Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. (BBBY) is a high-quality participant in the home furnishings retail industry, and is thus affected significantly by the housing industry. It sells a wide variety of merchandise such as linens, bath items, kitchen items, and basic house wares through a network of 993 BBBY stores in all 50 States, and a total of 1,173 stores. It also owns Christmas Tree shops, "buy buy BABY" stores, and Cost Plus and also has web site sales. Its immediate strategy is to open approximately 300 more stores in the coming years coupled with growing same-store sales.

BBBY has an outstanding long-term record of financial strength and profitability. The company has no debt. It generates a return of 26% on total capital. Sales are expected to continue to grow at 11.5% per year from the current level of $10.8 billion. BBBY pays no dividends, preferring to reinvest its

Seadrill (SDRL), the Bermuda-based offshore drilling services company, this week reported its quarterly- and nine-month results. Trading around $38.50, SDRL features an $0.85 quarterly dividend, which provides a projected 8.83% annual yield. With such an exceptional yield, the question for an investor, clearly, is "Can the company sustain or even increasing the dividend?"

While it's not always readily apparent, SDRL is controlled by legendary Norwegian businessman John Fredriksen, whose family company Hemen Holding controls 23.2% of SDRL. Reputedly SDRL's dividend provides Mr. Fredriksen with a very large part of his annual income. Logically, then, one can assume that he will do everything he can to have SDRL maintain the dividend.

A quarter is too short to draw valid conclusions so let's look at SDRL's [unaudited] financial statements for the nine months ended September 30, 2012 [available at Seadrill.com]. While the Statement of Income is always interesting - operating revenue

As natural gas prices have plunged in the U.S. from over $13/MMBtu in summer 2008 to well under $3 recently, global natural gas prices have diverged sharply. In Europe the cost is around $11-$12 and in Asia -- with Japan having shut down all 54 of its nuclear reactors -- the price varies from $15-$18 in the spot market. Much of this has come about as a result of American technology and unique property rights. In the U.S., unlike any other developed country, land owners hold both mineral rights and air rights, allowing individual landowners to benefit from mining. That has caused a boom in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to access massive shale gas deposits. While experts such as Royal Dutch Shell's CEO Peter Voser expect U.S. prices to rise back to $4-$6 on increased demand due to gas' lower cost and cleaner burning properties, the arbitrage opportunities globally are obvious

Mark Twain's character Pudd'nhead Wilson once noted that, "January is a particularly dangerous month to speculate in stocks. The others are February, March, April, May, June ..." Notwithstanding this tongue in cheek view, most investors like to have some small part of their portfolio dedicated to investments in companies with some realistic chance to go up greatly in price. That said, let's take a look at six stocks that research indicates could triple in value within the next few years.

Brightpoint, Inc. (CELL), $10.76. Brightpoint provides a wide variety of services to the wireless technology industry, including networks, resellers, and equipment manufacturers. Services include logistics, inventory management, distribution channel management, and software services for clients such as Apple (AAPL), Nokia (NOK), Kyocera (KYO), HTC (HTCXF.PK) and Motorola (MSI). Revenue for the most recent 12 months was $4.8 billion with Net Income of $48.3 million. Return on equity was

Searching for the proverbial "diamond in the rough" investment is difficult, in large part because there are thousands of publicly traded possibilities. Using computerized screens to filter according to various criteria is a fine starting point for analysis, reducing the number of companies to a manageable number. From that point you can then study their annual reports, websites, industries, and SEC filings - especially the annual report Form 10-K, research reports, and other sources to make a final choice.

The Value Line Investment Survey provides an online searchable data base using several hundred criteria on their 1,700 stock universe, and it's a very useful screening tool. Unfortunately there are a number of excellent foreign stocks not followed by VLIS. However, for the universe they follow and update quarterly, it's very effective.

To develop a list of quality companies with potentially outstanding appreciation potential of at least 100% for further analysis,

Since 1931, the Value Line Investment Survey has made huge amounts of stock market data available to investors in a concise, useful manner. Warren Buffet said of the VLIS that it's "An incredible value. I don't know of any other system that's as good.". With that in mind, let's test their system in 2012. To do so we identified a number of key screens to filter the VLIS' 1,700 stocks.

These screens consisted of two levels. For the first level we focused on broad criteria: Financial Strength of "A++", VLIS' highest rating; Safety of "1", also the highest rating on a 1-5 scale; and Timeliness of "1, 2 or 3" putting the selections in the top half at least for year-ahead performance.

At the second level our screens were more focused on specific individual criteria.The table below specifies the criteria:

Like Warren Buffett, many of us prefer companies we can readily understand. One such company is Alliance Resource Partners, LP (ARLP), a mid-cap coal company which mines coal in the Eastern U.S. and sells it to electric utilities. It's the 4th largest coal producer in the East. At its recent price of $73.20 per unit, the NASDAQ-listed company paid a 5.2% distribution. According to Value Line Investment Survey [12/9/2011], ARLP is expected to pay a $3.96 cash distribution per unit in 2012 which would be a 5.4% annual rate.

ARLP was recently [October 2011] "ranked by S&P in the top 1% of 7,500 public companies, having delivered a 27.2% compounded annual total return to unitholders over the last 10 years" [ARLP, Wells Fargo MLP conference, Dec 2011]. This exceptional performance resulted from market recognition of truly outstanding results. Since 2006 coal production has grown at a 6.3% compounded annual

Volatility, uncertainty and anxiety all make investing in securities an emotionally challenging effort, and learning to deal with those emotions is perhaps the most difficult single aspect of investing. Modern communications, 24/7 Bloomberg, CNBC, and Fox are constantly interesting, but also constantly prodding us - to quote a line from a great Eagles song - to "I can hear a voice inside me say, do something!" Yet when you step back and look at a long term chart over many decades, what seemed like the biblical Armageddon at the time becomes just a minor blip in the chart. The current Euro zone issues are just the most recent example. But we're all human, and research shows we're twice as sensitive to losses as we are to gains.

Each year in January I carefully review every trade I made during the entire prior year, and I look at what each

The most important single number in a company's financial statements is...Cash Flow from Operations! Because if a company isn't producing cash from its ongoing business, then all the rest is smoke and mirrors. As someone who's been a senior executive in a NYSE company, an investment banker, and CEO of two successful private PE-backed companies, I've seen it from all sides, and at the end of the day it's all about the cash. As Rod Tidwell said in the movie Jerry Maguire, "Show me the Kwan!"

Companies have three basic financial statements: Balance Sheet, Statement of Income, and Statement of Cash Flows. The Statement of Cash Flows itself has four fundamental elements: Cash Flow from Operations, Cash Flow from Investing, Cash Flow from Financing, and finally the Change in Cash and Cash Equivalents. Let's look at one of my favorite companies to see how this works in practice.

Bank of New York Mellon – A Reasonable 3X Speculation?

Trading in early December at a little over $19, a solid case can be made for BK being worth $58 a share within four years, giving you – with dividends - a potential 35% compounded annual rate of return. So with this kind of potential, let’s take a look at the company.

History and Tradition Unmatched

Founded in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton, BK is the oldest banking business in America and is the “only U.S. financial firm with long term senior debt rated AAA at the bank level by Moody’s” (source: BNYMellon.com). BK has a very strong 14.0% tier 1 capital ratio and a 16.1% total capital ratio; Global Finance magazine in August 2011 ranked Bank of NY Mellon as the safest bank in the U.S.

Global Financial Services Company

Today it’s a worldwide financial services company operating in

Most investors would like to have at least some portion of their money invested in gold. After all, over the last 10 years the long term trend has been steadily up, and with all the uncertainty in Europe, China and elsewhere, owning some gold makes sense. But investors who invest for income, and rely on that income, face a dilemma: gold itself doesn’t produce income, and gold mining stocks typically pay only modest 1-2% dividends. Even BHP – the Melbourne-based natural resources giant with some gold interests – yields just 3.0%. So what’s a gold investor who needs reasonable income to do?

The answer is a proven, conservative strategy of buying the SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD) and selling covered call options – called this because you’re ‘covered’ because you own the underlying security, and ‘call’ because it gives someone the right to ‘call away’ the security from you -