Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Stocks Of The Month: GS, MF

Yet another month of Fed lunacy, market volatility, and portfolio churn. Yay!

Gone is PetroChina (PTR), which had fallen from its high of $267 in October to my sale price of $176. I was still able to realize a 101% gain (46% annualized), and I can't really say that a $314 billion dollar company has much tremendous upside potential to be missed.

I picked up two new stocks: Goldman Sachs (GS) and MF Global (MF). Goldman Sachs is a very easy stock to own - even though its down nearly 9% from where I bought it earlier this month, I'm not worried one bit; because not only is Goldman the best investment bank in the world, their so-called peers are grossly incompetent in comparison. Yet somehow GS trades at a discount of 9x forward earnings, and a PEG of 0.65. Pretty ridiculous, I say. Long-term, at worst, GS is a reasonable bet to outperform the S&P 500.

MF is more of a flier pick. It's a worldwide clearing house of (count the buzzwords) futures, options, derivatives, "foreign exchange products", currencies, energy, metals, and agriculture. It had its IPO over the summer but hasn't done much since, nor has much analyst coverage - and with a market cap under $4 billion, has plenty of room to run.

Here's my current portfolio. As always, I believe in all of these stocks - until I sell them.

Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) 8.59%
Southern Copper (PCU) 7.77%
Fording Canadian Coal (FDG) 7.28%
Baidu (BIDU) 6.51%
Dominion Resources Black Warrior Trust (DOM) 5.74%
Goldman Sachs (GS) 5.63%
Annaly Capital Management (NLY) 5.62%
MF Global (MF) 5.37%
Tidewater (TDW) 5.16%
Capstone Turbine (CPST) 4.94%
MEMC Electronic Materials (WFR) 4.83%
Google (GOOG) 4.70%
Apache (APA) 4.31%
Frontline (FRO) 4.16%
Apple (AAPL) 3.83%
NVIDIA (NVDA) 3.69%
Geron (GERN) 3.55%
Ace Limited (ACE) 2.97%
Alliance Resource Partners (ARLP) 2.68%
Nokia (NOK) 2.67%