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102 Comments

    • ON: Fri Oct 10th 10:57 AM
      Commented on:
      Midstream MLPs Crashing, Present Opportunity
      Great article. I have both EEP and OKS and I think they are solid investments. Unfortunately, like you said in the current market valuations are out the window and both the good and the bad are being sold off heavily by hedge funds and panicked investors. If you buy in, expect that the price will continue to drop. So I'd buy immediately prior to the cutoff date to receive a dividend. Who knows when anything will hit bottom, but at current valuations these companies are a steal, even if they'll go lower in the short term. And they'll be the first to recover once the "all clear" whistle is blown. At least with them you get paid generously in the meantime to wait for some semblance of normalcy. Also note that MLP dividends have special tax handling both within and without an IRA, but nothing a normal tax-prep software program can't handle. But I recommend reading up on MLP's and their tax implications before investing. Avi Morris has some good blogs regarding MLP's on Seeking Alpha (seekingalpha.com/autho...).
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    • ON: Thu Oct 9th 09:41 AM
      Commented on:
      MLPs Still Attractive After Recent Selloff
      oldtrdr, you're absolutely right. My mistake. It is a trust. High dividends like the others, similar business, but not an MLP. Wasn't thinking.
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    • ON: Wed Oct 8th 11:24 AM
      Commented on:
      MLPs Still Attractive After Recent Selloff
      Oh, quick note... I promise this is it then I'm out of here. When looking at PGH, they kick out dividends monthly, not quarterly, so just looking at their dividend amount is misleading. It's currently at 23% annually based on today's price.
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    • ON: Wed Oct 8th 11:20 AM
      Commented on:
      MLPs Still Attractive After Recent Selloff
      Best bets for MLP's, or for anything? As for MLP's, I have EEP, OKS and PGH. I won't claim they're the best... just the ones I picked up for various reasons. I like OKS's significant exposure to gas, but last time I checked we still needed to move oil around. Today they just seem to keep going down and down. Timing of bottom-fishing aside, they are good companies at a good price with good dividends. Read some of Avi's prior articles regarding the tax-handling of MLP's within or without an IRA. It gets a little muddy within an IRA.

      As for good buys in general... take your pick. Fertilizer companies, copper miners, gold (maybe), dry bulk shippers, gas and oil producers. They're all down significantly as if they're going out of business, yet they all have solid cash flows and last time I checked Asia was still running red-hot (and China just lowered its rates!!!). I personally put a lot of stock (no pun intended) in Jim Jubak's list on MSN and read him regularly.

      As a side note, I love how the press is saying that EEP is down 18% today because of the 2.4m fine. That happened last fall, and I read about that fine last week. I guess knee-jerk reactions are on a delay ;-)
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    • ON: Wed Oct 8th 10:41 AM
      Commented on:
      MLPs Still Attractive After Recent Selloff
      "Crash" assumes that the event has finished. Judging by today, it ain't over. Most of these are down a good number of points, after a few weeks of general decline. Not sure what's going on. I think "good" stocks are being punished in this market because they are the best thing to sell. I read something today that said hedge funds have liquidated about 20% of their total assets in the last month. That's a lot of selling. Personally, anything that pays me a dividend, and has a fwd PE below the S&P norm of around 15, is a double-gimmie. You eventually get both the dividends and the appreciation. And these MLP's have lower taxes.
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    • ON: Wed Oct 8th 08:16 AM
      Commented on:
      MLPs Still Attractive After Recent Selloff
      You should add OKS to your list of tags. I agree that these are good plays right now in the crazy market. They have stable cash flows, regardless of the price of the commodity running through their pipes. Even though we're likely heading into a significant recession, these guys provide stable dividends for those who sit and wait, and the prices will return to normal eventually. However, I would have changed the article's title to "MLP's MORE attractive after recent selloff".
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    • ON: Wed Oct 8th 07:38 AM
      Commented on:
      Mosaic Misses Earnings and Brings Down the Sector
      At any other time, Mosaic would be an incredible buy. I bought them when they dropped 30% in one day. Now they're down another 20. I don't kick myself for buying them. I only kick myself for not getting them cheaper. They will get back up there, but that's another 20% I could have had. That's the problem with this market. Over the last year, any given stock can swing 5+ points and that's a "normal" day. Used to be you were giddy over it bouncing 2% in one day. Fertilizer companies and dry bulk shippers (plus oil, gas, copper, gold, etc.) are getting --- let's just say it --- RAPED lately. Prices are acting like all the business has dried up. Genco (GNK) was way up there at $85 about a year ago. I picked them up (happy at the time) in the $60's thinking it was a great bargain. Now here they are near $20. I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined they'd be that ridiculously low. And that's the problem with this market now. Time after time, value investors get screwed as the prices continue to drop irrationally. But I'll be picking up more GNK and MOS in the near future. They'll piddle around for the next year or two, but long-term they are screaming buys at this price or anywhere within 50-100% of it.
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    • ON: Mon Oct 6th 10:58 AM
      Commented on:
      GE Looks Very Attractive Here
      EVERYTHING looks attractive right now! Not just GE. Valuations are just plain out the window and right now everyone is just waiting for a bottom on anything, not just GE. Technicals are worthless. CHK and XTO are hovering above a fwd PE of 6. Dry Bulk shippers are less than 3. Freeport is less than 4 and Southern Copper is at 5. XOM is about 8. ConnocoPhillips is 5. The fertilizer companies, which are rolling in cash, are hovering between 2 and 4.

      But even if you bought GE now (or virtually anything), you'll be rewarded long term. I wish I had waited a little longer. I thought below $30 was great. $20 of course would have been better. But my crystal ball was broken at the time. At any other time, a stalwart like GE at a fwd PE of 10 would be jumped on by anyone. But this is not any other time. THESE ARE CRAZY TIMES! Just buy with whatever spare cash you have and sit. Proper valuations will return over time.
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    • ON: Fri Oct 3rd 11:53 AM
      Commented on:
      The Real Reasons Fertilizer Stocks Are In the Dirt
      I think cstauffer is right. This market is NOT FUNCTIONAL. A fwd PE of 2.4? That sounds like a company circling the bowl ready to go into bankruptcy. Connoco Phillips less than 6. RIG at a little above 6. The dry-bulk shippers are all below 3. These aren't fly-by-night companies. We're talking great cash flows and ample growth. Sure, more potash is coming on line. And you know what will happen? More people in emerging economies will add more meat to their diet, which requires 8 times the corn feed as a vegetarian diet. So you'll see demand go up to match. Ag had an incredible run (and I cashed in on a lot of that over the last year with a 100%+ return on YARIY). We won't see that kind of run again. But long-term these (and most of the rest of the market) will bounce back to its normal 15-20 PE range. Even if their current profits get cut in half due to supply increase, I think from their current price they have 100-200% upside. Bottom-fish if you want, but I bought them yesterday and will just sit and wait.
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    • ON: Fri Oct 3rd 11:38 AM
      Commented on:
      MBIA Sues Countrywide: Part of the Solution to Clean Up the Lies
      The real problem is that you had an industry that, in an effort to chase profits, encouraged mortgage brokers to crank out as much business for as big of a mortgage as possible, and the underwriters were looking the other way because they were just wrapping them up as securities then passing them along. And although I am long MBI, I believe that they too were looking the other way as far as properly analyzing the risk on this stuff. If they priced their wraps too high, no one would buy them. No one planned for a worst case scenario where default rates doubled or tripled. Its not just one slice of the pie that's to blame --- it was the whole thing. Now, if MBI can chase this stuff down in court and recover a little from it, more power to them. But it will drag out for years. I think Ambac including this stuff in its income statement is just scrambling for any reason to pad it in the positive.
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    • ON: Thu Oct 2nd 14:44 PM
      Commented on:
      Attractive Outlook for MLPs Following September Lows
      jamookey... I bought MOS today. When I first started watching them in January (just to pace YARIY which I owned at the time) , they were at $135. Now, they're at $42! This after they "disappointed&quo... Wall Street by coming in a little short on earnings (God forbid you don't come in exactly at what these number crunchers think --- despite the fact that they all missed this huge financial mess and recession). Forget that Mosaic doubled their profits over last year. Forget that they have a fwd PE less than 3 (you'd think they were going into bankruptcy at that level). It's just knee-jerking. And I say "thank you" to whoever panicked and sold me their shares at such a lovely price.
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    • ON: Thu Oct 2nd 13:31 PM
      Commented on:
      Attractive Outlook for MLPs Following September Lows
      We're in the midst of a panicked sell-off. No one thinks anything is making any money anymore, so they're pulling out and sitting on cash. These pipeline companies provide solid dividends while you wait, and their stock prices will come back up. Are we really using significantly less gas and oil? No. And it has to be shipped from point A to point B, just like it always has to, regardless of the price of the oil or gas itself. I find it ironic that on a day like today when lot's of good companies are down 10% or more, EEP is only down 1.5% --- and that's with getting hit with a hefty fine regarding the pipeline explosion last fall. I have noticed that OKS seems to be slipping more over the last few weeks than EEP has. Is there any news regarding them and possibly debt problems? Long EEP and OKS.
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    • ON: Thu Oct 2nd 12:33 PM
      Commented on:
      The Market Hates Mosaic: Phosphates Not Up to Snuff
      If someone wants to sell me stock in a great company, that is already seriously undervalued because of general market conditions, at a 30% discount... well, all I can say is "thank you".
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    • ON: Tue Sep 30th 13:36 PM
      Commented on:
      Financial Markets Circle the Drain: Where Does That Leave Clean Energy?
      jcordes, how is not wanting to add a tremendous amount to the national debt "inane and shallow"? You may want to spend us into a hole to get a bump out of your stocks, but I (and most of the U.S.) don't want to. Unlike the mainstream media, which paints Congress as "not being ABLE TO get the job done" regarding passing this bill, I applaud them for a handful of holdouts that DON'T WANT THIS BILL TO PASS because its a bad idea. Period. No more than a patch job with a huge pricetag. You want to know what will fix this crisis? The market itself. Look at WaMu, Lehman, AIG, Merrill and the many banks that have gone under. They're all owned now by other companies that had better balance sheets because they took on less risk. Big fish swallowing the smaller fish. And suddenly WaMu's balance sheet doesn't look so precarious anymore now that its been folded into a bigger company (that will make money off of the deal in the long run). My numbers may be off slightly, but anyone that runs around like a chicken with its head cut off, screaming that the 2nd Great Depression is coming, and selling all their stocks in a panic deserves what they get. And they also get my thanks for selling their stocks to me so cheaply. Bargains galore!!! Keep on panicking and I'll keep on buying. I'll be shallow and inane sitting on the beach sipping my margaritas with a big-ass retirement account.
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    • ON: Mon Sep 29th 16:17 PM
      Commented on:
      Financial Markets Circle the Drain: Where Does That Leave Clean Energy?
      Congrats to the 40% of Republicans in the House and the 33% of Democrats in the House that blocked this. This bailout plan was a bad idea, and tons of economists came out saying so. Just doing "something" for the sake of doing "something" will get you a small bounce for a few days, but won't fix anything. Forgive me for not having a ton of confidence in 'ole Hank and Ben. And the pricetag on this one was astronomical. For you Survivor fans, $700 billion is 700,000 seasons of someone winning the million dollars. Or for you PowerBall fanatics, that's winning a hundred million jackpots 7,000 times! It is an un-Godly amount that would have saddled this country with an even bigger debt than we already have. About $2,800 each for every man, woman and child in this country. And if you think we'd get any of that back --- ask yourself this: who would sell it to us taxpayers if they would make money off of it? How about we get a REAL plan, and hammer out the details in more than a weekend? Call together all the leading economists in the country and get them together in a room, not all the Wall Street bankers!
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