I was interviewed last week about my thoughts regarding British Petroleum. I had a strong buy recommendation on the stock when BP was trading around $30 per share two months ago, and there was talk of bankruptcy. Jeff Ostrowski a reporter at the Palm Beach Post interviewed me after reading several of my articles on the topic. The article appeared this past Tuesday on the front page!! The story was also picked up by The State newspaper which is South Carolina’s largest newspaper.
A little bit about the Palm Beach Post. It is the sixth largest newspaper in Florida with over 150,000 people reading the paper daily. The paper is especially prestigious since most of it’s readers are high income, and sophisticated investors. Palm Beach’s per capita income is $109,219 making it one of the most affluent communities in the country. According to my very knowledgeable aunt who I joke could probably win Jeporady fifty times in a row if she ever was a contestent, “Palm Beach was always THE money community”, It was where investment bankers and industrial magnates had second homes or retired to.
Here is a brief quote from the article followed by a link to the full story:
Tilson thinks BP shares will keep climbing to $50. Tilson is a value investor, Wall Street jargon for stock pickers who look for hidden bargains in tainted companies.
“We are taking advantage of panicky and short-sighted investors,” Tilson said. “That’s what we do as value investors.”
Other bargain hunters see similar opportunity. Jacob Wolinsky, a New York investor who runs ValueWalk.com, calls BP shares “ridiculously cheap.”
Like Tilson, Wolinsky sees room for more appreciation. BP’s price-to-earnings ratio, a common measure of stock valuation, is six. By contrast, ExxonMobil trades at 14 times earnings and Chevron at 11 – so an optimist like Wolinsky figures BP shares have room to double.
And while many investors treat BP as a pariah, Wolinsky and Tilson say they have no ethical qualms.
“Sometimes you have to hold your nose,” Tilson said. “But in buying the stock, we are not endorsing BP’s behavior. We’re on the side of the American people, who want the cleanup to go well and the environmental damage to be minimal.”
Here is a link to the full article https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/investors-see-a-bargain-in-bp-837725.html
I was a bit misunderstood by Jeff, and that is not exactly why I thought BP was a good buy, nor why I had no ethical concerns with buying it.
I will post below some of my previous articles on BP:
https://www.valuewalk.com/value-investing-reports/whitney-tilson-presents-full-case-bp/
https://www.valuewalk.com/commodity-prices/whitney-tilson-bullish-bp/
https://www.valuewalk.com/commodity-prices/bp-worth-90-share-0-share/
