- The Best of The S&A Digest

Stock Ideas

Investing Ideas

The Best of The S&A Digest

Market Watch

RTSI$: IND Say what you want about the man -- Vladimir Putin has brought power and stability to Russia. As you can see from the chart above, the Russian stock market has performed extremely well over the past few years.
More...

Login Form

The Best of The S&A Digest

Sunday, 14 October 2007

Here's an interesting way to play the subprime crisis... buy the property insurers. These companies are trading at their cheapest multiples since 2000 based on fears that they hold large chunks of subprime debt. In reality, subprime only constitutes 1% of their fixed-income assets.
The S&P 500 Property & Casualty Insurance Index dropped 6.2% in the third quarter, worse than the 4.9% drop of the S&P 500 Financials, which includes subprime-mortgage originators Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. The average property and casualty insurance stock trades at around 8.3 times earnings now, down from 17 a year earlier.

Shares of Allstate, the largest publicly traded U.S. home and auto insurer, dropped farther during the subprime scare (18% from peak to trough) than they did after Hurricane Katrina, when the company lost $3.6 billion.

We just published our latest issue of the S&A Oil Report this week, titled There Are No Easy Barrels Left. One look at Matt Badiali's current portfolio forces me to admit, that yes, it is a big, big bull market in oil right now. Twenty-one of Matt's 35 recommendations are up double digits, and only seven are down. His three biggest open winners have soared 82%, 80%, and 56% in less than two years.

Changing The Rules On The Bank Bailout

By Andrew Carpenter For a guy with a Harvard MBA, President Bush simply doesn't get how real banks work... but anyone who has waited three to five days for an out of state check to clear gets how...
+ Full Story

August Blues By Yiannis G. Mostrous

August is traditionally a weak month for Asian markets. And given the turmoil surrounding the global financial system, this weakness has been understandably magnified in 2007.
+ Full Story

Matt's latest recommendations are in the nascent field of deepwater drilling services. This is a very young sector of the oil business. Up until the mid-1990s, Big Oil didn't have the computing power to map large sections of the ocean floor. With the leap in technology of the past 10 years, however, spending on deepwater oil exploration is exploding... and large oil fields are turning up in the Gulf of Mexico.

Signs of a market top? The spread between the risk premiums of put and call options on the S&P 500 is unusually high. Normally, the spread is around 6%. But since August, speculators have favored puts, causing the spread to widen to 8.1%. The last time this indicator approached these levels was in July 2001, just before the S&P 500 fell 34%.
Excerpted from : The Growth Stock Wire

We endeavor to decipher analysis of this Teaser/News Letter to distinguish the thoughts of Authors/Editors.
Please post your Review/Comments, your rating helps other users gauge the value of an article ...