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September 23, 2010

Silver Leaf Resorts Looks Cheap Again

Silverleaf Resorts (SVLF) has gone back down below net current asset value. It's brother in the industry Bluegreen (BXG) is down a lot too and below NCAV but I didn't like BXG's last quarterly.

SVLF has $127.8 million in net current asset value and is trading at a market cap of only $39.4 million at the moment with the stock at $1.04.

full disclosure: long SVLF @ 1.04

September 5, 2010

Health Care Bill Stocks Breakout Play

Near Net Current Asset Stock & health care stock Forward Industries FORD products include soft-sided carrying cases, bags, clips, hand straps, protective face plates, and other accessories for medical monitoring and diagnostic kits, cellular telephones, and bar code scanners. I read in the annual report that diabetic products were 75% of sales in 2009. With more people now being covered by the government all these people who are or are about to get type II diabetes should add to that segment.

I believe the market cap was just over NCAV. Net current asset value is $22.2 million and current market cap is around $22.5 million. The stock is volatile though and was up 19% Friday so it could actually dip below. They have a great balance sheet. The bulk of quick assets are in cash. I am sure there are a lot of other health care reform stocks out there as well that will benefit from the government subsidies if you will. This is just one that caught my eye because of the huge volume last week. MDF is an interesting chart too.




The stock is in a clear uptrend and seems to be possibly a failed double top on this wide ranging day spike. The only concerning thing is how much of an appetite is left after this run but being around NCAV seems positive in this regard. Hard for me to pick a spot technically to enter because the stocks momentum looks strong here. I might play it of continuation or a pull-back to new support at around 2.60. It's actually a better investment and hold type of play probably on health-care. Luckily one of the few long-term investments I still have is a healthcare mutual fund that I've held for some years. I sold my Stryker SYK about a couple years ago.

full disclosure: no position at time of writing

Healthcare Stock Vision Sciences VSCI

VSCI is a healthcare company that makes endoscopes for medical and industrial uses. VSCI has a market cap right now of $48 million. The balance sheet isn't as deep value as I usually look at but it is good.

Balance Sheet
Looking at the balance sheet we have current assets of 8,806 - inventory of 3,915 = $4.89 million.

$4.891 mil / $2.720 million in current liabilities = healthy quick ratio of 1.79

Also, there is $3.5 million in net tangible assets. The balance sheet looked good enough to me.

Income Statement
They had good sales growth year over year in 2009. Fiscal 2010 looks like negative sales growth. This first quarter of their fiscal 2011 revenue was down 21%. Urology and bronchoscopy sales were both up and ear nose and throat sales and repairs etc. (guessing that is industrial segment) were down.

More from the first quarter they just reported
  • ENT and TNE sales decreased 63% to $0.4 million from $1.2 million
  • Urology sales increased 28% to $0.9 million from $0.7 million
  • Bronchoscopy sales increased 113% to $0.4 million from $0.2 million and
  • Repairs, peripherals, and accessories sales decreased 33% to $0.3 million from $0.5 million,

It looks like they haven't been profitable on the bottom line annually for atleast a couple years. Looks like there was positive EPS of $.57 in 2007 annually(2008 fiscal?).

Some Thoughts
It looks like this healthcare companies biggest problems have been gross margins. Morningstar shows a 37% gross profit margin in 2004 and it's just been slowly declining since.

The old CEO resigned in November of 2009 and was replaced with an interim CEO who was on the board since 2005. I'm not sure if this has changed as of late right now though.

Ownership
The interim CEO Warren Bielke has bought 300,000 shares of stock just this year. Some $320,000 worth.

Morningstar says American Funds Smallcap World 529A has a 3.3% stake.

More Observations
The stock price went from $1.50 in late '07 to $6 in early '08.

The conference call for Q1 2011 was on August 12th. Interestingly the stock ran 28% after the conference call on the 12th through late August. I haven't read the transcript of that call yet. I didn't see it on Seeking Alpha. The audio looks to be here. The thing is though the call may not have actually been significant as far as the way the stock traded. It might just be correlation without causation. I would like to know if they have any guidance on revenue or earnings though.

One thing that stands out is the stock traded 590,000 shares on July 23rd and a whopping 1,109,200 shares July 26th! The stock has three month average trading volume of only 68,000. That was some unusually heavy volume. I believe that the last time the stock traded over 1 million shares intraday was in September of 2007.

















full disclosure: no position but I have it on my watchlist