Hottest links for Friday October 11th, 2013 the on time edition for once finally (see Thursday’s edition of hottest links). Get our free daily newsletter (which is being updated to make it superb) and never miss a single linkfest.
Top stories for today can be found below; Great article on Michael Price and asset allocation with a value twist; Some good valuation articles and a new one from Aswath on Twitter; Speaking of twitter, if you were short oil or long TW Telecom Inc (NASDAQ:TWTC) you should thank the company; Janet Yellen may or may not be the best candidate for the Fed but she is a shrewd investor; Man gets acquitted because a goat cannot come to court and testify; That and much more below.
Hottest Links
Value Investing
Investing With A Legend: Michael Price
I’m going to do a series for readers of The Idea Farm where I identify and chat about my 20 favorite hedge fund managers to track via 13Fs. Below is an example, Michael Price. He ran money at Mutual Series with Max Heine before merging with Franklin and starting his own family office. [Mebane Faber]
Webco: Cheap, But Is It Safe?
I actually didn’t plan for this sequence of posts to happen, I was turning over rocks today and stumbled on Webco Industries, Inc. (OTCMKTS:WEBC) selling at close to 50% of BV. The discount to book value along caught my attention, and their history of significant past earnings encouraged me to continue researching them. [Nate Tobik, Oddball Stocks]
European Investing: Exclusive Insights and Ideas
I’m pleased to share below exclusive excerpts from three of the 15+ conference sessions, as well as timeless insights on European investing by selected instructors at European Investing Summit 2013. Excerpts include; FPA’s Gregory Herr on Aggreko plc (LON:AGK) (OTCMKTS:ARGKF), Bayes Fund’s Massimo Fuggetta on Ferrexpo Plc (LON:FXPO) (OTCMKTS:FEEXF), Evermore Global Advisors’ David Marcus on European Investment Ideas and more. [Oliver Mihaljevic, BeyondProxy]
Good Focus List Of Stocks With “Wide Moats”
Morningstar StockInvestor editor Matt Coffina discusses recent additions to the Wide Moat Focus Index such as SYSCO Corporation (NYSE:SYY), The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE:KO), CSX Corporation (NYSE:CSX), Kinder Morgan Inc (NYSE:KMI), Medtronic, Inc. (NYSE:MDT), Spectra Energy Corp. (NYSE:SE), Covidien plc (NYSE:COV), Allergan, Inc. (NYSE:AGN) and ITC Holdings Corp. (NYSE:ITC). [Matthew Coffina, Morningstar]
Hedge Funds
Investors Flee Fund After Founder’s Prostitution Bust
Virtually all investors have fled Portland, Oregon-based Common Sense Investment Management following the arrest of founder Jim Bisenius for soliciting a prostitute, sources close to the matter said. [Lawrence Delevingne, CNBC]
Cannell Capital Files 13D on Hooper Holmes (HH)
Carlo Cannell’s hedge fund Cannell Capital filed a 13D on shares of Hooper Holmes, Inc. (NYSEMKT:HH). They’ve disclosed a 14.24% ownership stake in the company with 9,946,766 shares. [Market Folly]
Eminence Capital Boosts Sonic Automotive Stake
Ricky Sandler’s hedge fund firm Eminence Capital filed a 13G with the SEC regarding shares of Sonic Automotive Inc (NYSE:SAH). Per the filing, Eminence has disclosed a 5.1% ownership stake with 2,065,739 shares. [Market Folly]
Another Case Of Mistaken Twitter Identity?
With the TWTR Inc (OTCMKTS:THEGQ) (TWTRQ) bankrupt pennystock fiasco dead and buried (courtesy of a ticker change many thought the algo trading issues surrounding 2013’s Twitter, Inc. (TWTR) mega IPO were resolved. Maybe not. As the chart below shows, TW Telecom Inc (NASDAQ:TWTC) briefly soared tenfold as yet another algo went berserk, sending the price from $30 to $300, and the market cap from $4.4 billion to $44 billion. [Tyler Durden , Zero Hedge]
Twitter IPO: Why A Good Trade Be A Bad Investment (or Vice Versa)?
In my last post, I valued Twitter, Inc. (TWTR) at about $10 billion. I made a ton of assumptions to get to that value and I argued that changing those assumptions could give you a different value. [Aswath Damodaran]
Greifeld’s less-than-flashy pitch to Twitter
The CEO of NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:NDAQ), parent company of the stock exchange that bills itself as the home for hip tech companies to list, didn’t have a 140-character sound bite to throw at Twitter, Inc. (TWTR). [Christina Rexrode, MarketWatch]
Tweet Recalling Yom Kippur War, 40 Years On, Jolts Oil Traders
Oil traders razor-focused on signs of escalating violence in the Middle East were jolted on Thursday by a Twitter posting from the Israeli military that, at first glance, suggested they had just bombed Syrian airports. [Matthew Robinson, Reuters]
Asset Allocation
The Biggest Problem With Buy and Hold
When overvalued assets grow to be bigger and bigger parts of a market, or become the market, you no longer want to invest in that market. That, to me, is the biggest failing of buy and hold. It ignores common sense. Below is Japan’s historical CAPE. [Mebane Faber]
361 Capital Weekly Research Briefing
President Barack Obama and his top economic officials appear to be pushing for some market unrest to exert pressure on the GOP to throw in the towel. [Blaine Rollins, The Reformed Broker]
Highlights and Impressions from The Big Picture Conference 2013
We also had a lot of celebrity finance and media folks in attendance (Peter Boockvar, Jim Bianco, Jeff Hirsch, Louise Yamada, etc), and it was cool watching them ask questions of the speakers on stage and interact with the crowd during breaks. [Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker]
Janet Yellen Big User Of Vanguard Funds
In a financial disclosure report she filed back in 2011, which was first picked up by the Wall Street Journal, Yellen disclosed anywhere from $3 million to as much as $9.15 million in assets linked to Vanguard mutual funds, including an allocation to the firm’s first-ever fund, the Vanguard Index Trust 500 Portfolio. [Cinthia Murphy, IndexUniverse]
Living In A Low Return World
I recently came across a couple of longer articles that highlight the challenges investors will face in what is increasingly looking to be a low-return world. [Tadas Viskanta, Abnormal Returns]
Misc
Easy Come, Easy Go For Veteran Bank Exec
At the time, Issa was managing director for commercial banking at Flagstar and, as the filing implied, was likely to be out of a job soon due to the fact that CIT Group Inc. (NYSE:CIT) had agreed to purchase Flagstar Bancorp Inc (NYSE:FBC)’s commercial portfolio. [Footnoted]
Hottest Links: Not The Onion
Man Walks Free After Sheep Refuses To Testify
A man who was accused of having sex with a sheep has walked free after the animal was unable to testify. [Metro]
