3 Sales and 4 New Buys: Redwood Trust, Gehl Corp., Shoe Carnival, Charlotte Russe

My portfolio reshaping file can be found here. In order to stay in compliance with the Bloomberg data license, I only include numeric fields that I have calculated. My ranking method ranks the companies in my portfolio, and all replacement candidates by several variables:

1. Relative Strength (lower is better, double weight)
2. Trailing P/E
3. This year’s P/E
4. Next year’s P/E
5. Price-to-book (double weight)
6. Price-to-sales (double weight — financials are counted as average)
7. Dividend Yield
8. Net Operating Accruals (a measure of accounting integrity — double weight — financials are counted as average)

I rank the companies on all of the criteria, weight the ranks, and calculate a grand rank. I look for the company that I own that has the middle rank for all of my currently owned companies, and I sell a few companies that I own below that, and buy some new companies near the top of the list. Here are my actions:

Sales

• Sara Lee (SLE)
• Dow Chemical (DOW)
• DTE Energy (DTE)

Purchases

• Redwood Trust (RWT)
• Gehl Corp (GEHL)
• Shoe Carnival (SCVL)
• Charlotte Russe Holding (CHIC)

Future Sale

One reinsurer — could be Flagstone, PartnerRe, or Aspen Holdings.

Rationale

I have enough reinsurance names going into earnings. If you need more of an example of how well they will do this quarter , then look no further than PartnerRe’s solid earnings report this evening. On the other sales, DTE Energy and Dow Chemical were solely for valuation reasons. Sara Lee is another matter; my confidence that they can turn around the company is reduced, and valuation is not compelling.

As for purchases, on the shoe retailers, there were a bevy of cheap names, but Shoe Carnival and Charlotte Russe seemed to have the most consistent operations, and low debt. Gehl seems to be in a good industry, small agricultural machinery is in demand, and valuations are modest. Finally, Redwood Trust seems to be well-run as mortgage REITs go. Asset quality is good and leverage is moderate. Also, the debt is all from securitizations, so it is non-recourse to the company; the most that can happen is that the assets in the securitizations depreciate to the degree that their residual interests are worthless.

One other shift that is unintentional here, is that my portfolio becomes more small cap in nature. I am selling away larger companies, and buying smaller ones. That is an accident of the process, but occurring because there are some genuinely cheap companies to buy. Time will tell as to whether these are good purchases, but most of what I like in investments are lining up here.

Comments

[arkla]

(GEHL) got out of the farm machinery business this year.

[richandmer]

The stocks you sold have not done well and the stocks you are buying are even worse. Why not at least wait until they turn around a bit?