Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Spekulatius who wrote (29566)	1/4/2008 12:09:27 PM
From: Grommit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78464

OSK. I chose OSK over GEHL due to better recent results among other reasons. I owned OSK last year and lost a bit on it. Too many good things to buy today. finance.yahoo.com biz.yahoo.com

To: Spekulatius who wrote (29566)	1/8/2008 6:27:50 PM
From: anializer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78464

Spekulatius, Curious as to why GEHL has performed so miserably over the past 2 years. Any reason you can see? I know they sold most of the farm equipment division and combined what they kept into the machinery division. But it seems this was a hot sector in general, yet GEHL's decline was onerous and persistent. Any thought's?

To: Spekulatius who wrote (29566)	1/10/2008 11:51:26 PM
From: Spekulatius	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78464

DFS & AXP - i was lucky enough to sell my starter positions in AXP and DFS today after i saw the writing on the wall with COF. I wish i had done the same with AB which lowered earnings expectations for 2007 unexpectedly. So much for the great idea of swapping LM for AB to harvest tax losses in LM. Now i have got losses in both. Too early to buy into AXP even after todays haircut. i think this stock could see a 3 as a first number. After i purchased my AXP position I started to poke around in the SEC filings and found some reason for concern: 1) over the years AXP has reduced it's reserves for bad debt, due to better credit performance. Now it looks like they have to reverse that trend and boost the reserves and write of more loans. 2) It seems that under certain circumstances AXP can be forced to take back securitized credit card receivables - up to 20B$ if my interpretation is correct. I bet the stock would not respond well if that were come to pass. At current prices I like DFS better, since it seems more conservatively managed. lower loan growth is actually good going into a recession (or something close to it). but even though i see that DFS has to add 500M$ to their reserves as well over this cycle.this would boost reserves to 5% of receivables, which is a reasonable number if annualized losses climb to 5% (rule of thumb is that reserves are equal to 1x annualized loss rates for credit card companies). Who's next. With a fallen star like AXP i think we will see likewise with C, Chase and BofA credit card business - the next shoe to drop after mortgage losses (which are going to get worse too). I see housing prices falling 5-10% this year. Compounding the losses so far i venture to guess that vintage 2005 & 2006 buyers with 10-20% equity at the time of purchase are going to be underwater by now. Those "prime" mortgages are going to show much higher losses as well, I am willing to guess.