Titan Tumbles

On Saturday, defense contracting giant Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) abandoned its ill-fated pursuit of information technology heavyweight Titan (NYSE: TTN). Lockheed allowed a June 25 deadline for completion to expire unextended, following Titan's failure to settle criminal charges with the Department of Justice (DOJ). In anticipation of Lockheed's announcement, Titan's share price collapsed Friday, falling more than 20%.

My, oh my, did I ever call this one wrong! At last count, I have written five times about this deal: first describing the DOJ's corruption allegations against Titan, then arguing that Lockheed should go ahead and buy Titan anyway, especially after Lockheed extracted a huge price concession out of Titan for getting Lockheed involved in this fiasco. Earlier this month, I summed all this up and predicted a quick settlement of all charges against Titan, whatever the cost, and a conclusion of the merger by last Friday.

Well, if you are going to make a bad call, you might as well make it spectacularly bad, right? Anyway, mea culpa, folks. Please accept this writer's humble apologies for calling this one entirely wrong. The Titan-Lockheed merger is officially dead -- and remember, you heard it here last.

So Titan is single again, and claims it is not on the rebound. The company plans to be a stand-alone operation for the foreseeable future, so let's see what kind of future that might be. Start with this article here, in which we took a cursory look at Titan's last earnings announcement.

Titan currently has a trailing P/E of about 50 -- pricey for a company with a projected 16% annual growth rate. But those numbers include last quarter's results, which were hobbled by expenses that Titan incurred in gussying itself up for the merger with Lockheed. Looking forward, Titan's P/E ratio drops to 15, giving it a reasonable PEG ratio of 0.9. That compares favorably with competitors Electronic Data Systems' (NYSE: EDS) ratio of 2.2 and Computer Sciences' (NYSE: CSC) 1.2.

Still, the SEC and DOJ investigations are going to hamper Titan's operations for the next few months. And the 0.9 PEG is not a very big discount to the valuations given to Titan's other competitors, for example Anteon (NYSE: ANT), at 1.0, and CACI (NYSE: CAI) and ManTech (Nasdaq: MANT), which both have PEGs of about 0.8.

Long story short, if Titan is going to be flying solo, I will not be buying a ticket on this ride. (Hey, but what do I know?)

In return for freely and publicly acknowledging mistakes such as this one, Fool contributor Rich Smith reserves the right to gloat incessantly whenever (if ever) he calls things right. He owns no shares in any company mentioned in this article.