002 9:23:50 PM
From: Spekulatius	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78625

Travelers Tapa I just established a position in travelers insurance recently. I got aware of the opportunity through a favorable article in Barron's. P/E is about 10. As most other insurance companies Tapa has issues with asbestos and the current situation in the stock market isn't helping either. The asbestos issues are somewhat alliviated by the fact that Citicorp is still on the hook for up to 500M$ if Traveler's asbestos reserves are not sufficient.

To: Paul Senior who wrote (15726)	11/1/2002 3:31:24 PM
From: hoyasaxa	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78625

Paul- LabCorp. Thanks for your comments. Appreciate your contributions to this thread. Thought I'd share some more information regarding LabCorp. LabCorp, like Quest Diagnostics, provides clinical laboratory testing for individuals, companies and big Pharma- these two companies are the two largest independent clinical labs in the USA. Economics similar to the CROs -- both have a small presence in this area as well -- key to watch and understand are trends in volume and pricing. LabCorp doing a good job increasing prices even as they lose some volume -- volume lost appears to me more intentional than not- like banks getting rid of customers that aren't profitable. I covered labcorp as an analyst back in 1998-9. Company has impressively performed since then, after they did a reverse split and cleaned up some capital structure issues by taking out a convert. I like the medical outsourcers in general on a macro basis (human genome and other new advances creating new drugs and technology and more business for these guys). Business scales quite well. M&A activity pretty active.... Quintiles is the big gun CRO and remains attractive to me and value gap b/t the similar LabCorp (LH)and Quest (DGX) is going to narrow with my bet that LH goes more up than DGX gos down.... As for the conglomerate players - appreciate your comments on JCI. United Technologies and Thermo-Electron are worth more than they are valued at but due to their complexity tough to argue too strongly for them and shareholders to realize their worth any time soon, perhaps? Cheers-