You love buying your shirts when they go on sale. And who can resist a buy-one-get-one-free offer? So when our stocks go on sale, why do we bemoan their low prices?
Smart investors like Warren Buffett or Marty Whitman love it when their stocks are suddenly selling at bargain-basement prices. For them, these companies become no-brainer buys.
The investors in the Motley Fool CAPS community also like a bargain, apparently. Below, you'll find three companies whose shares are selling at least 50% below their 52-week highs, but which still earn high honors from our investor-intelligence database. Consider it a BOGO sale on stocks.
|
Stock
|
CAPS Rating
(out of 5)
|
% Off 12-Month High
|
| Gramercy Capital (NYSE: GKK ) |
*****
|
52%
|
| National Bank of Greece (NYSE: NBG ) |
****
|
53%
|
| Smith Micro Software (Nasdaq: SMSI ) |
****
|
54%
|
Naturally, we want you to look a bit closer at these stocks before buying. You can get low-priced appliances in the dent-and-ding section of your home-remodeling superstore, but their quality might not be so good. Same thing here: Make sure there's nothing seriously wrong with the company before you plug it into your portfolio.
Take two, they're small
For a real estate financing firm, Gramercy Capital is going to have a tough time making a go of it if it has to transfer all of its assets from its realty section to its lenders. Yet the specialty finance specialist was only able to negotiate an extension on its loans with Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, and SL Green -- and only for two weeks -- by doing just that.
In December Gramercy had sold to SL Green its interests in three Manhattan office buildings for $390 million in an attempt to lighten the load it was carrying. Gramercy was an SL spinoff in 2004.
As dire as the picture looks, the commercial real estate market may have finally hit bottom. According to the analysts at real estate information outfit Reis, rents have begun ticking up again and vacancies may even improve. Average first quarter rents rose 0.5% to $22.20 a square foot. While New York has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country (10.7%), it's still pretty high historically.
While the CAPS community has been bullish on Gramercy, it was Wall Street that was most optimistic about its prospect with all the analysts weighing in on it having an upbeat outlook. But you can let us know on the Gramercy Capital CAPS page whether you think the CRE financier will be able to survive.
Generating interest
Although Treasury Secretary Geithner says there's zero chance the ratings agencies will lower the U.S.'s credit worthiness, Standard & Poor's itself says there's a one-in-three probability of it happening. For my own part, I put greater stock in the proclamations of the company that will actually be downgraded itself. We haven't reached the condition of Greece or Portugal or Spain just yet, but unless the political will to meaningfully cut spending is found we may soon find ourselves in their shoes.
S&P just downgraded National Bank of Greece and three other Greek banks, soon after pushing the country further down into junk status. Ireland was downgraded too (though not as far) because having to prop up Bank of Ireland (NYSE: IRE ) and Allied Irish Bank (NYSE: AIB ) is going to be an enormously expensive affair.
The great risk for National Bank of Greece is that Greece itself will default, something CAPS member jed71 thinks is a distinct possibility.
While a bailout from Germany is possible, I have been reading that chances of it passing through German parliament are slim to none. That's not to say it's impossible, but it certainly seems highly unlikely. I think it's relatively obvious that any sort of debt restructuring will hit Greek banks the hardest. The write downs will be extremely painful and it will take years for the Greek banks to recover.
The Fool's free portfolio tracker can aggregate all the news about National Bank of Greece and how the dominoes will fall.
A smaller form factor
Smith Micro Software got absolutely crushed in February when it withdrew guidance that it had set only a month before that expected to see sales as high as $160 million for 2011. A key customer -- and Verizon (NYSE: VZ ) , Sprint (NYSE: S ) , and HTC all rank up there -- was not ordering product at expected levels.
The mobile communications market that Smith Micro serves remains an area of boundless activity so that despite the weakness in orders it's currently experiencing, there's good reason to believe sales will get back on track. But highly rated CAPS All-Star SaintCroix hinted before the announcement there would be trouble for Smith Micro after seeing Synchronoss Technologies (Nasdaq: SNCR ) report Verizon was buying into more of their product.
Synchronoss is up today because Verizon is starting to subscribe to its service. And you know it's because of the iPhone and all those damn vendors with their damn software.
Smith Micro is down for the same reason. Verizon doesn't want to install any more software and deal with all that backend crap. Software is dead. The cloud! The cloud! Join the cloud!
Smith Micro remains a shell of its former high-flying self, but you can see if it can return to form by adding it to your watchlist.
Have half a mind
Sign up today for the completely free CAPS service, and tell us whether these stocks are twice as good at half the price.
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