10 Small to Mid Cap Stocks with Attractive Valuations

Many of the institutional clients of The Applied Finance Group, Ltd. (AFG) tend to focus on large cap stocks and benchmark themselves against the S&P 500 Index, which is why many of the buy ideas from ValueExpectations.com usually come from the large cap index. For those investors who focus on small to mid cap stocks from the Russell 2000, we have provided a list of companies with the most attractive valuations within the index.

AFG's default valuation is a great place to start when looking for potential equity investments as our valuation techniques have proven successful through time at identifying mispriced securities and helping our clients identify investment opportunities resulting in outperforming their chosen benchmark.

Besides valuation, another thing AFG takes into account is a company’s Economic Margin ((EM_) which measures the true economic profitability a company earns above or below its cost of capital, and more importantly, the expected change in EMs. Companies expected to improve their EMs have proven through backtests to be more likely to outperform than those with EMs that are expected to decline. The list below contains 10 stocks that are expected to improve their Economic Margins at a greater rate than their sector peers, have attractive valuations and rate as attractive based on AFG’s overall investment opportunity criteria.

AFG Rank within Sector Ticker Name Sector Investment Opportunity Valuation Signal EM Change Signal Attractive Stocks In The Russell 2000 (NYSE:USU) USEC INC Energy and Extraction Attractive Attractive Attractive (NASDAQ:SSTI) SILICON STORAGE TECH INC Technology Attractive Attractive Attractive (NYSE:UFS) DOMTAR CORP Basic Material Attractive Attractive Attractive (NYSE:NL) NL INDUSTRIES INC Basic Material Attractive Attractive Attractive (NASDAQ:CHTT) CHATTEM INC Health Attractive Attractive Attractive (NYSE:UNS) UNISOURCE ENERGY CORP Utilities Attractive Attractive Attractive (NASDAQ:SMMX) SYMYX TECHNOLOGIES INC Miscellaneous Attractive Attractive Attractive (NASDAQ:VSAT) VIASAT INC Technology Attractive Attractive Attractive (NASDAQ:CPII) CPI INTERNATIONAL INC Consumer Durable Attractive Attractive Attractive (NASDAQ:ELMG) EMS TECHNOLOGIES INC Technology Attractive Attractive Attractive

AFG's Valuation Metric – Measures the percent to target (deviation between a stock’s current trading price and its AFG current default target price). To derive the intrinsic value of a firm, AFG uses its proprietary Valuation Model (modified discounted cash flow model).

Economic Margin - A corporate performance measurement that addresses the gaps in GAAP, eliminating distortions caused by accounting policies to measure what a company is truly earning above or below their cost of capital.

Management Quality – Assesses management’s ability to make wealth-creating decisions.

Comments

[Ånden som ...:]

I just checked out almost every stock on this list and I've added several to my watchlist.

Just a tip: You'd get a lot more hits/comments if you started posting some key numbers along the names. It's kind of tiring to check out the financials of each stock when you don't know what kind of stocks the writer likes (I'd be mad as hell if you only posted biotech companies with zero revenues).

Sep 01 03:15 PM

[dpk:]

Anden.Which stocks from this article have entered your watch list and reasons thereof as to why those are in.You too will get more hits if you start elaborating and it will help us including the author of the article to explore more and share further.

On Sep 01 03:15 PM Ånden som Går wrote:

> I just checked out almost every stock on this list and I've added
> several to my watchlist. Just a tip: You'd get a lot more hits/comments if you started posting
> some key numbers along the names. It's kind of tiring to check out
> the financials of each stock when you don't know what kind of stocks
> the writer likes (I'd be mad as hell if you only posted biotech companies
> with zero revenues).

Sep 02 12:12 PM