Cisco: Let Me See That LONG

Cisco has a dominant market share in an industry where scale is advantage. Considering this, its market price a couple of years ago was laughable. But it only looks laughable in retrospect. When I brought up the stock as a potential investment at that time, though commenters on this site generally agreed that the company was undervalued, commenters throughout the rest of the web (e.g. through Seeking Alpha) saw the company through Mr. Market's eyes. Here are some of the bewildering comments I received after arguing the stock is undervalued:

IFON You Up With A Deal

InfoSonics (IFON) was already a deep net-net when it reported results earlier this week. But after reporting an EPS loss of 5 cents, the shares were pulverized, causing the company to lose almost one-third of its market cap, or 16 cents per share. Blood in the streets.

My Years With General Motors

Alfred Sloan became CEO of General Motors in 1923, and stayed on for several decades. In that time, he transformed GM from a rag-tag collection of unfocused, poorly-performing businesses into the largest company in the world. In My Years With General Motors, he discusses how he did it. Bill Gates calls his book "[P]robably the best book to read if you want to read only one book about business."

Hammond Manufactures Value

Hammond Manufacturing (HMM.A) makes products like transformers, racks, enclosures and casing for the electrical products industry. You might expect a company in this industry to barely earn its cost of capital - and you'd be right. What you might not expect is that this consistently profitable company is a net-net and trades barely over 1/3 of it's book value!

hhgregg Management Rips Off Shareholders

hhgregg has always struck me as a rather shareholder-friendly company. So it caught me off-guard when hhgregg's management decided to re-price its underwater options. Such actions are a huge red flag for investors.

Alco-Stores: Large Shareholder Disappears

As previously discussed on this site, shares of Alco-Stores (ALCS) trade at a deep discount to the company's net current assets. While that discount started to narrow late last year, it started to widen again over the last few months. At the same time, a large shareholder (who previously owned more than 15% of this illiquid stock), started to sell piecemeal! My guess is that the latter may have been causing the former.

Walking to Value

I recently watched Jim Chanos' April 5th presentation. He provides the latest update on his China thesis, including some great commentary in the Q&A session that follows the presentation...