How to Find Dirt Cheap Value Stocks

How to Find Dirt Cheap Value Stocks

November 6, 2008

The market has been all over the place lately -- down 700 points here, up 300 points there -- and all of that volatility is leaving tremendous value opportunities in its wake.
Consider the cases of Transocean (NYSE: RIG) and Noble (NYSE: NE): two solidly profitable oil and gas drillers trading with price-to-earnings ratios of 5, both more than 50% off their 52-week highs. If you need a new energy stock for your portfolio, you could do worse than to start your research here.
It's opportunities like this that value investors drool over. After all, the chance to buy dirt cheap dream stocks only comes around so often.
But knowing how to spot the right value stocks in a down market is often more difficult than it sounds -- because there's a reason the market doesn't like this company right now. It's your job to figure out why, and whether the dislike is reasonable.
And one of the best ways I've found to identify promising deep value stocks is PYAD.
What's PYAD? Developed by our friends at Fool UK in 1999, PYAD is a strategy that minimizes downside risk while maximizing upside potential. To this end, it looks for the P, the Y, the A , and the D:
P/E ratio: less than two-thirds of the market's average.
Yield: 50% higher than the market average.
Assets: price-to-book ratio below 1x.
Debt: manageable amount, preferably none.
A stock trading at a steep discount to the market and below the book value of its assets has already taken some tough punches -- and it could also be a sign that the worst is over.
But just because the market has stopped beating up on a stock doesn't mean it's ready to make nice and come to its senses. That could take time. And that's why having a healthy dividend yield is important. In essence, you're getting paid to wait for the rebound.
And finally, low or no debt reduces risk. After all, debt holders need to be paid before common stockholders, and high interest expenses can make earnings more volatile. Stocks saddled with heavy debt loads are not usually worth waiting on.
All of these together suggest a stock might be an excellent deep value play.
Right, but does PYAD work? Out of curiosity, I used PYAD to look at U.S. stocks capitalized over $200 million on Oct. 31, 2002 -- near the last bear market's bottom. Of the 11 stocks that met all four criteria, nine of them are in positive territory today, including Reynolds American (NYSE: RAI), up 247%, and Xcel Energy, up 121%.
Those are pretty good returns for six years -- especially when they include the past few months.
So which stocks would fit the PYAD criteria today? Here are a few of the contenders.
Company
P/E Ratio (ttm)
Dividend Yield
Price to Book
Interest Coverage (EBITDA/Interest Coverage)
Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE: FCX)
3.96
6.1%
0.7
15.2
Ingersoll-Rand (NYSE: IR)
5.9
3.9%
0.5
8.2
Tesoro (NYSE: TSO)
9.67
3.8%
0. 5
5.4
Alcoa (NYSE: AA)
5.65
5.5%
0.6
10.9
Source: Capital IQ, a division of Standard and Poor's.ttm = trailing 12 months. EBITDA = earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.
Of course, no screen, including PYAD, can tell you definitively whether you should buy a stock; they just provide starting points for further research. In this market, for instance, investors would be wise to take a very close look at a company's assets to gauge the risk of write-downs before making an investment.
And the next step, as it is with any potential value play, is doing a valuation to determine the company's intrinsic value. If a PYAD stock's true value is well above its current market price, you can sit back, relax, and let the juicy dividends flow in while you wait for the market to come around.
Time to value hunt? The beauty of PYAD is its simple ability to identify stocks with limited downside. I think Warren Buffett, who famously quipped that rule No. 1 in investing is "Never lose money," would approve.
A strong company with limited downside selling at a discount to its intrinsic value is what advisors Philip Durrell and Ron Gross look for at our Motley Fool Inside Value investing service -- and in this market they're finding plenty.

Chesapeake's Not Choking

October 31, 2008

Apparently, natural gas prices collapsed in the third quarter. You'd hardly know it from Chesapeake Energy's (NYSE: CHK) quarterly results.
Natural gas price realizations -- industry jargon for the effective sales price -- came in at $8.02/mcfe (per thousand cubic feet) for the third quarter. That's down 2% from the June quarter. Production levels were also roughly the same, resulting in operating cash flow of $1.4 billion, compared to $1.44 billion previously.
Confused? Well, the secret sauce is called a swap. Swaps and collars are derivatives employed by E&Ps to hedge their cash flow in case commodities suddenly crash. Practically everyone, from Anadarko Petroleum (NYSE: APC) to Williams Companies (NYSE: WMB), utilizes at least a moderate amount of hedges. Only firms with the most underleveraged balance sheets, such as Occidental Petroleum (NYSE: OXY), are able to largely go without. Those price realizations I mentioned before include the effect of cash-settled derivatives.
The giveaway that something went sour in the quarter is the mark-to-market gain of over $2.8 billion on unrealized hedges -- the ones that are still being carried on the books. This non-cash gain pumped up Chesapeake's net income figure, which, as a result, is pretty much useless for analytical purposes. This is why we generally pay closer attention to cash flow rather than earnings in E&P land.
So hedges are one thing protecting Chesapeake's caboose. Monetization is another maneuver available to muddle through this morose period. In the third quarter, the company completed about $7.5 billion transactions, from BP's (NYSE: BP) Woodford Shale purchase to Plains Exploration & Production's (NYSE: PXP) Haynesville Shale farm-in. Chesapeake is looking to execute more deals in the near term and, so far, sounds confident in its ability to close on them.
These monetizations might smack of deleveraging desperation were they not so darn lucrative. Through the first nine months of this year, Chesapeake sold undeveloped leasehold for $3.6 billion. That's nearly five times the firm's cost basis. There's something to be said for the long-term cash stream that a drilling program provides, but as with respectable ATP Oil & Gas (Nasdaq: ATPG), I see nothing subpar about converting some of that future value into cash today -- especially when credit is tight and you've got as deep a development pipeline as Chesapeake does.

November Meeting

Reminder: The November meeting date was changed to December 4th, 2008. There will be no meeting in December. Please bring your Nov. and Dec. monthly investment at the December meeting.