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

To: Spekulatius who wrote (30073)	2/17/2008 12:29:17 AM
From: Paul Senior	Respond to of 78741

GTN. Yes, GTN not cheap on some measures. Especially so when doing comparison's to recent public sales of stations. Before I bought I did use this for a very rough comparison: marketwatch.com 11/30/07: "Clear Channel Communications Inc.'s $1.26 billion sale of 35 television stations to Newport Television." GTN: has 36 television stations and enterprise value $1.21 billion. Assuming there are some better and some worse stations in each group, I'll further assume in dealing with 35-36 stations, the value per station average out about the same. So I conclude that GTN stock is trading only slightly below what a motivated private party would be willing to pay for GTN stock and net debt in order to get GTN's 36 stations. So yes, GTN is not cheap (by such an evaluation). However, I note now that TVL has 31 stations and that TVL's enterprise value is $1.43B. Fewer stations than GTN, yet higher enterprise value than GTN. Very crudely: GTN with 36 stations and enterprise value 1.21B, is the cheaper stock when the focus is on assets (assuming sample size of 31 or so normalizes any differences among individual stations). If the focus is on earnings, then TVL (EV/EBITDA) shows to be the less expensive one. Again, very rough analysis. And I am not considering individual company's strengths/weaknesses, e.g. HD capability, ratings, ancillary businesses, etc. CBS, TVL might be buys too. I don't know. I do like GTN for its locations in college towns, for the persistent insider buying, for its relatively low stock price (relative to its historical prices), and the fact that several value funds seem to be holding shares.