John Dorfman Columns category, Page 10

I never abandon the stock market utterly, and I don’t think anyone should. But when a recession looms, it makes sense to get more defensive. That means investing in sectors that usually withstand bear markets and recessions fairly well. Traditional choices include consumer staples, gold, health care stocks, tobacco and...

Among other pleasures quashed by the pandemic, the baseball season will be delayed (let’s hope not canceled). However, as a minor consolation, my 30-30 Club continues. In baseball, the 30-30 Club contains players who have hit 30 home runs and stolen 30 bases in the same season. In the past...

The market’s battlefield is littered with casualties. Each quarter I write about stocks that have been wounded and that I think have excellent recovery potential. I call it the Casualty List. This quarter there are many candidates: Dozens of solid stocks are down 40% or more. Blame the coronavirus and...

Laurent Condon, a retired trader in Saint-Rambert-en-Bugey, France, won my stock-picking contest, Dorfman’s Three-Stock Derby, for 2019-20. This was the fourth time Condon has won honors in one of my contests. He won my short-selling contest in 2017-18 and finished third the following year. Last year, he finished third in...

The time for bargain hunting in the virus-afflicted stock market may not have come yet. But it will come. Guessing when we have hit bottom will be an art, not a science. It will be partly a matter of judgment and feel. When you are ready to wade back into...

Two CEOs have made million-dollar buys of their company’s stock in February and March. At Continental Resources Inc. (CLR), CEO William Berry spent $1.6 million to increase his holding by 90,000 shares. He now owns 931,301 shares, worth about $13.8 million at Friday’s prices. Berry has been Continental’s CEO only...

A student at the American School in Milan, Italy, won my annual Derby of Economic Forecasting Talent (DEFT) for 2019. Gregorio De Giuli, a 17-year-old high school senior, modestly attributed his success to “luck,” but there was more to it than that. “I looked at charts and followed the trend,”...

Sir John Templeton, one of the greatest investors of the 20th century, famously said you should invest “at the point of maximum pessimism.” At various points in his career, he did that in the United States, Japan and New Zealand. Now, I think investors have the chance to do something...

If you want a stock market bet that’s 74% likely to lose money, try investing in high-flying stock that sells for 100 times revenue or more. I call such investments “near insanity,” because in the vast majority of cases, these stocks crash back to earth. How dizzying is 100 times...

The wealthiest people don’t always have the biggest salaries. And the wealthiest companies aren’t necessarily those with the best earnings lately. I believe that companies with a great balance sheet deserve recognition. So, in 2001 I started compiling an annual list of Balance Sheet Powerhouses. To make it, a company...

The stock market in the past couple of years has been a momentum market in which rich stocks get richer and poor stocks get poorer. That may change fairly soon. But for the moment, investors would be smart to look at stocks that possess both value and momentum. Here, folks,...

When I was a boy, my father took me to the race track. I was entranced by the Daily Racing Form, which contained a wealth of information about every horse’s past performance. “There’s one problem,” my father said. “The horses don’t read the form.” As I look at the stock-market...

Buying the stocks of good companies on bad news is my favorite investing method. The trick is to find bad news that is real but probably temporary. Each quarter in this column, I compile my Casualty List. It highlights stocks that have been pummeled in the latest quarter, and that...

The four stocks that Wall Street analysts most adored a year ago all fell. The analysts’ darlings as of January 2019 posted a 15% loss from Jan. 14, 2019 through Jan. 10, 2020. This happened even as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, widely used as a gauge of the...

Over the past 21 years, my Robot Portfolio, a naive stock-picking paradigm, has more than doubled the return on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, the gauge most professionals use to track the performance of the U.S. stock market. The cumulative returns: 1034% for the Robot, 379% for the S&P...

If you’re doing a portfolio refresh for the new year, here are 10 stocks that I think deserve strong consideration. Most of them sell for 16 times earnings or less, in a market where the average multiple is about 23. They all have low debt or reasonable debt, in my...

Investors loathe energy stocks, which are down more than 40% since their peak in June 2014. A 2018 rebound proved to be a sucker rally. Two CEOs of small energy companies are defying the trend, buying their companies’ shares recently. Joseph Foran, the CEO of Matador Resources Co. (MTDR), spent...

Energy stocks, and to a lesser extent bank stocks, have been the market’s whipping boys in 2019. Now they are being punished anew, as investors sell shares to establish tax losses. In the fall frenzy of tax-loss selling, certain stocks are often pushed below their intrinsic value, and that is...

What do Met Life, Kelly Services and Oasis Petroleum have in common? Each is selling below book value. Book value is a company’s net worth (assets minus liabilities), usually expressed as a figure per share of stock outstanding. Buying stocks below book value is a classic bargain hunters’ strategy. Here...

The U.S. stock market’s hottest stocks this year have mostly been youngish companies with little if any profit history. Investors these days are talking conservatively, but investing speculatively. Among the 535 U.S. stocks with a market value of $10 billion or more as of Nov. 1, five have returned more...

Is there a perfect size for a stock? Perhaps not. Size doesn’t matter — at least, not as much as profitability, growth and valuation. And yet, there is a size to which I am particularly partial. It’s right around $1 billion. To me, that is the dividing line between small-capitalization...

Stolen fruit, anyone? Filings with the Securities and Exchange Administration make it easy to follow what almost any U.S. money manager is doing with his or her portfolio. I like to keep tabs on what my competitors are doing, especially the competitors I respect. Once a year, I feature some...

With impeachment and trade war in the air, the stock market probably won’t roar ahead in the next 12 months. Anything can happen, but my guess is that the coming 12 months will see a normal gain of 10% or less. In that environment, wouldn’t it be nice to have...

Stocks that are wounded often make the best buys. That’s why I compile a Casualty List each quarter of stocks that have landed in the market’s hospital — and that I think have outstanding potential to recover. The list you are about to read is the 66th one I’ve done...

If the U.S. stock market falls — whether because of the impeachment battle, the trade war with China or slowing corporate profits — stocks outside the U.S. won’t necessarily do better. Then again, they may. Diversifying your stock portfolio by putting a slice of it in companies based outside the...