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

To: E_K_S who wrote (38454)	7/6/2010 10:32:17 PM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 78744

Water Utilities. I hold shares in these: AWK CWT WTR PICO SBS CPL VE. I don't follow SJW or AWR. I sold out of AWR, and I guess I've just forgotten to go back and look at these two. For value buys now, I like AWK and SBS. SBS -- Brazilian with a low p/e. I'm just holding on to my SBS shares; I suppose I should look closer to see if I ought to add. I've built a full position in [t]AWK[/t] (<span style='font-size:11px'>LAST</span>: 20.29<span style='font-size:11px'> 7/6/2010 5:18:11 PM</span>) ; I'm reinvesting its dividends back into the stock; and I'm a buyer for even more shares if the stock falls under $20/sh. again. (I bought some shares as high as $21.49 in May). In earlier posts here on AWK, I've mentioned the reasons the stock appeals to me. PICCO gets written up occasionally by guys who like to do sum-of-parts analyses to conclude or allude that a stock is undervalued. Here's a recent write-up that does that for PICCO: finance.yahoo.com Maybe PICCO's a buy or an add at current low price. I haven't decided for me yet. I'll hold on to the shares I already have though. I looked at Veolia (VE) over the weekend. The price has come down to near lows. The company is such a behemoth -- involved in several types of utilities, has 300,000 employees -- it's a little difficult for me to decide what to do (hold only or add more shares) with this French-based company. Maybe just watch for now to see if stock goes lower. Basically I'm intending to keep positions in water utilities because they provide a vital service - supplying drinking water being a VERY vital activity. -g- Some of these companies have a long history of paying increasing dividends, and that appeals to me since I am planning and hoping to hold these stocks for years. While the sector is government regulated, it's hard to see bureaucrats crippling the companies by reducing their profits and jeopardizing the water supply quantity and/or its quality to their constituents. I always hear of rumblings that municipalities should take over the publicly-traded utilities in their area instead of having their utilities be run, often from afar, by a large corporation. And the other way too: that the government-owned ones should be privatized because corporate ownership will make them more efficient and thus save the municipalities money. I don't know if there's a trend here or not; I'm just buying and holding these stocks based on their past history and the numbers in front of me.