It's a long way from $78 to $60, but it's only taken crude oil a few weeks to make that price slide of nearly 25%. Natural gas, too, has hit the skids. Since early August, its price is down 47%. As a result, the investors with the top 100 portfolios at Marketocracy ditched more of their energy-related holdings last week. At the same time, they bought into what looks like it could be a nascent turnaround at a troubled media company, and they dumped shares of another media giant that has been trying to right its ship for more than four years.
The biggest new buy, with more than $177,000 of fresh M100 funds plowed into it last week, was (nyse: TRB - news - people ). After a board meeting last Thursday, Tribune's chairman and CEO said that all options are on the table to help the company unlock value, including a sale, breakup or buyout. The company, which owns large newspapers including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, as well as television stations and the Chicago Cubs baseball team, could be sold to buyers as a whole, but more likely in parts. The stock has been on a three-year slide, but it gained nearly 10% last week on optimism that something positive for shareholders will happen soon.
Another large dollar-volume buy for the M100 was Boise, Idaho-based (nasdaq: ECOL - news - people ). The company provides radioactive, hazardous and industrial waste management services in the U.S. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, the company reported that it had resolved a dispute with its insurance company over a fire two years ago at a Texas facility. The resolution will add $672,000 to American Ecology's operating income for the current quarter--a sum not completely insignificant, since the company had $7.46 million in operating earnings last quarter.
Gurus were also big buyers of Parsippany, N.J.-based (nyse: CAR - news - people ), the new name (as of Sept. 6) for Cendant, which split itself into four parts this summer: (nyse: H - news - people ), (nyse: WYN - news - people ), Travelport and Avis Budget. The car rental arm, Avis Budget, generated $2.96 billion in operating cash flow on $18.5 billion in revenue over the past 12 months. At $18.33, shares trade for 14.2 times expected 2006 earnings and at an attractive 0.97 price-to-earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio.
In a blast--or perhaps more accurately, an electrically charged and temporarily debilitating jolt--from the past, gurus jumped back into (nyse: TASR - news - people ). The Scottsdale, Ariz., stun gun maker had no news last week, aside from the usual self-congratulatory and amusing press releases it puts out on a regular basis. Down more than 75% from its all-time high in December 2004, Taser still looks expensive as measured by most traditional metrics, such as price to sales, earnings and book value, as well as its PEG ratio. Nonetheless, gurus may have been interested in Taser as a speculative contrarian play. Nearly 23% of the stock's float had been sold short as of Aug. 10, and at $7.44, shares are at the low end of their three-month range. It wouldn't take much to ignite a wave of short-covering and some quick profits.
A security-related company more in line with the taste of investors who use some measure of fundamental analysis is (nasdaq: ASEI - news - people ). Gurus scooped up shares last week in this Billerica, Mass., maker of bomb detection and X-ray equipment. Shares trade at 17 times earnings and at a PEG ratio of 0.84. ASEI's CEO bragged about a bunch of U.S. government orders that will be coming in later this year.
On the sell side, gurus continued to cut loose their energy holdings. Last week's selling fury was focused on natural gas exposure, as well as oil.
Gurus dumped all of their shares of Houston-based (nyse: SFY - news - people ), an independent oil and gas producer operating mostly in Louisiana, Texas and in the Gulf of Mexico. Shares of Swift are down more than 15% since early August.
The M100 also exited their position in (nyse: PAA - news - people ). The Houston pipeline operator transports crude oil and natural gas products through 15,000 miles of pipeline in the U.S. and Canada. Damage to its price has been mitigated by its fat dividend yield, which currently stands at 6.4%.
(nyse: TRP - news - people ) operates as a natural gas transmission and storage company. Its partnership with the U.S. subsidiary of (nyse: RDSA - news - people ), Broadwater Energy, had hoped to build a liquefied natural gas depot in Long Island Sound. On Friday, the U.S. Coast Guard issued a report highly critical of the idea, and while it did not kill the project, for all intents and purposes, it is now dead in the water, so to speak. The Coast Guard pointed out the vulnerability of such a facility to terrorist attacks and maintained that it did not have the resources necessary to ensure safety. Gurus bailed completely.
(nyse: IBM - news - people ) was also shown the door. An analyst at UBS expressed a "cautious" outlook for Big Blue, even as he upped the company's price target from $84 to $86 per share.
Gurus also bailed on shares of (nyse: TWX - news - people ). Gurus sold as the company's AOL unit gave an optimistic report about the results so far from offering its service for free. Shares of Time Warner, long a market laggard, are up about 15% since mid-August but have been flat for about three years.
Marketocracy.com tracks more than 60,000 stock portfolios that are run by amateur investors. Of those, the top 100 performing portfolios, the M100, are mirrored in a real-life mutual fund, the Masters 100 Fund ( MOFQX ). Each week, Guru Picks analyzes the buys and sells of this best performing group of investors, known as the M100.
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