Here is a link (opens PDF) to a 9 page analysis I did of American Express (AXP). Warning: it is a bit dry. I was going to present American Express at Value Investing Congress in Pasadena, but the stock ran up and exhausted a good portion of margin of safety. Amex is one of [...]
Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes magazine, mentioned my book in his article: The new Benjamin Graham is Vitaliy N. Katsenelson. I highly recommend Katsenelson’s book, Active Value Investing: Making Money in Range-Bound Markets (Wiley, 2007). I like to think the old Ben Graham would have recommended it, too.
I was interviewed by Kiplinger about Jos. A. Bank (JOSB), my favorite retail stock I presented (download PDF of my presentation) at Value Investing Congress in Pasadena. This is probably the most contrarian stock I ever owned – 93% of the float is short.
The NY Times came up with a very interesting way to look at consumer spending. In the long run, consumer spending is a function of consumer income. Though since early 2000 it did not appear to be the case as consumers financed their spending by borrowing against their future income. If you believe that consumer [...]
This article in Forbes about aircraft leasing companies names some publicly traded stocks that appear cheap: Genesis Lease (GLS), AerCap (AER), and Aircastle (AYR). But that cheapness may be a bit deceiving.
My firm sold Lloyds TSB Group (LYG) a couple of weeks ago. I still think it’s one of the best run banks in the world, but its exposure to loans underwritten by other banks made us pause and rethink our thesis. LYG has a securitization conduit called Cancara. It uses the conduit to securitize some of the [...]
I love the price/earnings ratio, but like all investment tools, it is flawed. This is because it is only as good as the numbers that go into it. There is no debate about the “p” in the equation – price is quoted every second. But the “e”, though readily available, is only as good as [...]