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

To: Jurgis Bekepuris who wrote (29365)	12/21/2007 4:38:31 PM
From: SI Bob	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78464

I've really changed up my investing/trading approach in my trading account so I'm a bit more conservative, and it seems to be working well. I'm basically trading stocks I already hold in my long-term account, but getting in and out of them for relatively small gains, which so far are adding up. At the risk of jinxing them (as so often happens with my Options trading, which I'm limiting to 10% of that account's value), I lightened up on [t]ELN[/t] and [t]ACAS[/t] today (actually flipped a small amoung of ACAS a couple of times), rebought [t]WPL[/t] with just one partial flip, and bought Jan 17.5 calls on [t]ADCT[/t] and Jun 5's on [t]FMT[/t], neither of which I have in my long-term account. They're specifically trades. I missed out bad on FMT yesterday/today. Bought it yesterday, expecting to do a 20-cent flip on it, sold it at a 5-cent loss, and today it closed about $1.45 above where that happened, or just over 50%. Getting back on-topic, I'm really liking both ACAS and WPL here, though ACAS's volatility begs to be day-traded. WPL, dunno. Volume is improving on it, but it really seems to be largely forgotten. Can reliably trade it for 40-50 cents if it's timed right (70 cents if I were actually any good) and the trade is for days rather than hours, but I guess it's going to be a while before it starts getting respect again. And I'm holding onto it in the LT account for that day.

To: Jurgis Bekepuris who wrote (29365)	12/21/2007 8:06:16 PM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78464

valuing insurers: NWLIA. Knowing this about any company is possibly good and maybe sufficient: "what...their assets and are they really worth what they claim + whether their liabilities are not understated". I've not found it necessary though for insurance companies. Book value (the growth of)is the standard metric used by analysts and the companies themselves in evaluating insurance company performance. On that basis NWLIA is cheap. Because it has almost always sold below book value. As it does now. Which means for the past several years it's almost always been cheap by my reasoning, because it's almost always sold under bv. Could you make money in this stock? Yes, because book value has increased every year and and the stock price has mostly followed it (up) too. Is the stock a great buy now? There've been years when the the p/bk has been .7 or lower; it's now .8. Although I've been in the stock since '02, I made my first small add recently @ $190. Nobody seemed to be interested in the stock when I was posting on it here in '02. I made several buys then in a taxable and in an ira account. I still have all these shares (because the stock is still undervalued, imo). One discussion point back then was that the stock was iffy because patriarch Moody and his family --the controlling sharesholders ---might not be running the company for the good of all shareholders. Over time, for me, I don't have much of those concerns now, given the growth in bv that the company's produced and my cursory reading of the annual reports. It's the same regarding Moody-controlled ANAT. I've been in since '01 with dividends reinvested, and I made my first small add in Aug. this year with the stock at $120/sh. When someone is in a company for several years, over time, one gets to have some comfort, understanding, and knowledge of how the business is run and its issues and problems and strengths. My opinion is that rather than "running from NWLIA", an investor ought to look closer at it, and maybe pick a point where the stock might make for a small buying opportunity. (.7 p/bk? Now at .8 p/bk?) I continue to look for and buy and hold several other insurance companies that sell below p/bk.