CT Programmer

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.

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.

Potash Corp., Agrium Caught in Industry-Wide Downturn

David White: Get your own blog. You write more than the author does. We don't need a minute-by-minute update on the price of POT.

As With Fertilizer Commodities, POT Bubbles

No one here even mentions YARA International (YARIY), which happens to be one of the biggest FERT's in the world. They're huge in Europe and Asia, and they also have their own inline gas production, which is a huge cost of doing business. They're trading at a PE in the low 20's currently. And like POT, their revenues just doubled as well. They're on a foreign exchange, so info isn't readily available (thus they are lesser known), but they have all the financials on their web site at yara.com.