Kenya IPO - Safaricom
Back in March, I wrote about Safaricom the telecom giant of Kenya. This recommendation highlights a great way where communicating with your friends leads to great stock recommendations. After understanding the risks involved, I noted that this would be a great play in the international markets especially because the local US environment isn't exactly overflowing with gigantic returns. I was pleased to read today the Safaricom's Initial Public Offering rose roughly 50% today. The one difficulty the average investor may have run into is that because it was an international IPO there weren't as many ways to participate in this offering outside of having some type of link to Morgan Stanley an advisor to Safaricom. Check out our earlier discussion here: http://urbanomics.blogspot.com/2008/03/march-edition-urb-in-60-seconds.html
NATIONAL CITY - IS IT TIME TO BUY???
National City (NYSE: NCC) dropped over 83 percent in the previous 12 months. Time after time we have continued to comment about the weakness in the financial sector. Need more proof, check out Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual and National City as examples of banks under fire and almost under water. I got a call the other day from a friend who said is it time to buy, so I began my research of this company and turned up some positive information. I was surprised and comforted by the recent upgrades by Deutsche Bank AG and KBW. However, I also stumbled along an article about the fact that NCC is under a Memorandum of Understanding or MOU with a regulatory banking agency. From my experience of auditing banks, an MOU is not a good look. As a matter of fact is down right ugly and means that the regulators are not very happy with your financial standing as a bank that is federally insured by the government. I also read that NCC book value price, if all the assets were sold, would roughly place the share price at $4.70. However my only problem is that some analysts may be placing value on some assets that no longer have value. So I am recommending at this point that if you truly want to own this stock, take the book value and discount this price to the point that you can sleep easy at night. I am not in a hurry to catch a bottom for financial stocks, so stay tuned to see if I change my mind.
THE NEW GOLD
The new gold will be solar or wind energy. I've got some views on both of these areas so check back with me soon.
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