Reminiscences of a Stockblogger

Dec 12

Stocks I’m looking at: RPX Corp

I came across this idea from the Joel Greenblatt’s Magic Formula investing website. The website is a take off of the book he wrote, “The Little Book that beats the Market”. The website basically allows you to sign up for free and access a stock screen of the top 50 stocks based on the formula described in the book.

I’ve had some luck finding stocks from this screen in the past. Argan Inc (AGX) and Furiex Pharmaceuticals (FURX) are two stocks that I have done well on. The screen tends to dig up companies in obscure businesses that I would otherwise ignore. RPX Corp is no different.

RPX is in a business that I didn’t even know existed. In fact, I’m not even sure it did exist before RPX.

RPX buys patents. Then it sells memberships to companies that allow them to use the patents that RPX has in their portfolio. Read more

Dec 7

Stocks I’m Looking at Part I: Mitek

Over the last two weeks I’ve been focusing on finding new opportunities. I’ve been posting thoughts about the stocks that I have been looking at through my twitter account (@LSigurd) but I have yet to write about any of them here. This post is the first in a series I want to do over the next week of brief summaries of my findings. These posts are not intended to be in-depth analysis as much as they are a broad overview of why I think these companies deserve a closer look. I am writing them as much for myself as anyone else, before I forget I ever had the ideas at all.

MITEK (MITK)

I rather painfully bought this one at $2.40, sold it on some concerns I had with their revenue model after reviewing the conference calls, and then bought some of them back on the news Wednesday that they had found a partner in US Bank for their new bill paying product. Below are the transactions in my practice account. Read more

Nov 27

3 Comments

Week 73: A short update

Portfolio Performance

(Note that I am now posting my portfolio composition and list of trades at the end of the post)

Update

This is going to be a short update. I wanted to get this out over the weekend but did not have time. The performance snap-shot is as of last Friday, so it does not include the rather impressive moves that occurred yesterday in Impac Mortgage (IMH), Nam Tai (NTE) and Equal Energy (EQU). To just briefly touch on what happened yesterday, a fund named Iszo Capital announced a 6.2% position in Impac Mortgage after the market closed yesterday. As for Nam Tai, the company released a video on their website that suggested sales could hit $300 billion per month in the future. This would be quite the jump from current levels, as the company did $380 million in sales in the third quarter. Read more

Nov 25

4 Comments

Why is PHH Corp so cheap?

Let’s just get right to it. I don’t understand why PHH is as cheap as it is.

I have talked about this before, and I don’t want to reiterate the conclusions of my prior post on PHH (You can be a stock market genius: By Buying PHH Corp), but I do want to take a look at the company from a slightly different perspective to show that, even after the 50% run up since my original post, it remains undervalued.

This week, during one of my lunch hours, I made a comparison between PHH and Nationstar. I was somewhat surprised by the results. The table below lists key statistics of the mortgage origination and servicing businesses for both companies. Read more