John Dorfman Columns category, Page 4

The harsh market climate of August and September has left quite a few stocks selling for what I consider bargain prices. Welcome to the 82nd quarterly Casualty List, featuring stocks that have been knocked around and that I think have the potential to recover and thrive. RTX Corp. I’ll start...

We are coming up on a seasonal turning point in the stock market. October is special for three reasons: • It is the month when history’s most spectacular market crashes have occurred, most famously in 1929 and 1987. • Yet it is actually, on average, a pretty good month. •...

In 20 years of running the annual Short Sellers Don’t Have Horns short-selling contest, I’ve never had a winner request anonymity. Until now. The winner, whom I will call Sam, is a 22-year-old stock analyst who recently earned a master’s degree in finance from a college in the Boston area....

No one wants to hear the word “fat.” But put it together with “profit margins,” and it doesn’t sound bad. Once a year, I feature in this column some stocks that boast unusually large profit margins. These can be a sign that a company has a unique product or is...

Most value stocks (those that are reasonably priced or cheap) are struggling to gain traction this year. Growth stocks are ruling the roost. But a few value stocks are outperforming the market. For people who relish both value and some price action, here are five stocks to consider. Each sells...

It’s a simple formula, right? A business’s profit equals its revenue minus expenses. Yet, this can be tricky. Some expenses are intangible. Say you’re a cruise company and bought some ships five years ago, paying out $30 million. You didn’t subtract the whole $30 million from your profits that year....

The Sane Portfolio wasn’t intended to burn up the track. This is a hypothetical portfolio I devised in 1999 and have refreshed almost every year since. It’s intended as a slightly conservative, middle-of-the-road collection of stocks. But in the past year it’s risen 23%. To be eligible for the Sane...

Hatfield vs. McCoy. Montague vs. Capulet. Yankees vs. Red Sox. Great feuds, each. But what about value and growth, the two main schools of investing? They don’t have to be enemies. Once a year, I write a column on stocks I believe show value and growth characteristics. For 17 columns...

You can’t teach genius. But you can learn a lot from observing geniuses at work. Here are a few nuggets of investment wisdom from seven master investors. John Neff The manager of the Windsor Fund for three decades, John Neff was a quintessential value investor. “To us, ugly stocks were...

A good tool for spotting turnaround candidates is the price-to-sales ratio. Start with a company’s stock price. Divide it by the company’s sales (revenue) per share. If the number you get is less than 1.0, the stock is cheap; typically the company is straining for growth and profits. When you...

Let’s postulate that the goal in stock investing is to buy low and sell high. If so, it makes sense to look at stocks that have been banged up, searching for ones that have recovery potential. That’s the goal of my quarterly Casualty List. Today, I’ll highlight two large energy...

Two of the badges of corporate success are high profits and low debt. Today, I draw your attention to five stocks that excel in both regards. Each has a return on stockholders’ equity of 20% or better. On this measure of profitability, I consider 10% decent and 15% good. Each...

While I write about more than 200 stocks each year, I own far fewer. Once a year in this column, I discuss my holdings. Here are the 25 I own personally and for most clients now. Communications I hold the same three communications stocks I held a year ago —...

My father owned International Business Machines (IBM) stock most of the time from the 1950s to the 1980s. Maybe your father did, too. I hope he did, because IBM shares rose well over one hundred fold in that period. Today, I think IBM and some other well-known names should be...

Some people love stocks that are surging. Others love stocks that have been knocked down. Investors pay less attention to stocks that have been holding still, and therein may lie an opportunity. Some of these Do Nothing stocks may just … well, do something. Hence, my Do Nothing Club. It...

Thanks to Jerome Powell and his crew at the Federal Reserve, interest rates are about five percentage points higher than they were a year ago. For stock pickers, that means debt once again matters. This should be a good environment for folks who prefer low-debt companies. Beginning in 1998, I’ve...

Walk up to any graduate student in finance. Ask her to design a stock-picking screen. I’ll bet you a milkshake that she will design something more complex than my Old Faithful stock-selection paradigm. Yet, my picks in this column drawn from Old Faithful have averaged more than a 19% return...

What do Mike Trout and Microsoft have in common? Both are members of a 30-30 Club. In baseball, this club contains those stars who have smashed 30 home runs and have stolen 30 bases in the same season. I have a 30-30 club for corporations. To make it, a company...

You can understand a lot about this year’s stock market by looking at the winners and losers among the nation’s biggest stocks. Among the 167 stocks with a market value of $100 billion or more, the best performers this year are: • Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), up 83%. • Meta Platforms...

Like a race-car driver slicing in front of the competition, the Nasdaq Stock Market has resumed market leadership in 2023. This year through March 17, the Nasdaq Composite Index has returned 11.1%. The New York Stock Exchange Composite Index has fallen 3.8%. The most widely watched market gauge, the Standard...

The CEO of Devon Energy (DVN), Richard Muncrief, made two purchases of his own company’s stock in February. That’s intriguing, because the price of oil and natural gas have been falling lately. Shares of Devon, the 18th-largest U.S. energy company by market value, are down more than 18% in the...

“Think of the economy as a big exuberant dog that jumps up on people,” my father said to me long ago, “and think of the Fed as a man with a rolled up newspaper.” The man taps the dog lightly to get it to stop jumping, but that has no...

On a hilltop in your town live two people. Joseph has an income of $400,000 a year but little savings. Francois has income of only $90,000 a year but $30 million in the bank. Who would you rather be? Any sane person would pick Francois. And yet, when they go...

Just because a stock is cheap doesn’t mean it can’t get cheaper. That’s why some investors prefer stocks that show both value and momentum. Twice a year, I highlight a few such stocks in this column. Here are a few more. Each of these stocks has beaten the S&P 500...

Most economists predict a recession for the U.S. in 2023. No one is good at foretelling the future, but the recession threat may be one reason to consider adding some non-U.S. stocks to your portfolio. Here are five foreign stocks I currently like. All of them trade in the U.S.,...