The S&P 500 is currently trading near an all-time high, which is making it quite difficult to find companies that are trading on the cheap. However, if you're willing to turn over a lot of rocks, you'll find that there are still a handful of stocks out there that are trading for dirt-cheap prices.
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Brookfield Property Partners (BPY +0.00%), Ford (F 0.98%), and Gamestop (GME +1.53%) are three such stocks, and better yet, they all offer up huge dividend yields. Let's take a closer look at all three to determine if they could be worth buying.
A global real estate empire
Brookfield Property Partners makes its money by buying real estate assets such as office buildings, retail stores, and multifamily properties, and it then leases out space in those properties under long-term contracts. This business model provides the company with a steady base of cash flow that management uses to pay out an ever-rising distribution.
Image source: Brookfield Property Partners.
Brookfield's assets are currently worth $31 per unit, which is up about 3% over the year-ago period. That's a solid growth rate when you consider that the company took a hit on currency fluctuations, and it also paid out $1.12 in annual distributions. With shares currently trading under $22 per share, I think Brookfield Property Partners is meaningfully undervalued.
Thankfully, I'm not the only one who agrees. Management has been buying back its units hand over fist, retiring more than 2.8 million units in the last 15 months alone. With shares trading at such a discount to their asset value, I think that's a great use of capital.
An auto giant
Investors haven't been showing large automakers like Ford any love recently, and it's not hard to understand why. Auto sales have been on fire in the lucrative North American market, which is causing traders to worry that sales and profits are peaking. If true, that could suggest that sales and profit margins are currently unsustainably high, which means future profits growth could stagnate, or even decline in the years ahead.
If that wasn't enough to worry about, there's also the very possibility that autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing service could put a dent in auto sales over the long term. Mix in the fact that Tesla Motors has been rapidly taking market share, and it's not hard to understand why traders are approaching the company's stock with caution.
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All of those worries have weighed heavily on Ford's stock, which is why the company is currently trading at less than six times trailing earnings. When you combine that value price tag with the company's rising dividend payments, Ford's dividend yield has been above 4.5%.
Despite all the doom and gloom, Ford does offer reasons investors to be optimistic. The company is investing heavily to mass produce a self-driving car for use in ride-hailing and ride-sharing by 2021, which Ford believes could drive increased profitability in the years ahead. In the meantime, Ford stock is so cheap, investors could win by buying shares today.
A business in transition
With trailing and forward P/E ratios below seven, it isn't much of a stretch to say that investors have written off video-game retailer GameStop as "dead money." It's not hard to understand the narrative that surrounds the company, either. Comparable-store sales are declining, which is pulling down revenue and earnings per share. With gamers continuing to shift their attention away from physical products and toward digital offerings, it isn't hard to paint this company's future as bleak.
Image source: GameStop.
However, GameStop's management team is certainly aware of these industry dynamics, and they're investing accordingly. GameStop is beefing up its digital and mobile offerings and bundling them with physical game purchases. That helped drive a 54% jump in its tech brand sales division last quarter. The company is also making a big push into the collectibles space through its Think Geek brand, where revenue is growing rapidly. Better still, these new areas are higher margin than its legacy gaming business, so gross margins are actually on the rise.
Of course, it will still be some time before the company's growth initiatives will fully offset the revenue declines from its physical games business, which is why the market isn't giving GameStop any credit. However, analysts do believe these moves will pay off in the long term as current estimates call for EPS growth of more than 7% over the next five years. That's a strong growth rate for such an absurdly cheap stock. Add in a dividend yield of 5.8%, and it's possible long-term investors could do well by buying shares today.
