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

To: E_K_S who wrote (55313)	5/12/2015 9:37:48 AM
From: bruwin	Respond to of 78958

"Sterling's construction equipment has a basis of $167,888,000, which includes $16,000,000 of land and buildings. That's $8.85/share in hard asset value just in their company owned machinery and land." But from a current shareholder's position how does that shareholder currently benefit, financially, from that "hard asset value" ? Isn't it the case that only once the company gets liquidated, and that Asset Value gets distributed, that the shareholder gains a financial benefit, i.e. book value = liquidated value (hopefully !!). Other than that the shareholder can only gain by selling shares at a profit or from a dividend payout. And both, particularly the latter, are very much dependent on how much of the Top Line Revenue gets to the Bottom Line. Currently, in Sterling's case, all of its Revenue is gone by the time it gets to the EBITDA level. But, Yes, things are not easy in that Sector. Hopefully they will improve, especially in the construction, building and renovation business. And let's wait and see how STRL's next few Quarters look like. I suspect it will take more than just 3 months of good news to turn the company to greater profitability and consistently positive stock price performance ...

To: E_K_S who wrote (55313)	5/12/2015 2:30:26 PM
From: Shane M	1 Recommendation Recommended By Mattyice Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78958

Hi EKS, I own a whole 5 shares in STRL company and it's my longest held stock - and sortof a cool story behind it. I didn't even know I owned it for many years until they tracked me down a few years ago. When I was young, definitely middle or early high school, I took my lawn mowing money and bought some shares of retailer Heck's which was in process of getting wiped out by WalMart. (I didn't know that at the time, I just thought it was cool to own part of something where I could go shop. Plus I liked their signage!) This would've been early to mid 1980s. I thought they just went bankrupt and that was that - but years later I get a letter telling me I have 5 shares of STRL and it was from that account my dad had to set up for me because I was too young to have my own account. I think it had to be something leftover from that Heck's bankruptcy because I'd sold everything else and moved on long ago. From what I can tell, it looks like sterling ended up buying a part of a subsequent bankruptcy of another company that arose from what was leftover from Heck's. getfilings.com Anyhow, I can't even afford to transfer it to my broker because it's worth less than the fee to transfer it. So I just keep getting this mail directly from the company, big thick printouts of shareholder material, because of my 5 shares. I know they've spent more on postage than my shares are worth. I keep thinking they may one day do a reverse split that liquidates me, as that's the only way I'll probably ever sell, and it'd probably save them some money in postage imho.