Apologies for the absence

I wanted to apologize for my absence. I have been busy with school and a project. Details on that project and blog posts coming soon!

 

Still Relevant: Benjamin Graham

Benjamin Graham wrote his seminal work Security Analysis in 1934. The book is rightfully viewed as the bible for almost any fundamentally based investor and has stood the test of time very well. I cannot overstate how much that book has formed my views of the financial markets. It’s basically been the foundation from which my thought process comes from. With that in mind, I think it’s crucially important to examine the strategic gems of that book and examine what their original reasoning was. I think it’s very common for people to forget the historical context of older books and fail to adjust the reasoning accordingly. Examples of this lack of context are the ban on pork in the old testament of the bible (pigs were seriously unclean animals back then and people who ate pork were taking a very serious health risk), and the entire department of agriculture.

Graham advocated a strategy of buying stocks and bonds that were selling for less than 70% of their cash value. In 1934 the world was in the grips of the Great Depression and there was an ocean of securities priced very low. Graham called these stocks ‘cigarette butts’ because they were like discarded cigarettes that a budget conscious man could pick up and get one last free puff. I need to restate this loudly so that all of you will understand what I’m saying, Security Analysis suggests that you should be able to build a portfolio of stocks trading for less than 70% of their CURRENT ASSETS minus their TOTAL LIABILITIES. It’s tough to argue that we should expect to ever see a market that as cheap as the Great Depression. Today most of Grahams picks are companies that are available for that price for a great reason, like outright fraud. It’s pretty safe to conclude that we have to (and have) relax our standards. My own personal standard is trying to purchase somewhat solid companies for less than the sum of a very conservative 10 year DCF and a heavily discounted balance sheet.

Security Analysis is harshly critical of people who trade with a short time frame calling them ‘speculators’. It essentially postulates that no sane and intelligent person would participate in the rapid trading of shares because with a few exceptions most would be better served (and serve their broker less) by buying and holding for the long term. There is still a great deal to be said for holding long term positions in stocks, bonds, and basically every other investment vehicle. At the same time it’s important to note what has changed since 1934. First and foremost it’s now possible to trade extremely cheaply. In 1934 it cost a minimum fixed cost to buy or sell a stock. This lead to average round trip transactional costs that were literally hundreds of times higher than they are today. If I had to pay 4% of my total starting position in a stock to get in and out you can bet your ass I’d have a huge edge if I was buying it! Graham also lived in an era with very poor disclosures and rampant insider trading. He felt (correctly) that the price of the stock was being manipulated by outside forces. His solution was simply to buy it when Mr. Market was having a meltdown—and buy it in a small position that allowed him to diversify away the risk that he was being cheated. In Grahams day stocks were also very much independent entities. Their performance was nowhere near as linked to a broader ‘index’ as it is today. This meant that it made very little sense to worry about anything but the situation surrounding the stock itself when it came to deciding when to buy or sell.

Graham also had strong words for people who dealt in warrants, options, and short positions. He felt that all of these devices were potentially ruinous and he’s often right. Again though, it’s important to realize how different things were in Grahams day. There was a lot less liquidity in the market, so it was extremely hazardous to everyone involved to have these types of investments. The biggest reason to use any of them is for hedging. Hedging was handled in Graham’s portfolio by buying a company for significantly less than cash value and diversifying!

So here we are in 2012. It costs next to nothing to make a trade, nearly every stock is in lock step with the index, and both volume and volatility are at record levels. Despite all of this, Graham’s basic idea of buying a dollar for seventy cents is still valid. We may have to change our definition of a long term time frame. We may have to reduce ourselves to giving a business a more complex valuation than the cash it holds. Still, buying a dollar for seventy cents is still a pretty damned good move. Make no mistake, his books still hold enormous wisdom and even though things will have probably changed even more a hundred years from now, Security Analysis will probably still be a good read.

Banking Boredom

Banking used to be pretty boring. Banks borrowed for one interest rate, lent at a slightly higher interest rate, and pocketed the difference. It was a quiet stable trade that lent to comments like 3-6-3 which stood for “Borrow at 3% lend at 6% and be on the golf course by 3″. There is a huge amount of talk about how we need to change the capital requirements on banks, or we need to break them up so that they won’t be too big to fail… But I think those are not going to get at the root of the problem.

Banks aren’t supposed to be hedge funds, or Investment Banks (which are about as different from the public perception of what a ‘bank’ is that they might as well be grocery stores comparatively), or even insurance companies. They are supposed to borrow money at very low interest rates, lend at very low interest rates, and generally be a bastion of lazy privilege. No one should work a 70 hour week at a bank. They’re supposed to be open fewer hours, take more holidays, and generally be lazier than any other business on earth.

So here’s my solution. Accept that there is an implicit idea that banks are going to be large, and are probably going to get bailed out if anything goes significantly wrong. Once you’ve accepted this restrict their activities to ONLY these activities: Taking deposits, making mortgage loans, making business loans, making credit card loans (this should give them healthy profit margins), and moving money around via wires etc. They shouldn’t be allowed to sell or buy mortgage backed securities, have proprietary trading units, hedge any of their positions at all, or do anything but hold their entire loan portfolio until it amortizes itself right off their books. In exchange for this massive limitation of their activities they get to be able to have FDIC insurance, borrow money from the fed, and have the implicit guarantee that should everything in the economy go to shit they’ll get government support.

Under no circumstances should they be allowed to own an equity stake in any other firm. If they want to generate a return on the capital they have—they have to lend it. They are not allowed to buy publicly issued bonds either.

If businesses want to have access to FDIC guarantees on depositor accounts, access to nearly free money from the fed, and be able to request a bailout when the going gets rough it’s pretty obvious that they can’t be allowed to take on massive amounts of risk… In fact they should only be allowed to do the things that keep the economy running—keeping track of deposits, making consumer loans, making the smaller business loans, and providing really crummy safe places to stash money (CD’s).

A lot of bankers will respond to this by saying that “This will make American Banks uncompetitive globally”. That might be true, but I have no doubt that there will be plenty of firms who will continue to do the kind of financial alchemy that we are presently known for. It just doesn’t make any sense for the companies that form the backbone of the financial system to be allowed to dabble in areas where they have very little expertise while socializing their losses. The developed nations of the world are all allowing the predators of the financial system (various market operators many of whom are hedge funds) to have access to a large pool of idiots (big banks) to fleece, and for some reason we’re all paying the bill when the predators make a kill. If you want to swim with the sharks that’s fine, but you should be gambling with your own money—not mine.

For me this has always been the central issue of the whole crisis. I make bets—and when I lose I have to pay for it. I still don’t understand why anyone should be allowed to place bets for their own benefit that should they lose will be paid by other people. It’s just completely insane.

There is no silver lining with Zynga

Zynga IPO’d on Friday. It finished the day down ~5% and has spent the time since being booed out of the house. Some people have attempted to find a silver lining by saying that Zynga ‘can raise 1 billion establishing a 9 billion market valuation illustrates something fundamental, and big, lies beneath.” Bullshit.

I’ve done some thinking about internet stocks. And the only reasonable conclusion any of us can come to about any single big ‘internet’ stock excepting Google is that what we’re dealing with is an ugly mismatch between supply and demand. LNKD sold just     7.8M out of 94.4M shares outstanding in its IPO, GRPN offered just 5M out of 35M and P sold just 14.7M shares out of ~160M shares outstanding.

So what does all of this mean? IPO’s have always been a gamble but in the past they weren’t so blatantly used to make sure the venture capitalists and the founders got paid. It’s absolutely crucial to these stakeholders that the stocks come in at a high valuation—so they purposefully utilize their control over the supply of the company’s stock to create the stock market equivalent of diamonds. Internet stocks are hot because a certain part of the investing population is perpetually on the hunt for the next big thing. Unfortunately these people are being rather efficiently manipulated by the company insiders who are forcing these sorts of investors to compete with one another to acquire rare shares of these stocks.

This supply shortage has driven shares of these companies far outside any reasonable parameters for a sane investment. None of the firms I’ve directly named (except Google) is in any danger of being a good investment. Much like diamonds the retail buyers of these stocks are going to discover very poor resale value when the shine comes off.

Fundamental Analysis vs. Technical Analysis

Up front I’m going to say that I sincerely hope that this post isn’t the final straw for some of my strict value investing readers. I know I’ve severely undermined your loyalty by making (and posting about) some short term moves like my HPQ puts. I also know this subject has been done to death—but I hope that I come at it from a different perspective than you’ve seen before.

On the surface value oriented Graham-Dodd style fundamental analysis of investments makes a lot of sense. It also has a proven track record of performing even for laypeople relatively ignorant of finance via the Magic Formula. It also crucially scales very well (although clearly it doesn’t break the laws of gravity associated with large amounts of funds under management). This style has its downsides though—it works very poorly over a short time frame preferring to accumulate alpha imperceptibly over time, while it does take random events into account (risk analysis exists in theory) it cannot exactly predict them, and it is fairly hard to analyze from a R:R perspective.

Technical Analysis is the air to the thick loam of Graham-Dodd. It is also the mask used by countless stock market ‘systems’ that are frequently little better than scams. Under every successful lie there must be truth however… And Technical Analysis done correctly is a powerful tool. Good chartists are some of the Wall Street people who are actually worth the ridiculous salaries that they are paid—because they generate massive quantities of alpha.

TA isn’t logical really. This makes it very hard for us extremely analytical types to wrap our heads around it. But there is a logical fallacy that most of us fall victim to—we think the markets next oscillation is random. It’s not. It’s generated by people making choices… And they tend to do things the same way over and over again. They’ve been making these choices for years—and they aren’t about to change their ways. Some TA patterns work because there are a large number of people who MAKE them work through sheer belief. If that’s not acceptable to you I’d suggest buying gold—because paper money works the same way.

There are some somewhat simplistic concepts in TA that are incorporated into every system and are as clearly true as the idea that buying a viable business for less than Net Current Asset Value is a good thing. The core concept (in my mind at least) is the idea of support and resistance prices. This is one of the places where TA and Value Investing most frequently find common ground—because when TA finds a support price the stock is frequently at least slightly undervalued… And when TA finds a resistance price the reverse is often true. They might be doing things for different reasons than us value types—but when we buy a stock because ‘it’s stupid cheap’ it has often just touched a crucial support point where TA people will go long looking for a great R:R spot.

The advantages of TA are compelling. TA allows a trader to define their R:R by specializing in liquid securities that allow him to get in and out at predefined points. This means that he can know for a FACT how much he can lose. To put this in perspective most value oriented investors are 100% (or more) exposed to the markets 24/7/365. After doing that I can personally attest to how attractive being out of the market is. Also it’s quite hard—and that’s a barrier to entry. Barriers to entry are great… They protect the people willing to work their way in from being competed with by every Tom, Dick, and Harry who decides he wants to be a trader. TA people generally trade far more than Value oriented people—which is a double edged sword. The positive edge is that they get more individual opportunities to generate alpha.

There are some rather significant limitations and downsides to TA. It doesn’t scale especially well, (which has been gotten around by having computers make up size with quantity of trades) its accuracy degrades accurately as the time frame gets longer, and it does a much worse job of predicting random events than value oriented approaches. The worst disasters that typically happen to TA guys are when they get trapped in positions when the market does something dramatic in response to some large event that the value investing people probably at least thought about. Failure to correctly hedge this kind of risk is the reason why large actively managed TA funds blow up so often. (That and the never ending competition for yield that causes them to take ever larger risks) TA is also basically impossible to do passively. It’s an active trader’s game… And as such it’s not even an option for most people. When you’re in a trade you pretty much have to watch it until you close it… Because the situation is constantly changing.

Now to summarize the horribly tl;dr (too long, didn’t read) post to this point.

1. Both Technical and Fundamental Analysis are valid methods of generating a trading advantage against the market.

2. The longer the time frame being looked at the bigger the advantage FA holds… and vice versa. (at a 30 second time frame Technical traders can still have some edge—Fundamentals almost never play any part at all in any given 30 second period. Fundamentals can tell me pretty accurately the general direction a company will head for the next 5 years… Technical analysis over a 5 year time period is less than worthless)

3. When it comes to ‘when do I cut my losses?’ TA wins hands down. When something takes a big hit FA often suggests that it’s now ‘cheaper’ and it can be very tempting to buy more assuming ‘nothing has changed’. This isn’t necessarily a mistake—but it can absolutely ruin you if you don’t know what you’re doing. (‘nothing has changed’ is often ‘you don’t know that something changed 10 minutes ago’)

4. Event risk is much worse for TA traders… They have virtually no warning that whatever it is they trade is about to do something really bizarre. FA guys are often betting on that event happening. (One man’s catalyst is another man’s disaster)

5. TA for better or worse has much higher barriers to entry than FA. FA can be done fairly effectively by buying ‘The Little Book That Still Beats the Market’ and following directions significantly easier than assembling my office furniture. TA is fucking hard. This is not to say that getting really good at FA is easy—it’s about as hard as getting similarly good at TA… It just has a much less brutal learning curve at the beginning.

 

At the end of the day people who want to be legitimately amazing at managing money (and do it for a living) will probably be best served by learning at least the intermediate level of both and specializing (and being very good at) the other. For the other people who are trying to break into the business and think that TA is simply voodoo priests examining chicken entrails—I have bad news—that insane stuff is real… And you’re going to have to get semi competent at it to compete at any reasonably high level.

5 of 2011’s Mistakes and What I Learned From Them

1. I liked EXM at 4.03 in late April. There were lots of good reasons why it was a strong purchase on paper; it’s an even better deal now. What went wrong? It has absolutely no catalyst short of shipping recovering and a balance sheet that looks like bankruptcy the longer the shipping slump continues.

What I learned—when looking at distressed companies you need a catalyst. There needs to be some specific major trigger event that is going to turn things around and that event needs to have an expiration date (preferably before the company itself expires and you lose the game of musical chairs that is distressed asset investing). If nothing happens by that date, you sell.

2. I made investments in businesses that I didn’t understand. I did this several times this year, mostly in retail. I read all of the disclosures, but still didn’t know the first thing about fashion. What I did understand about retail was that they are a business under severe pressure on their profit margins. That’s not the sort of thing that you can accurately value, which means any valuation you do of the income statement is pretty much a wild guess.

What I learned—there is plenty of money to be made investing in any sector. Warren Buffett/Peter Lynch/Everyone else are right. Most of the edge you have in investing is what you understand beyond the average Wall Street trader. If I had 10 years of managing a Gap store I could probably walk into one and very quickly figure out how things were going. Edges in investing come from things you do better than everyone else. Hard work, knowledge of the product, knowledge of the market, being small, being large, these are all examples of edges you can have. All of these are things that you can have going for you. If you can’t explain why you have a significant advantage over basically every stockbroker alive (sorry Josh but this is a pretty low bar to set) you might as well throw darts. I should temper this by saying that it’s not actually that hard to have an edge. Most other people haven’t done any homework at all. Those are the people who bought the stock as opposed to some ETF that is moving 50k share lots back and forth to stay balanced every day.

3. I let Mr. Market dictate how I was doing. I did this over and over and over again this year. I freaked out when the market went down and I felt like a God when the market went up. I sold things out of panic, and I bought things at prices that I didn’t love because I was afraid they would be even higher the next day. I took winning plays and sold them for losses, and I held winning plays until they lost money. It amazes me just how great the markets are at making me do stupid things.

What I Learned—I’m in the process of learning how to have a complete plan and stick to it. A defined entry, a defined exit, a defined risk threshold where I bail out, and a reason why all of these are good things to have. Eventually I might even have the patience to not do anything until I can check all of these boxes. I hope.

4. I started blogging without having any real idea of what I wanted out of it. Honestly the only thing I did right was aggressively promoting myself and focusing on the content. I was lucky enough to catch Josh’s eye and his liking my work is why most of you are reading this right now. I would probably have given up completely a long time ago without the positive feedback—so thanks to the people who are still reading this blog after my barely posting for a couple of months.

What I learned—I’m not going to make any money from this. I’ve realized that this is completely ok. It’s rewarding in ways I never would have predicted. For some reason strangers on the internet agreeing with me or at least thinking I am smart is wonderful. It’s also helped me flesh out my thought process on investing a lot.

5. One of the most annoying things that smart people do is believe that they know THE TRUTH after 10 minutes of distracted thought while buying groceries. It’s a particular form of arrogance to believe that you can parse reality so finely that you can see everyone else’s bullshit instantly. Unfortunately you end up being right often enough that it’s a behavior that frequently gets positive reinforcement. There were several ideas I held at the beginning of the year that were the result of this kind of thinking.

What I learned—I see this in myself frequently and try my best to root out these toxic thoughts and replace them with the much less comforting thought that I really don’t know. When most of what you have in the world is a cynical ability to read between the lines ‘I don’t know’ are probably the three scariest words in the English language. Thankfully not knowing and thus being terrified of that grey space is a major motivation to go out and actually learn about things. What I learned doing this could fill several more blog posts.

 

 

All Jobs Are Not Created Equal

According to the 2009 Census the upper limit for the bottom fifth of household incomes is 20,453 per year, the upper limit for the second fifth is 38,550, the third fifth is 61,801, the fourth 100,000, and the top 5% is above 180,001. George Will wrote an article titled “Choking on Obamacare” where he describes the horrible effect that Obamacare is having on job creation.

The company he cherry picks for his article is CKE Restaurants, the parent company of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants. I’m going to be enormously generous and assume that the average hourly wage for one of their non-management team members is $8.50 (.50 more than the highest minimum wage in the country—CA). Assuming that these people are offered full time employment (which would not be standard operating procedure in the fast food industry) they are grossing 17680 per year which is quite safely in the bottom fifth. It’s very unlikely that second tier store management earn enough to be in the top 40% of wage earners.

There is a huge difference between a good job and a bad job. It’s time that we all stopped pretending that what we want is ‘job creation’. What we want and need is ‘good job creation’. A good job is one that can provide a living wage for a small family. It doesn’t have to provide them with any degree of wealth—but it does have to allow them to eat, get to and from work, have decent healthcare, and pay for utilities and rent without depending on government subsidy. A job that doesn’t provide the very basics for a family of 3 is a statistical anomaly—not a job. Jobs that fail to meet these requirements trap people in a cycle of poverty that locks them into being permanent consumers of government programs like food stamps, as well as making them vulnerable to preventable health problems and services like payday lenders that exist to prey on them almost exclusively.

Will is complaining that CKE’s business model will be less sustainable than it is today under Obamacare. What he doesn’t say is that CKE’s current business model is a great example of socializing employee costs. Currently the health care costs that CKE doesn’t want to pay are born by the rest of us when CKE’s employees visit emergency rooms and fail to pay their bills (a cost that is dependably passed on to us through higher insurance premiums). These companies are already allowed to leverage local anti-poverty programs to care for their employees, who don’t make enough money to ‘pay their own way’. Business models like CKE’s shouldn’t be sustainable at all. I don’t give a fuck if they get ‘less sustainable’.

At the end of the day we are always going to have a pool of unskilled laborers who do not have the talent, opportunity, or work ethic to procure the skills needed to get a ‘skilled’ job. We can tell ourselves that the free market will provide for them, but as groups of people go can any of you think of a group less capable of representing their own interests? A free market suggests that two equal parties will come together and decide a fair price for a good or service. Are we really willing to accept a permanent underclass so that we can get a cheap cheeseburger?

The question we have to ask ourselves is whether or not the lowest tier of jobs in our economy is actually helping the economy. Are they really jobs? Politicians and pundits might like to tout ‘job creation’ without referencing the quality of the jobs being created—but expanding the underclass in this country is definitely not a positive thing. Perhaps it’s time to examine the economic viability of business models that require employees earning wages far below what is needed to live.

Nope Mr Hastings. You Have No Credibility.

Netflix CEO Reid Hastings talked about an “arms race” in online streaming today. I found issue almost immediately with nearly everything he said—most of which makes no sense to me. “Half of home-video viewing will come through the internet by 2016, aided by expanding fiber-optic networks that can carry the data and more web-enabled TVs…” That’s insane. While fiber optic networks are expanding… They aren’t expanding fast enough to keep up with present demand. Netflix already takes up 32.7% of US downstream traffic which is up significantly over the last year. The current unlimited bandwidth pricing model that ISP’s use has allowed Netflix to compete directly with them on video entertainment while abusing their networks degrading services and forcing expensive upgrades. The ISP’s are already fighting back and can be expected to continue to do so. Netflix’s plan is to continue to expand its internet business even though it’s facing a serious squeeze from both the hardware (ISP’s) and the programming (the content providers) sides of their business. I’m starting to have serious doubts about their business even being viable.

    It’s not helping me feel better that Hastings is talking about HBO Go as his number one competitor. HBO Go is just the online streaming service of a premium cable channel. Now if what he’s really saying is that HBO Go represents a new type of competitor that endangers his business model that makes a little bit of sense… But HBO Go is an additional service being provided through the customers ISP (who provides the video service that the customer has to pay for to get access to HBO Go) and the content comes from HBO—who doesn’t exactly have to pay an outside party for rights to its own shows. As for competition that uses a similar model to Netflix I’d say Hulu probably represents the biggest threat. Hulu may have fewer crappy movies—but they have managed to get mainstream TV networks to give them access to their shows in exchange for a cut of the ad revenues.

My wife is watching a TV show on Netflix right now, and we don’t pay our local cable provider for video. While this is very good for me (Netflix streaming is much cheaper than cable TV), it makes absolutely no sense for my local cable company. I’m enjoying the parasitic Netflix business model—but its future is severely in doubt.

AMR is a spectacularly easy short

American Airlines parent company AMR announced that they were filing bankruptcy this week. It’s currently trading at .3710 a share—the reality is that it should be and soon will be at 0. There are a few delusional souls who believe that it is a positive R:R decision to go long AMR right now ‘because it’s cheap’. It’s definitely possible to bet on AMR not being as bad off as everyone believes—but the common stock isn’t where that play should be made.

This bloomberg article talks about what a catastrophe this filing is for holders of unsecured debt. Let’s stop and think about what this means. AMR is going under because of catastrophically bad deals it cut with its workers in better times. They are facing a mountain of pension debt, debt for capital expenditures, and a much smaller sliver of debt that financed airport expenses that is unsecured. The unsecured debt holders are going to take a bath. The big question is how big of a bath it’s going to be.

The order in which people get paid in a bankruptcy is as follows: secured debt of various seniorityà Unsecured debt à preferred stockàcommon stock. As you can see if the unsecured bond holders are going to take a bath the common and preferred stockholders of AMR are about to get wiped completely out. No ifs ands or buts. With that in mind I’m getting short tomorrow morning—and so should you. The great thing is that winning this bet is a 100% profit proposition. Naturally if I’m wrong it could be really, really, horrible… But calling that a long shot is pretty far-fetched.

DSX is a very cheap stock

DSX is a dry bulk shipping company. Unlike most of its competitors it is carrying a relatively small amount of low interest rate debt, and normally I wouldn’t care about this fact… But the shipping industry is presently in a multi-year slump and while a recovery in shipping prices is nearly guaranteed as ships are retired and the supply of ships contracts I have no confidence that this won’t happen to deeply indebted shipping companies scrambling for credit.

DSX runs all of its ships on long term charters. This has had the nice effect that they have been greatly cushioned from the huge drop in rates from 2008 to present. As a result of this they have a rather significant amount of cash, very little debt, and a fleet that under cost accounting rules is worth ~1B. While other shippers are losing money after interest payments DSX has been hoarding cash for the last 3 years in preparation for next year when a significant number of its charters expire and face being renewed at the new lower rates. According to Zach’s this year’s 1.31 per share net profit is supposed to turn into .83 next year. It’s important to note that the strategy that has served them so well up to this point could  very easily backfire if shipping prices remain extremely low next year.

And right on time the BDI went from 1250 at the beginning of September to 2018 now. This represents a significant shift in the price of shipping—and has held in the ~1700-~2200 range since September 1st. It’s important to note that this is still quite a bit lower than the levels that DSX was getting on previous charters—but it does render the analysts’ earnings expectations fairly inaccurate.

DSX is ungodly cheap. It’s in the shipping sector so it’s been pretty badly bludgeoned over the last couple of years—and other peoples pain is our gain. With that in mind let’s do the numbers.

Income Statement

DSX is going to see very minor changes in income over the next 2 quarters as most of their current charters will survive at least that long. To simulate this I gave them 2 quarters at last quarters net income number of 27.68M. Then I ran a 9.5 year DCF using a 66.56M starting point (Zach’s estimate just to be safe) 0% growth and a 12% discount. This spat out a 421.2M number for the value of DSX’s income over the next ten years.

Balance Sheet

DSX has 387M in mostly cash and other assorted short term assets, 1157M in long term assets (basically 100% ships), and 384.81 in long term debt at very attractive interest rates (from the cash flow statement it looks to be about 4% APR). In the interests of producing a low valuation I decided to give DSX just 60% of the cost-depreciation on their ships. This brought the value of the balance sheet to 696.39M.

Summary of the Numbers

DSX has a conservative value of 1117.59M… And is trading for 694.44M. That’s 62 cents on the dollar. (I initially posted that the market cap was MUCH lower at 194M because Google Finance had an error in the number of outstanding shares. I claim complete responsibility for not doing good due diligence. Blah. I guess from now on I’ll have to get my quick fundamental data from somewhere else.)

 

Disclosure: I am long DSX

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