Wikinvest Wire

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

How Long Has This Stock Been Hiding?

I was trolling around and stumbled across the PowerShares Global Agriculture Fund (PAGG) and one of the holdings is a company called Taiwan Fertilizer which is on the chart in blue.

The red line is iShares Taiwan ETF (EWT) which is about 50% tech stocks and the green line is the Market Vectors Agribusiness ETF (MOO) which a couple of clients own.

I've never heard of the company before now. According to Google Finance the market cap is 119 billion which I take to be Taiwan dollars which would work out to a market cap of US$3.7 billion.

Just kind of interesting.

5 comments:

Steve said...

The chart of PAGG is nearly identical to MOO

Anonymous said...

I work in this industry and have not heard of it either. I overlayed SQM and they looked similar. What I found interesting was the declining profits on rising sales volume, attributed to increasing taxes, and the description of the company looked more like an industrial conglomerate than a straight ag business. My question for you Roger: Would you be buying this to capture Ag, or capture Taiwan? It looks like SQM or POT would be a better Ag play (less moving parts, easier to get information on the business). If you are trying to capture Taiwan, this looks pretty good; the company is a well entrenched industrial conglomerate, sort of like GE or ITW.
Take care,
Sam

Roger Nusbaum said...

Sam you are further along than me with the name and your deciding to take a look is exactly the reaction I would hope someone would take.

Buying it, if I got to that level of interest, would be difficult due to liquidity issues in buying enough for clients but part of the process of learning about it would be to try to figure what it is a proxy for; country or sector. For example we own DEO but I don't really think of that as much of a proxy for the UK but is a proxy, IMO, for staples.

Figuring out an answer to your question would be part of the process.

Banker said...

Roger,

Any views on the over all Economy?

Anonymous said...

When someone is successful for a long period, eventually the "ego" takes over and they start making bad decisions. I've worked with many successful CEO's who eventually start to falter because their input does not change when circumstances change. They seem to think they know the entire decision process so no changes in that process will be necessary, ie, the Peter Principle effect

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