The complete list of ADRs from Argentina that are traded in the U.S. are listed below:

Emerging markets are the best performing markets this year. In these markets, the main market indexes of countries like Brazil have skyrocketed year-to-date (YTD) relative to other countries. For example, the MSCI Brazil Index ETF (EWZ) is up an incredible 99.42% as of September 30, 2009. Some of the Latin American ADRs have also had great runs.

The list below shows the Latin American ADRs which are up 100% or more as of Oct 6, 2009:

The following five stocks are the best performing Latin American ADRs Year-to-Date:

1.Ternium (TX)
YTD Change: 109.22%

For investors concerned with the potential for inflation here at home, companies that derive a significant portion of revenues from outside the U.S. may be of interest. Based on The Applied Finance Group’s valuation model, we found 10 attractive ADRs, as well as 10 unnatractive ADRs, with a market cap greater than $1 billion that derived more than 50% of sales from outside the U.S. in the most recent fiscal year.

An ADR (American Depositary Receipt) is a stock that trades in the U.S. but represents a specified number of shares in a foreign corporation. ADRs are bought and sold on American markets just like regular stocks, and are issued/sponsored in the U.S. by a bank or brokerage, making it easier for Americans to invest in foreign companies.

Yesterday the Illinois-based Metals Service Center Institute ((MSCI)) announced that at current shipping levels US steel inventories represent a 2.9 month supply.

The news release stated:

"Steel shipments from U.S. metals centers totaled 2.25 million tons in May, a reduction of 48.5% from May 2008 shipments. Steel shipments for the first five months of the year, at 12.3 million tons, are down 44.3% compared with last year’s period. U.S. steel inventories at metals service centers totaled 6.46 million tons at the end of May, 38.3% lower than year-ago inventories. At current shipping rates, those stocks represented a 2.9-month supply.

From time to time we like to look at what's been working (or not) in the market over various periods of time. When the market was not moving +20% in 7 weeks, or -20% in 7 weeks on an alternating basis (student body left trading) I used to find a lot of interesting data in these sort of scans in terms of where the relative strength is. Nowadays, I think the overall market is dominant and stock picking is secondary. I've had this thesis since last summer; once the commodities trade blew up there was no place to hide and most asset classes seemed to simply trade in a monolithic nature. To that point Mike Santoli wrote in this week's Barron's a confirmation of my "gut" feel in "Not a Stockpicker's Market"

• Still, even as overall volatility and fear levels have ebbed, the market isn't yet making as many fine discernments among stocks as most would hope. On a three-month basis, the correlation among all stocks has been running above 0.8% (suggesting 80% of a stock's direction is market-determined).
• Robin Carpenter, a quantitative investment consultant at www.CarpenterAnalytix.com, finds evidence of emerging stock-by-stock variance lacking in recent market statistics. He does see some hints that stocks within industries are beginning to go their separate ways, but in general the market's overall direction retains sway.
• This is perhaps not a surprise in the present climate, in which short-term ETF rentals pass for investing in many quarters. But it adds to the list of challenges facing performance-pressed investors -- a list that includes a tendency for large day-to-day direction changes even in a range-trapped tape.

With that said, I wanted to take a look at what's been working the past "month" (which in my world is roughly 4 weeks) - obviously with commodities flying [May 30, 2009: Commodities Set for Best Month Since 1974] I expected this list to look very similar to what was working in latter 2007 or first half 2008. I was not disappointed - this list is chock full of old holdings of ours from that time frame...

MarketWatch recently had an interesting piece on contrarian investment strategies, highlighting the fact that many of the contrarian managers who were hit hard last year are now netting some strong bounce-back gains.

"As the market has bounced back in recent weeks, [several] contrarian-style funds, with their bargain-minded ways, have been outperforming," writes MarketWatch's Sam Mamudi, discussing well-known contrarian managers like David Dreman, Bill Miller, and Marty Whitman.

About a year ago, Chavez announced that he would be nationalizing Sidor, a company in which Ternium held a 59.7% interest in. Markets had been expecting a long, drawn out process before this nationalization would be completed and before Ternium would be getting payment for its stake in Sidor. Most analysts pegged Ternium’s stake in Sidor to be worth $1.6 Billion and deemed the nationalization process to be a distracting one for Ternium, one that would create an overhang on its stock. Thursday, this overhang was lifted in a big way.

Why should you care about Mohnish Pabrai?

Pabrai learned the craft of investing by studying the strategies of value investors such as Ben Graham, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. His investment firm’s fee structure is modeled after that of the Buffett Partnerships in the 1950s and ‘60s. Pabrai’s main fund delivered a cumulative return, net of fees, of +90% versus a return of -27% for the S&P 500 Index from inception on October 1, 2000 through December 31, 2008. Pabrai is also author of The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns.

As a follow-up to my earlier post on John Mauldin’s guest commentary feature, I decided to run a scan through Hillbent’s Market Direction Monitor for stocks trading at forward P/E ratios less than their current dividend yields, in an effort to discover some reasonable equity market values.

Like John Mauldin, I tend to agree that a 6% dividend yield covers a lot of market sins, so a minimum required yield is 6%. However, from this point forward, I include some of my own risk management parameters:

Fairholme Capital, led by Bruce Berkowitz, runs a pretty focused portfolio and I found their most recent filing very interesting:

• Berkowitz’s two largest new positions were big stakes in Boeing (BA) and Northrop Grumman (NOC), the win-win US tanker contract trade, if you will.  I have both on my watchlist and keep in mind that Berkowitz bought in around $60 on the two stocks; both are trading around $40 now and near 4% yield.  I feel like I need to do more research to get the defense industry into my circle of competence but if I thought there was value in those two stocks before, Berkowitz’s bet piques my interest even more.
• Berkowitz can’t be accused of lacking conviction.  He added heavily to his healthcare positions, increasing his Pfizer (PFE) and UnitedHealth Group (UNH) by over 20% and Forest Labs (FRX) by nearly 50%.  It looks like he’s reversed his selling on Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ), adding back 46% of his position as the stock has dropped.  Berkowitz still believed in Eddie Lampert at Sears (SHLD), at least as of Q3 (remember that SHLD has fallen from $90 to under $40 now). And perhaps most interestingly, he continued the accumulation of Leucadia National (LUK), adding 36% more shares after adding over 10% last quarter.   At the time, LUK was trading in the mid $40 range but now trades under $18.  Might be time to dig into LUK, which is sometimes lumped in with Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) since both have reputations as “mini-Berkshires.”
• Berkowitz didn’t completely divest any substantial positions.  USG was his biggest sold-off position but only at $200M, compared to $1B+ positions in SHLD and PFE.  He also sold half his BRK.A position though probably more to raise cash than any judgment on the stock.

Bob Rodriguez had been warning of funkiness in the credit markets for some time but it didn’t spare his FPA Capital fund from the slumping market.  His filing this quarter suggests FPA had a low-key quarter:

Many foreign stocks that trade as ADRs in the US have fallen heavily in-line with their home country’s market performance. In order to identify the ADRs that are down more than 80% year-to-date, I ran the screener and ended up with the 38 stocks listed below.

Foreign ADR Stocks Down > 80%

When looking for high yield investments, it is important to consider the safety and security of the company, not just the high dividend payout. One metric to look at is the Price to Book Ratio, which is the price of the stock in relation to the net worth of the stock, in other words, what each share would be worth if all the company assets were sold off, all the debts paid off, and what is left over divided by the number of shares outstanding. The lower the Price to Book Ratio, the better the buy. If the ratio is less than one, the shareholder would receive more for their shares are trading at if the company immediately went out of business and sold everything off.

Obviously, the book value can be nebulous in many circumstances, especially with companies that own a lot of real estate, but the ratio can still be used as a good comparison indicator. According to WallStreetNewsNetwork.com, there are over 35 stocks with market caps over $500 million, yields above 5%, and price to book value ratios less than one. They also have P/E ratios less than 20 and PEG ratios less than one. [Many of the very high yield stocks have yields that are tenuous]. Here are ten of those stocks:

The smelting of iron began in the second millennium B.C. The first making of steel is believed to have taken place in 1400 B.C., in East Africa. Now investors are looking at iron and steel as an infrastructure play.

All of the following have market caps in excess of $6 billion:

All this doesn’t sound very investor-friendly, thus the title chosen for this article seems a little strange at first glance. But once the polemic, rhetoric, disinformation and plain simple lies told by both business reporters and by Venezuela’s president are stripped away, it becomes obvious to the level-headed investor that Chavez and his detractors provide some gilt-edged opportunities to make profits in the stock market.

General Motors (GM) - Jerry York's resignation from GM's board after the company failed to make a deal with Nissan and Renault means that the stock has lost its catalyst, according to Cramer who has been recommending GM because of York who was responsible for restructuring at IBM (IBM) and Chrysler. Although GM could see a turnaround Cramer believes that the "odds just got longer."

From the F-1: