Coming Up With a List of U.S. Stocks

A reader sent me this email:

“I was curious about how you go about looking at companies A through Z. Obviously there are many ways to do that and many sites that can be used, but what is your method? Which site do you use for domestic securities? And do you have a list of all publicly traded companies that you go off of?”

For complete lists of the stocks in any country, you always start by going to their stock exchange.

Here’s a list of the world’s stock exchanges.

Now back to your question. How to find stocks in the U.S…

The U.S. has quite a few really big stock exchange websites. There’s the NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, and OTC Market.

Technically, the OTC Market isn’t a stock exchange. But for the purposes of generating this list, it’s just as good. And the OTC Market website is at least as good as NYSE and NASDAQ. Probably better. It’s definitely easier to navigate and much more geared to actually researching stocks.

There are so many stocks in the U.S. it can be difficult to go through them using the various U.S. stock exchange websites.

However, coverage of U.S. stocks is so good by screeners that you’ll almost never miss an interesting U.S. stock using one of the better screeners out there.

A good site for U.S. stocks is Morningstar.

They have a screener for paid subscribers that covers just about every U.S. stock. So, if you tell the screener you want just U.S. public companies with a market cap of at least $2 million – to throw out stocks that are inactive but still listed on the screener – Morningstar will spit out a list of 6,267 stocks. That’s more than enough stocks for most people!

And these are just American companies. There are tons of foreign companies traded in the United States. We’re not talking about them. Even if we just look at U.S. companies with publicly traded stock we’re talking about over 6,000 choices.

My advice is to pick small sections of this 6,000+ stock universe and then work your way through them.

Let’s say you’re from the state of Illinois. If we do the same search for domestic stocks with at least a $2 million market cap headquartered in Illinois we get 209 stocks. Morningstar says the biggest Illinois based stock has a market cap of $78 billion. And the smallest has a market cap of $2 million. There are more than a dozen Illinois stocks with a market cap under $10 million.

That’s tiny. Let’s go a little bigger.

There are 58 Illinois stocks with a market cap under $100 million. If Illinois was my home state, I’d pretend those 58 stocks were my whole universe for a couple days and just go through that list from A to Z.

This works well for a lot of states. New Jersey has even more public companies than Illinois: 247. The biggest …

Investing in Turnarounds

A reader sent me this email:

Do you invest in turnarounds / cyclicals?

I came across Furniture Brands (FBN). Avg. FCF over 10 years is $75 million. Current EV is $280 million. Of course, last two years were horrible from an earnings perspective…However, FCF was not bad in those years…Trades at 1.2x tangible book value and 0.2x sales…The low ROE even in good years tells me this is not a great business…thoughts appreciated.

I wouldn’t pay a dime more than tangible book for any company involved in making furniture. In fact, I’d want about a 33% discount to tangible book to even get interested in that sort of thing. I think invested assets in the furniture industry are worth far less than book. The more likely capital is to stay invested in the furniture industry, the less likely I am to value that capital at anywhere near book value.

I don’t think of myself as investing in turnarounds or cyclicals. But others might disagree. Was Barnes & Noble (BKS) a turnaround? I don’t think so. It was more the expectation of horrible things happening in the future than the present that was weighing on that stock.

However, I will invest in stocks that are temporarily unloved because of the state their industry is in. So I would buy something like Masco (MAS) or Mohawk (MHK) at the right price. I bought Omnicom (OMC) when the advertising industry looked bad (early 2009). And it’s only because I have a pretty high hurdle rate – and a micro cap bias – that I don’t own Fair Isaac (FICO) right now. I’d say each of those companies at one point had a low stock price mainly – though not exclusively – because it was the wrong time in the cycle for their industry. But I want a good long-term record and good operations relative to peers. I don’t want to invest in something that’s gone downhill compared to competitors. But, if I think their competitive position is strong – it’s just the industry that’s weak – I would definitely consider buying something like that.

The thing with Furniture Brands is that all the stocks in the furniture industry are really, really cheap. I mean, I posted Mason’s report on Stanley (STLY) on the blog and Chromcraft Revington (CRC) shows up in Ben Graham net/net screens. My problem is that furniture looks a bit like textiles when Buffett bought Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B). Textile production was moving from New England to the South back then. And there were very good, very permanent reasons for that happening. Not permanent for the South keeping the mills but permanent for the North losing them.

Furniture – unlike textiles – is a consumer product. But furniture is tricky because like appliances, computers, flat screen TVs, etc. it’s a product where the customer often does an exhaustive search. I don’t like businesses where the customer rationally considers alternatives. Furniture isn’t a repeat purchase business. Brand loyalty is …

How Much Would You Pay for This Stock? – Blind Stock Valuation #1

In an earlier post, about how to value a business, I said:

Here’s my advice for how to really learn to value a stock. Start with a stock that’s pretty easy to value and completely unknown to you. Don’t look at the stock price! Just try to value the whole company.

Ideally, you should be able to black out the company name, business description, and stock price on a Value Line page and still be able to come up with an approximate appraised value for the business within 10 minutes.

So here’s a blind trial I’ve prepared…

How much would you pay for this stock?

Answer by emailing me your per share appraisal. In other words, tell me how much the stock is worth. I’ll pick the best email answer I get and give the winner a copy of my favorite version of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor.

You have until the end of January to send me your email.

Talk to Geoff About Blind Stock Valuation…

What Broker to Use When Buying International Stocks

The author of a great value investing blog, Value Uncovered, asked me this question on Twitter:

“What broker do you use that supports buying international stocks?”

I use a full service broker.

But I would recommend most people interested in buying foreign stocks start by looking at Noble Trading and Interactive Brokers.

As far as I know, any full service broker should be able to buy you any stock you want. The question for full service brokers is whether they want to buy you any stock you want and then how much they’ll charge. The easiest answer to both these questions is to personally know a broker at one of the full service firms beforehand and then give him your account with a clear understanding of exactly what it is you want to do. You don’t need advice. Just execution.

Now, you need to think of things from the other guy’s perspective.

If you’re a super concentrated, go anywhere value investor like me you have two problems. One is a problem for the investor. The other is a problem for the broker. The investor’s problem – my problem – is that I want to buy any stock anywhere and the long list of fees normally tacked on to this sort of thing can pile up to a horrendous dollar amount per trade. However, since I don’t hold more than 5 stocks at once – from the broker’s perspective – I make a horrendously low number of trades each year.

You – the investor – need to be assured you won’t have all your gains eaten up by commissions. But the broker needs to be assured the account will be worth his time.

It would be heartless of you to ask a full service broker to take on this kind of account without giving him 1% of each round trip in return (0.5% of each order). It would be greedy for him to ask for more than 2%.

You can work something out in that range. For example, if you have a $200,000 portfolio that you want to put into no more than 10 stocks at once, each order will be $20,000. If you turn your portfolio over once a year, you’ll be placing 20 orders – each for $20,000 – each year (after the first). That means you can pay $100 to $200 on each order (0.5% to 1% of each order) in commissions to your broker.

Obviously, if you have more money to invest and hold fewer stocks (as I do), you can pay a higher commission on each order. At my level of concentration – just 5 stocks – you can pay $200 to $400 on each order and still be paying your broker only 1% to 2% of your $200,000 portfolio each year.

Although numbers like $400 an order and 2% of assets a year sound obscene, they really aren’t if the service you are getting is worth it.

If a brokerage firm appeared …

Warren Buffett and Western Insurance

A reader asked me this question:

…your last article on Gurufocus regarding 50% returns and microcaps…seems (to) have sparked a lot of responses on it. Some are off the mark or just misinterpreting the point of the article. Other comments provide good points. Not sure if you were planning on responding to all the various comments. There is a difference between cigar butt approach and hold forever approach. Personally I think your approach considers the downside based on your checklist…Maybe discussion on margin of safety in the approach should be mentioned…your thoughts?

Regarding the difference between the cigar butt approach and the hold forever approach, Warren Buffett was not using a cigar butt approach to invest in micro caps in the 1950s. He was just focused on decent, dependable, dirt cheap, neglected stocks. The companies Buffett invested in for his own account in the 1950s were not cigar butts. He just didn’t plan to hold them forever. He sold out of one cheap stock whenever he found a cheaper one.

But these weren’t low quality businesses.

Let’s take a look at one…

Western Insurance

I found some strange things when I was 20 years old. I went through Moody’s Bank and Finance Manual, about 1,000 pages. I went through it twice. The first time I went through, I saw a company called Western Insurance Security Company in Fort Scott, Kansas…Perfectly sound company. I knew people that represented them in Omaha. Earnings per share $20, stock price $16…I ran ads in the Fort Scott, Kansas paper to try and buy that stock – it had only 300 or 400 shareholders. It was selling at one times earnings, it had a first class (management team)…I’d never heard of Western Insurance Services until I turned that page that said Western Insurance Services. It showed earnings per share of $20 and the high was $16. Now that may not turn out to be something you can make a lot of money on, but the odds are good. It’s like a basketball coach seeing a guy 7’3” walk through the door. He may not be able to stay in school, and may be very uncoordinated, but he’s very large. So I went down to the Nebraska Insurance Department, and I got the convention reports on their insurance companies, and I read Best’s. I didn’t have any background in insurance. But I knew I could understand it if I worked at it for a while. And all I was really trying to do was disprove this thing. I was really trying to figure out something that was wrong with this. Only there wasn’t anything wrong. It was a perfectly good insurance company, a better than average underwriter, and you could buy it at one times earnings. I ran ads in the Fort Scott, Kansas paper to buy this stock when it was $20. But it came through turning the pages. No one tells you about it. You get ‘em by looking.

I would put something …

Warren Buffett and The Washington Post

From Warren Buffett’s 1991 Lecture at Notre Dame:

In ‘74 you could have bought the Washington Post when the whole company was valued at $80 million. Now at that time the company was debt free, it owned the Washington Post newspaper, it owned Newsweek, it owned the CBS stations in Washington D.C. and Jacksonville, Florida, the ABC station in Miami, the CBS station in Hartford/New Haven, a half interest in 800,000 acres of timberland in Canada, plus a 200,000-ton-a-year mill up there, a third of the International Herald Tribune, and probably some other things I forgot. If you asked any one of thousands of investment analysts or media specialists about how much those properties were worth, they would have said, if they added them up, they would have come up with $400, $500, $600 million…That is not a complicated story. We bought in 1974, from not more than 10 sellers, what was then 9% of the Washington Post Company, based on that valuation. And they were people like Scudder Stevens, and bank trust departments. And if you asked any of the people selling us the stock what the business was worth, they would have come up with an answer of $400 million…It isn’t that hard to evaluate the Washington Post. You can look and see what newspapers and television stations sell for. If your fix is $400 and it’s selling for $390, so what?…If your range is $300 to $500 and it’s selling for $80 you don’t need to be more accurate than that.

Talk to Geoff About Warren Buffett and the Washington Post…

Warren Buffett and Walt Disney

We bought 5% of the Walt Disney Company in 1966. It cost us $4 million dollars. $80 million bucks was the valuation of the whole thing. 300 and some acres in Anaheim. The Pirate’s ride had just been put in. It cost $17 million bucks. The whole company was selling for $80 million. Mary Poppins had just come out. Mary Poppins made about $30 million that year, and seven years later you’re going to show it to kids the same age. It’s like having an oil well where all the oil seeps back in….in 1966 they had 220 pictures of one sort or another. They wrote them all down to zero – there were no residual values placed on the value of any Disney picture up through the ‘60s. So (you got all of this) for $80 million bucks, and you got Walt Disney to work for you. It was incredible. You didn’t have to be a genius to know that the Walt Disney company was worth more than $80 million. $17 million for the Pirate’s Ride. It’s unbelievable. But there it was. And the reason was, in 1966 people said, ‘Well, Mary Poppins is terrific this year, but they’re not going to have another Mary Poppins next year, so the earnings will be down.’ I don’t care if the earnings are down like that. You know you’ve still got Mary Poppins to throw out in seven more years…I mean there’s no better system than to have something where, essentially, you get a new crop every seven years and you get to charge more each time…I went out to see Walt Disney (he’d never heard of me; I was 35 years old). We sat down and he told me the whole plan for the company – he couldn’t have been a nicer guy. It was a joke. If he’d privately gone to some huge venture capitalist, or some major American corporation, if he’d been a private company, and said ‘I want you to buy into this’…they would have bought in based on a valuation of $300 or $400 million dollars. The very fact that it was just sitting there in the market every day convinced (people that $80 million was an appropriate valuation). Essentially, they ignored it because it was so familiar. But that happens periodically on Wall Street.…

How Warren Buffett Thinks About Micro Cap Stocks

The key to understanding why a stock picker like Warren Buffett made his best returns when he was investing in micro caps is understanding that a neglected stock is more likely to offer a mispriced bet.

The idea that there’s a trade-off between risk and return only makes sense if people are paying attention to a stock and correctly pricing it. In other words, the more people are correctly handicapping the situation, the more there is a trade-off between risk and return. The less people are correctly handicapping the situation, the less there is a trade-off between risk and return. This trade-off is not inherent to the situation itself. A fast horse and a slow horse – a good company and a bad company – only become equal in risk adjusted terms when the necessary and correct bets are placed to move the odds to the point that equalizes the expected payoff.

The trade-off between risk and return comes from price. And the price comes from the betting public placing their bets correctly so that favorites pay less and long shots pay more. If the public bets wrong, there is no trade-off between risk and return.

As Ben Graham said:

“…the influence of what we call analytical factors over the market price is both partial and indirect – partial, because it frequently competes with purely speculative factors which influence the price in the opposite direction; and indirect, because it acts through the intermediary of people’s sentiments and decisions.”

In other words, objectively observed prices are the outputs of subjective analysis. Obviously, both the inputs and the black box – the human minds – into which the data is being input will together determine the market price.

People set prices using their minds.

And here’s the thing about minds. They work from experience. And they only experience what they pay attention to.

Here’s William James:

“…one sees how false a notion of experience that is which would make it tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an outward order. Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have nointerestfor me.My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which Inoticeshape my mind – without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”

So prices depend on attention.

The mere presence of data means nothing. People have to read 10-Ks. And they have to care about them. If nobody pays attention to a 10-K, that 10-K doesn’t enter into a stock price. Because the data in a 10-K only moves stock prices through people’s minds.

If you want to think about it like advertising you can. Some stocks are advertised by analysts and newspaper reporters and their own well-known consumer brands and products. Other stocks are unknown because they’re headquartered in the wrong state or wrong country, because they make stuff you’ve never heard of, and because you …

How to Value a Business

A reader sent me this email:

Hi Geoff,

I have an investment idea at the moment, but am very new to actually valuing businesses so it may take some time to learn how to do it properly.

Thanks,
Ryan

The basic approach to valuing a business is very simple.

Try to start without looking at the stock price. Instead value the entire business. You want to start by using some written in stone valuation ratios without letting concerns about quality, future prospects, etc. cloud your initial judgment. That comes later.

When appraising a business, you want to use the real estate appraisal principle known as “highest and best use“.

You can easily rank a non-financial company’s possible uses from lowest to highest:

1. Liquidation Value
2. Net Current Asset Value
3. Tangible Book Value
4. Earning Power Value

In almost all cases, liquidation value is not the highest use for a business, because even very bad businesses are usually worth more than they can be immediately liquidated for. So normally you skip a liquidation analysis completely and go straight to analyzing the net current asset value, tangible book value, and earning power value.

A business is almost always worth its net current asset value (Net Current Asset Value = Current Assets – Total Liabilities). A business is worth its tangible book value if it earns a return on capital equal to or greater than the future return expected in the stock market. So, if you think the stock market will return 7% a year from now on, any business that earns an 11% pre-tax return on invested tangible capital should be worth its tangible book value or higher since 11% pre-tax is greater than 7% after-tax (assuming a 35% tax rate). Businesses that can’t earn 10%+ on capital may actually not be worth tangible book value. It depends.

The highest and best use for many stocks is #4: Earning Power. Two good rules of thumb here are that a business is normally worth about 10 times EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) and 15 times free cash flow. These are just round numbers. It’s not an exact science. I use 10-year average real EBIT and free cash flow. Don’t worry about adjusting for inflation right now. But always make sure you use long-term averages for EBIT and free cash flow (unless we’re talking about super fast growers – which I’m a total dunce at valuing anyway).

I like to use enterprise value instead of market cap to value a stock both in terms of EBIT and free cash flow.

Also, unlike a lot of folks, I always split cash and debt off from the operating business. Cash and debt are just the financial scaffolding around the business. They’re not inherent to the business itself. And they’re not permanent. Just a choice made by the current owner. So, I value cash at 100% and separate it from the invested tangible book value.

That means I appraise …

Where to Find Micro Cap Stocks

In yesterday’s GuruFocus article “Warren Buffett: How to Make 50% a Year in Micro Cap Stocks”, I mentioned this Ben Graham quote:

The chief practical difference between the defensive and the enterprising investor is that the former limits himself to large and leading companies whereas the latter will buy any stock if his judgment and his technique tell him it is sufficiently attractive…The field of secondary stocks cannot be delimited precisely. It includes perhaps two thousand listed issues and many thousands more of unlisted ones which are not generally recognized as belonging in the category of “large and prosperous market leaders”…The intelligent investor can operate successfully in secondary common stocks provided he buys them only on a bargain basis.

So how do you find these secondary common stocks?

Here are 6 places to start:

1. Greenbackd – Toby Carlisle writes this great blog about Ben Graham bargains or “undervalued asset situations with a catalyst” as he calls them. I interviewed Toby last year.

2. Cheap Stocks – Jon Heller writes this equally great blog about Ben Graham net current asset bargains. Actually, as Toby mentions, Jon was part of what inspired him to write his own value investing blog. I also interviewed Jon last year.

3. Interactive Investor Blog – Richard Beddard writes this U.K. centric Ben Graham style value investing blog. He runs a model portfolio called The Thrifty 30. “It’s thrifty because the shares are all cheap, usually in comparison to their average profits over the last ten or-so years.” The Thrifty 30 is a double whammy of off the beaten path stocks for American investors since Richard focuses on secondary stocks and he focuses on the United Kingdom. Most American investors aren’t even familiar with leading U.K. companies. They’re totally clueless about the ones Richard covers.

4. Value Uncovered – This value investing blog covers “mostly small-cap, obscure stocks trading at a large discount to intrinsic value” as well as “merger arbitrage, going private transactions, self-tender offers, (and) bankruptcy plays”. Things you won’t see covered by financial journalists or stock analysts.

5. Shadow Stock – This is a micro cap value investing blog. It gives you a steady steam of quick posts about almost totally unknown value stocks. No matter how much you think you know about micro caps, you’re bound to find a couple stocks here you’ve never heard of.

6. Whopper Investments – This is another value investing blog that often features micro caps. Last year I was searching for any mentions of some micro caps I owned and twice found this blog was one of the only places that mentioned the stock. Whopper Investments often covers stocks you won’t hear about elsewhere.

The other reason a stock can be neglected is because of a special situation. A good example is Ascent Media (ASCMA) – a John Malone investment – selling one business and buying another, all while remaining the same publicly traded stock. That can cause investors …