The Motley Fool's CAPS investing service is one of the newest additions to the investing community at Fool.com, and it's another great way for investors to work together to beat the market. One of the features in CAPS allows users to set up a blog to talk about their picks, investing strategy, market view, or favorite baseball team (if they so desire).
I'm back again this week to bring you some more of the great content coming from the Fools who have taken advantage of CAPS' blogs.
Cisco on sale
To kick off this week's look at the blogs on CAPS, I found this pitch for networking giant -- and my pick for the ultimate Rule Maker -- Cisco
Time to take a stab at this blogging thing. I've been astounded at how well I've done in CAPS since joining a few months ago -- mostly due to underperform calls on New Century, arguably a no-brainer. For my first blog, a brief rundown on why I think [Cisco] is ridiculously cheap. Basically, a repeat of the stock pitch I just added.
I'm maintaining an 'outperform' pick on [Cisco] despite disappointing performance since the earnings release and conference call earlier in May '07. The stock fell after the conference call despite slightly beating analyst's estimates and reiterating good growth forecasts of 15-16%. Basically, [Cisco] beat estimates, but 'the market' was expecting a blowout and didn't get it.
With recent pullback to the mid 25's, [Cisco] is trading at a [forward] P/E of about 16.5, only one point higher than the S&P 500. This for a company with strong growth, [more than $22 billion] of cash and only a little over $6 [billion] in debt. If they're only getting typical money market/T-bill rates, [Cisco] is [generating] nearly a billion a year just from the cash.
I believe there's $10-$15 upside potential and I don't see much downside risk from here.
Though, as mentioned, this is rd80's first blog posting, you can follow future posts here.
Napkin Review -- Baidu
CAPS All-Star rorshey took a look at everyone's favorite Google
Baidu, Baidu, oh why do we bid you so high?
I have a hard time justifying the lofty price on this stock. Baidu has a market cap of $4.4 [billion] and an [enterprise value] of $4.25 [billion]. They have just over 125 million in current cash and little or no debt. So far, sounds marginal so let's review a little further.
Currently, Baidu is trading at 26x cash on hand (For perspective, even the almighty Google trades at 12x cash on hand). Book value for Baidu is around $170 million. Baidu trades at 25x book value (Google is at 8x, which probably includes a lot of intangibles and goodwill). Owner earnings in [fiscal year 2006] were $50 million. That's around 85x FY06 OE (owner earnings). If Baidu were not to grow at all, it would take 85 years to recoup our initial investment of $4.25 billion. We know of course that there is a strong likelihood Baidu will grow so it becomes a question of how much the company will grow and how much we want to pay for this growth.
For more -- including another napkin review -- check out rorshey's blog.
Jim Cramer's accuracy rate
Rounding out the week, I found this from reddingrunner:
Quote [from Jim Cramer]: "my most recent internal performance review found that the stocks I pick for the show beat the S&P 500 63 percent of the time."
Congrats to all CAPS players who are beating Cramer (currently about 500 of you, counting only those with 20 or more active picks). Give me time, I'm heading that direction.
For benchmarking ease, we track Jim Cramer on CAPS so players can keep an eye on what he's up to. While he has put up a pretty impressive overall score and is a CAPS All-Star, his accuracy, at 47%, is significantly lower than what's noted above. But I guess we can give him the benefit of the doubt, right? After all, we do love Jim.
To see more from reddingrunner, check out the full blog here.
Now it's your turn -- get off the sidelines, join CAPS, and start up your own CAPS blog to share your knowledge and insights with the rest of the CAPS universe.
Fool contributor Matt Koppenheffer shares some thoughts of his own on his CAPS blog. He does not own shares of any of the companies mentioned. Baidu.com is a Motley Fool Rule Breakers choice. The Fool's disclosure policy does not have its own CAPS blog, but if it did, it would blow your mind.
