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Technology Stocks : Speedfam [SFAM] Lovers Unite ! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JZGalt who wrote (2610)	1/29/1998 3:54:00 PM
From: ncs	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3736

I bought about a dozen stocks utilizing that type of criteria just before New Years, two of the stocks were SFAM and ADEX. At yesterday's close I was down 1/4 on SFAM and 11/16ths on ADEX (after a good day in that one). Overall I was up 3.57%. Others that I picked up were VECO, TLDCF, SPCT, SMOD, SAWS, RFMI, PEAKF, MRVC, KLIC and FSII. On average, they are down about 60% from their 52 week highs and most completed secondary offerings in the last half of '97, so had sufficient cash to make it through the Asian crisis. I figured I have a downside risk of 20% or so with the upside potential being at least 100%. Once any of them go above 33% I plan on putting in a stop loss at 25% of my gain. Hope I'm right on this one. Neil

To: JZGalt who wrote (2610)	2/1/1998 6:55:00 PM
From: Michael Burry	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3736

The Motley Fool's call this sort of calculation Enterprise Value. They're not the only ones! Just about every sophisticated value investor looks at EV ratios rather than the standard ratios quoted in Yahoo and the like. SFAM gets to look very interesting at a EV/Sales ratio under 1, but it would be a bargain at under 0.75. I don't feel all the bad news is out yet on Speedfam. Intelligent investors anticipating bad news with a buy lose money precisely because the market is slow in seeing what they could see early on. Partly, this is because a lot of institutional investors wait for the first missed estimate before dumping en masse, even if they anticipated it coming. sealpoint.com Go to Strategy - How to Be a Value Investor Asian demand was an ace in the hole for Speedfam, and it ain't there now. It won't be there for who knows how long. The stock price will anticipate any recovery, but in the meantime cheaper prices might be had by patiently waiting for the depths of despair. As a former Speedfam investor who sat with it from 20-->10 in 96 only to sell at 23, I admit to a keen interest - I want to buy this stock for emotional reasons, as I'm sure a lot of others do. EV/sales less than 0.75 should help sort that emotion away from my decision. Ken Fisher's book Super Stocks outlines how this anti-popularity strategy works. Good Investing, Mike