I've been working on an analysis of Tim Hortons, but I'm up north with the family and don't have my notes. I remember EPV was higher than NAV so I needed to assess the probability of sustaining the competitive advantage. It is currently trading at more than double what I came with for IV, so chalk this one into the "wait for supreme weakness" file. Again, I am stuck with the questions "is it secular, is it cyclical", as being the slightly natty paranoiac I often wonder out loud if the US is making a secular transition to post-superpower status via an economic crack-up unseen since the 1930's. Value traps will abound if this is the case.

So far this summer my investments have been few, and non-standard. I bought a website that I was easily able to rebrand onto a stronger domain name and it basically sits there on autopilot and earns about 3%-4% per month, recurring. I'm still measuring the retention and churn rates, but it looks like if I don't push on it (fire up a marketing program, etc), I can realistically expect 30%-40% ROI annually. It's tough to buy stocks when you can do that. Of course the downside to that is, the internet has no historical data for cyclical trends so everything is uncharted territory. Maybe I'll write a separate post on "value investing in web assets" because it's a whole different topic.

Mark Jr. wrote:
"I'm still measuring the retention and churn rates, but it looks like if I don't push on it (fire up a marketing program, etc), I can realistically expect 30%-40% ROI annually. It's tough to buy stocks when you can do that."


OK, but UnitedHealth UNH moved from $23 to $32, because it became so undervalued.  That's better than 71% per my calculator.  In six weeks.  And UNH is no obscure, small-cap.

I totally respect your apparent circle of competence, Mark, which is the internet; but, there's more to explore by the rest of us, no?

We're seeing some very distressed valuations in a lot of stocks, and perhaps they'll become even more distressed.  I would hope that between the 20-or-so of us, we can uncover some compelling values in this market.  Please speak up!  Let us know what you're seeing and thinking!  This forum can have a lot of value for all of us.  Jump in, everybody!

Cheers from the south of México,

Cristóbal

Agrium is looking pretty cheap right now.

I'm going to start an analysis but a quick look shows it trading around a P/E of like, < 4 right now.

I've been looking at Sprott Resource Corp TSX:SPC, they basically invest in other resource companies.

They've had a really good turn of luck, selling a coal mine to Russia a few months before the meltdown has them sitting on a pile of cash (somewhere north of 200M I think)

Then the meltdown just smashed resource stocks right down into oversold and undervalued, and SCP is just licking their getting ready to cherry pick some of these bargains.

They're basically setting themselves up to be a resource and commodity oriented value fund. I picked some up at $1.92 a couple months back although I haven't done an analysis on them yet.