We have held a long position in Brookfield Infrastructure Partners (BIP) since the beginning of 2011 and we have been pleased with the results of the company during this time. We believe that because of the complex nature of BIP’s infrastructure assets, investors may not necessarily have the ability to understand this company. We believe that this partly explains why only five brokerage analysts cover the stock.

click to enlarge images

On the other hand, Brookfield’s unique, hard-to-duplicate infrastructure assets provide them the ability to generate cash flows from operations and to pay out a sizable proportion of its income to partnership unit holders (BIP is a publicly traded limited partnership and one buys “partnership units” of BIP rather than common shares). We also believe that continued political uncertainty, such as the recent electoral victory of the Socialist party in the French Presidential Race, the continued instability in Greece and

Complete Story »

Actionable Items:

• Highest Positive Spread: First Trust Specialty Finance Fund (FGB)
• Lowest Negative Spread: Cornerstone Progressive Return Fund (CFP)
• Focus Stock(s) of the Week: Cohen & Steers Total Return Realty Fund (RFI)
• Last Week’s Focus Stock: Solar Senior Capital Ltd. (SUNS)

CEF Weekly Review: On average, the 13 closed-end fund (CEF) types registered a share price decrease of 3.4% for the week ending 5/18/12. The high-low spread (average percentage price change difference between the highest and lowest fund types) registered this week was +6.3% versus +3.0% the previous week.

The PowerShares CEF Income Composite (PCEF), an ETF that invests in taxable income CEFs, was down 4.9% for the week. PCEF is now up only 0.4% YTD on price appreciation. Currently, PCEF’s trailing twelve months’ yield is 8.2%. The S&P 500 plunged 4.3% this week on top of a decline of 1.1% the previous week. The S&P 500 continues to lose

Complete Story »

If you are new to this series of article I recommend that you take the time to read at least the first article in this series which explains the strategy in detail. If you are interested in how we got to this point with Teva or other quality companies used please refer to my concentrator blog which contains links to all the previous articles in the series.

I’d like to begin with a little summary information about how the strategy is doing overall before I get into the details about Teva (TEVA). After eight months we have collected 12.2 percent of our initial portfolio of $150,000 from selling puts. The total amount collected is $18,354. We have paid a total of $584.50 in commissions and fees, including the recent exercise fee on the put transaction to purchase Teva shares. That results in a total return

Complete Story »

Do you consider yourself a value investor, always looking for underestimated and potentially undervalued stocks? For a closer look at stocks that may be trading below their fair value, we ran a screen.

We began by screening the healthcare sector for stocks that appear to be undervalued relative to earnings growth, with PEG below 1.

We then screened for those that also appear undervalued relative to the Graham Number. The Graham Number is a measure of maximum fair value created by the “godfather of value investing” Benjamin Graham.

It is based off of a stock’s EPS and book value per share (BVPS).

Graham Number = SQRT(22.5 x TTM EPS x MRQ BVPS)

The equation assumes that P/E should not be higher than 15 and P/BV should not be higher than 1.5. Stocks trading well below their Graham Number may be undervalued.

(click to enlarge)

Do you think these stocks should

Complete Story »

Friday’s Facebook (FB) IPO was an example of why we need to maintain separate and unequal classes of people in the United States.

Before you get too riled up, this is not a David Duke-like or skinhead rant for separation of races or any such drivel. Neither is it a Shockley-like pseudo-intellectual rationalization for why one race is superior to another. My own family suffered greatly at the hands of those that had such deeply held beliefs. It is totally abhorrent and beyond me how anyone could believe that one group of people is any less deserving or is in any way less inherently capable than another group.

Instead, my belief that the need to banish equality in access to wealth creation tools is an understanding that differences are what make the system function to benefit us all and those differences need to be maintained.

My wife is enamored of

Complete Story »

Nvidia (NVDA) faces a major strategic problem. Integrated graphics, in the form of Intel’s (INTC) Ivy Bridge and AMD’s (AMD) newly released Trinity, are rapidly reaching the point of being good enough for the majority of usage cases. Integrated graphics processors are now capable of real time video transcoding and smooth game playing at common laptop resolutions. Three or four years ago, seeing this type of performance from an integrated chip would have been unthinkable.

Furthermore, the relative performance of integrated graphics is likely to increase substantially in the next couple years. Intel’s Haswell GT3 graphics chip is projected to have performance increases of at least 50% over Ivy Bridge, and possibly much more. Current Intel Ivy Bridge processors have an incredibly small die size, at 160mm2 for a quad core model. This means the company can devote die space to scaling graphics performance with great flexibility.

AMD has also

Complete Story »

Google (GOOG) recently announced a significant revision to its search engine algorithm called Knowledge Graph. This modification uses word associations (in a manner similar to the human brain) to enable it to deliver more relevant search results, thereby enhancing its users’ search experience.

The change came amidst reports that Google has been losing search market share in the U.S. market – which has long been the bulwark of its profitability – to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing search engine. Tallies for April 2012 show that Bing now accounts for about 30% of the U.S.’s online web searches, up over 3 percentage points from a year earlier.

Meanwhile, by April of 2012, Google’s share of U.S. online queries had fallen by almost 3 ½ percentage points, from close to 68% to around 64.4%. Even beleaguered Yahoo (YHOO) saw a moderate uptick of 1% on its search

This is more significant than it seems:

Complete Story »

EMC (EMC), a major player in the data storage industry, is making something of a splash in the technology sector. Trading at just over $26 per share, EMC has a market capitalization of almost $55 billion. Call traders have shown increased interest in EMC recently, so I’m going to analyze the stock from a value investor’s perspective and see what catalysts are afoot that may account for EMC’s recent popularity with these investors.

EMC is a global provider of virtual infrastructure technologies and solutions, enterprise storage systems and software, data backup and recovery, disaster recovery and archiving solutions, fraud protection, consulting, and a host of other products and services.

The stock has a trailing twelve month price to earnings ratio of 22.63 and an almost ideal price to earnings growth ratio of 1.08. EMC’s price to book is a very acceptable 2.73. Return on equity stands at 13.85% and quarterly

Complete Story »

While the media and many stock market participants were endlessly fascinated by the Facebook (FB) IPO (which overwhelmed the immediately prior obsession with the JP Morgan trading loss), I took the opportunity to buy shares of an all-but-forgotten company called Envivio (ENVI) that had a much less celebrated IPO just three weeks ago. Like FB on Friday, ENVI experienced a disappointing first day of trading on April 25. But unlike FB’s underwriters, led by Morgan Stanley, which stoutly supported the stock to prevent an embarrassing breach of the issue price, ENVI’s underwriters, led by Goldman Sachs, apparently declined to support the ENVI stock in the aftermarket. ENVI’s IPO came at $9 per share, down from the stated range on its S-1 filing of $10-$12 and has only briefly traded above the issue price in the ensuing three weeks. It closed down 5% on its first day and after 18 trading

Complete Story »

With shipments of Tablet PCs expected to exceed that of traditional desktop and notebook PCs by 2013, Intel (INTC), the Goliath of the semiconductor market, finds itself in a bit of pickle.

While Intel continues to dominate the x86 processor market, having shipped 80% of all x86 chips in the 1st Quarter of 2012, it has a much smaller footprint in the mobile processor market, where chips based on ARM Holdings (ARMH) designs, such as Apple’s (AAPL) A5 Qualcomm’s (QCOM) Snapdragon, Samsung’s (SSNLF.PK) Exynos and Texas Instrument’s (TI) OMAP, have competitive market shares.

Some have actually suggested that Apple, owing to the dominance of the iPad in the tablet market, could actually become the leader in mobile processors by the end of 2012. The truth of the matter is not that simple. While it may come to pass that Apple-branded chips could ship the most numbers in 2012, for all

Complete Story »