Random thoughts to start the week

Posted by Tim

September 21, 2008

My travels for the past two weeks have made Internet access and writing time hit and miss. I am now back from 3 days without the computer, but did get some CNBC time on Friday. Yahoo!!! I have some ideas to post on later in the week but wanted to put up a few random ideas:

The stocks in this site’s Income Portfolio gained 14% on Friday! I do not have an accurate idea how they did on Thursday, but it is nice to be sitting here with the portfolio positively green after the first half of last week.

My Seeking Alpha daily email for today (Sunday) had only 4 listings, all earnings transcripts. Normally the email comes with 30-40 opinioned article links. Are all blogger/financial writers in shock after Thursday and Friday?

Where to from here for VeraSun Energy (VSE: 0.28 0.00 0.00%)? The company revealed their stupid corn contracting moves from the early summer and corresponding huge pending losses. Various news articles state that company management is looking for a buyer. Keep this in mind: VSE has 14 state-of-the-art, same technology, 110 million gallon per year refineries. It costs approximately $200 million to build one of these refineries. VSE has a current market cap of $270 million, or less than 10% of the replacement cost of their plants. A buyer could pay $1 billion for the company and be getting a steal!