More than two years ago, I identified 10 companies that I would be putting $40,000 of my own retirement money behind. This was, has been, and will continue to be my way of helping the world to invest better.
Since then, that sum of money has grown to $53,880 -- a 34.7% increase, and $3,280 better than if I had just invested the money in the S&P 500.
Every month, I look over these stocks to see which three are tempting. I call these my "Buy Now" stocks because I think they're pretty good deals.
Read the chart below to see how the whole portfolio has performed, check out my best buys and, at the end, I'll offer up access to a special free report.
Company
Publication Date
Change
Vs. S&P 500 (percentage points)
Google (NASDAQ: GOOG )
6/26/11
Deutsche Boerse AG is a Germany-based international financial marketplace operator. It operates four business segments: Xetra; Eurex; Clearstream, and Market Data & Analytics. The Xetra business segment comprises three business areas: cash market using the Xetra electronic trading system and Xetra Frankfurt specialist trading; central counterparty for equities, and admission of securities to listing. The Eurex business segment comprises four business areas: electronic derivatives market trading platform Eurex; electronic options trading platform ISE; over-the-counter trading platforms Eurex Bonds, Eurex Repo, and Eurex Clearing. The Clearstream business segment comprises three business areas: custody, administration and settlement services for securities; global securities financing services, and investment funds services. The Market Data & Analytics business segment comprises two business areas: sales of price information and information distribution, and index development and sales.
Advisors' Opinion: - [By Mark Thompson]
The contracts are often cleared through exchanges such as CME and Eurex, operated by Deutsche Boerse (DBOEF).
CME said it would gradually apply an additional "event risk" margin of 12% to all over-the-counter interest rate swaps due to the "additional uncertainty brought by the debt ceiling debate."
Top Up And Coming Companies To Own In Right Now: RealD Inc(RLD)
RealD Inc., together with its subsidiaries, licenses stereoscopic 3D technologies in the United States, Canada, and internationally. The company designs, manufactures, licenses, and markets its RealD Cinema Systems that enable digital cinema projectors to show 3D motion pictures and alternative 3D content to consumers wearing the company?s RealD eyewear. It also offers RealD Display, active and passive eyewear ,and RealD Format technologies to consumer electronics manufacturers, and content producers and distributors to enable the delivery and viewing of 3D content on high definition televisions, laptops, and other displays. In addition, the company sells CrystalEyes eyewear, monitors, digital light processing television kits, polarizer films, emitters, and linear polarizing systems to companies, government agencies, academic institutions, and research and development organizations for applications in piloting the Mars Rover and in theme park installations. RealD Inc. was founded in 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California.
Advisors' Opinion: - [By Seth Jayson]
RealD (NYSE: RLD ) reported earnings on June 6. Here are the numbers you need to know.
The 10-second takeaway
For the quarter ended March 31 (Q4), RealD beat expectations on revenues and exceeded expectations on earnings per share.
Top Up And Coming Companies To Own In Right Now: Brunswick Corp (BC)
Brunswick Corporation (Brunswick), incorporated on December 31, 1907, is a worldwide designer, manufacturer and marketer of recreation products, including marine engines, boats, fitness equipment and bowling and billiards equipment. Brunswick�� engine products include outboard, sterndrive and inboard engines; trolling motors; propellers; engine control systems, and marine parts and accessories. The Company�� boat offerings include fiberglass boats; sportfishing convertibles and motoryachts; offshore fishing boats; aluminum fishing boats, and pontoon and deck boats. Brunswick�� fitness products include both cardiovascular and strength training equipment for the commercial and consumer markets. Brunswick�� bowling products include capital equipment, aftermarket and consumer goods. The Company also sells a range of billiards tables and other gaming tables and accessories. In addition, the Company owns and operates Brunswick bowling family entertainment centers in the United States and other countries. In August 2013, Brunswick Corporation completed the sale of the Hatteras and CABO brands of motoryachts and sportfishing convertibles to Navis HCY Acquisition.
The Company, through its Brunswick Financial Services Corporation (BFS) subsidiary, owns a 49% interest in a joint venture, Brunswick Acceptance Company, LLC (BAC). CDF Ventures, LLC (CDFV), a subsidiary of GE Capital Corporation, owns the remaining 51%. Under the terms of the joint venture agreement, BAC provides secured wholesale inventory floorplan financing to the Company�� engine and boat dealers.
Marine Engine Segment
Mercury Marine manufactures and markets a range of sterndrive propulsion systems, inboard engines and outboard engines under the Mercury, Mercury MerCruiser, Mariner, Mercury Racing, Mercury SportJet and Mercury Jet Drive, MotorGuide, Axius and Zeus brand names. In addition, Mercury Marine manufactures and markets marine parts and accessories under the Quicksilver, Mercury Precision! Parts, Mercury Propellers, Attwood, Land ����Sea, Kellogg Marine Supply, Diversified Marine Products, Sea Choice and MotorGuide brand names, including marine electronics and control integration systems, steering systems, instruments, controls, propellers, trolling motors, service parts and marine lubricants. Mercury Marine�� sterndrive engines, inboard engines and outboard engines are sold to independent boat builders, local, state and foreign governments, and to the Company�� Boat segment. In addition, Mercury Marine�� outboard engines are sold to end-users through a global network of more than 7,000 marine dealers and distributors, specialty marine retailers and marine service centers.
Mercury Marine, through Cummins MerCruiser Diesel Marine LLC (CMD), a joint venture between Brunswick�� Mercury Marine division and Cummins Marine, a division of Cummins Inc., supplies integrated diesel propulsion systems to the worldwide recreational and commercial marine markets, including the Company�� Boat segment. Mercury Marine manufactures two-stroke OptiMax outboard engines ranging from 75 to 300 horsepower, all of which feature Mercury�� direct fuel injection (DFI) technology, and four-stroke outboard engine include Verado, a collection of supercharged outboards ranging from 150 to 350 horsepower, and Mercury Marine's naturally aspirated four-stroke outboards, ranging from 2.5 to 150 horsepower including the introduction of the 150 FourStroke, which is quickly becoming known for its light weight, fuel efficiency and performance. In addition, most of Mercury�� sterndrive and inboard engines are available with catalyst exhaust monitoring and treatment systems.
Mercury Marine�� sterndrive and outboard engines are produced domestically in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with outboard engines also produced internationally in China and Japan. Mercury Marine manufactures 40, 50 and 60 horsepower four-stroke outboard engines in a facility in China, and produces smaller outboard en! gines in ! Japan pursuant to a joint venture with its partner, Tohatsu Corporation. CMD manufactures diesel marine propulsion systems in South Carolina.
Mercury Marine also operates a remanufacturing business for engines and service parts in Wisconsin. In addition, Mercury Marine has an equity ownership interest in a company that manufactures boats under the brand names Bella, Flipper and Aquador in Finland. Mercury Marine also has an interest in a company that manufactures boats under the brand names Bella, Flipper and Aquador in Finland. Mercury Marine�� parts and accessories distribution businesses include Land ����Sea, Kellogg Marine Supply and Diversified Marine Products. These businesses are the distributors of marine parts and accessories throughout North America.
Boat Segment
The Boat Group consists of the boat brands, such Sea Ray yachts, sport yachts, sport cruisers and runabouts; Bayliner sport cruisers and runabouts; Meridian motoryachts; Boston Whaler, Lund and Trophy fiberglass fishing boats, and Crestliner, Cypress Cay, Harris FloteBote, Lowe, Lund, Princecraft, Suncruiser and Triton aluminum fishing, utility, pontoon and deck boats. The Boat Group also includes a commercial and governmental sales unit that sells products to commercial customers, as well as the United States Government and state, local and foreign governments. The Boat Group procures most of its outboard engines, gasoline sterndrive engines and gasoline inboard engines from Brunswick�� Marine Engine segment.
The Boat Group has active manufacturing facilities in Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Canada, Mexico and Portugal, as well as additional inactive manufacturing facilities in Florida, Maryland, North Carolina and Tennessee. The Boat Group utilizes contract manufacturing facilities in Argentina and Poland. The Boat Group has constructed a manufacturing plant in Joinville, Santa Catarina, Brazil, which has nearly 150,000 square feet of man! ufacturin! g space. The Boat Group�� products are sold to end-users through a worldwide network of approximately 2,850 dealers and distributors, each of which carries one or more of Brunswick�� boat brands.
Fitness Segment
Brunswick�� Fitness segment consists of its Life Fitness division (Life Fitness), which designs, manufactures and markets a range of cardiovascular fitness equipment (including treadmills, total body cross-trainers, stair climbers and stationary exercise bicycles) and strength-training equipment under the Life Fitness and Hammer Strength brands. Life Fitness��commercial sales customers include health clubs, fitness facilities operated by professional sports teams, the military, governmental agencies, corporations, hotels, schools and universities. Consumer products are available at specialty retailers, select mass merchants, sporting goods stores, through international distributors, and on Life Fitness��Website. The Fitness segment�� principal manufacturing facilities are located in Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota and Hungary. Life Fitness distributes its products worldwide from regional warehouses and production facilities.
Bowling & Billiards Segment
The Bowling & Billiards segment consists of the Brunswick Bowling & Billiards division (BB&B). BB&B is a worldwide designer, manufacturer and marketer of bowling products. BB&B's bowling products business designs, manufactures and markets a variety of bowling products, including capital equipment (such as automatic pinsetters and scoring devices), bowling balls and aftermarket products (such as lane machines, pinsetter parts, lane conditioners and lane cleaners). Through licensing arrangements, BB&B also offers an array of bowling consumer products, including bowling shoes, bags and accessories.
BB&B operates 95 bowling centers in the United States, Canada and Europe. BB&B retail bowling centers offer bowling and, depending on size and location, may also offer activities a! nd facili! ties: restaurants, lounges, snack bars, billiards, video and redemption games, laser tag, pro shops and meeting and party rooms. Of the Company's 95 bowling centers, 42 have been converted into Brunswick Zones, which are bowling centers that offer an array of active entertainment activities for its guests. BB&B designs and/or markets billiards tables, table tennis tables, air powered table hockey games, billiard balls, cues and other gaming tables, as well as game room furniture and related accessories, under the Brunswick and Contender brands. BB&B's primary manufacturing and distribution facilities are located in Michigan, Wisconsin, Hungary and Mexico. Brunswick�� bowling and billiards products are sold through a variety of channels, including distributors, dealers, mass merchandisers, bowling centers and retailers, and directly to consumers on the Internet and through other outlets.
Advisors' Opinion: - [By Seth Jayson]
Basic guidelines
In this series, I examine inventory using a simple rule of thumb: Inventory increases ought to roughly parallel revenue increases. If inventory bloats more quickly than sales grow, this might be a sign that expected sales haven't materialized. Is the current inventory situation at Brunswick (NYSE: BC ) out of line? To figure that out, start by comparing the company's inventory growth to sales growth. How is Brunswick doing by this quick checkup? At first glance, not so great. Trailing-12-month revenue increased 3.0%, and inventory increased 8.4%. Comparing the latest quarter to the prior-year quarter, the story looks decent. Revenue increased 3.7%, and inventory increased 8.4%. Over the sequential quarterly period, the trend looks healthy. Revenue grew 19.9%, and inventory grew 5.0%.
- [By Seth Jayson]
Calling all cash flows
When you are trying to buy the market's best stocks, it's worth checking up on your companies' free cash flow once a quarter or so, to see whether it bears any relationship to the net income in the headlines. That's what we do with this series. Today, we're checking in on Brunswick (NYSE: BC ) , whose recent revenue and earnings are plotted below.
- [By Jeremy Bowman]
What: Shares of Brunswick (NYSE: BC ) were getting fired up today, climbing as much as 12% after issuing a strong quarterly report and improved guidance. �
Top Up And Coming Companies To Own In Right Now: Chesapeake Gold Corp (CHPGF.PK)
Chesapeake Gold Corp. is a mineral exploration company focusing on the discovery and development of gold-silver deposits in North and Central America. The Company�� primary asset is the Metates gold-silver project (Metates) located in Durango State, Mexico. The Company also has a portfolio of exploration properties in Mexico comprising 57,067 hectares in the states of Durango, Sinaloa, Oaxaca and Veracruz. The Escorpion property is located 85 kilometers by paved road southeast of Guatemala City. The Metates property is the undeveloped disseminated gold and silver deposits in Mexico. The property is consists of 14 mineral concessions totaling 14,727 hectares. Talapoosa property is a low-sulphidation gold/silver property in the Walker Lane gold trend of western Nevada, approximately 45 kilometers east of Reno. The property consists of 535 unpatented lode mining claims and seven additional fee land sections which cover 10,780 hectares.
Advisors' Opinion: - [By Hebba Investments]
Therefore the situation is still very bullish for investors in physical gold and the gold ETFs (GLD, CEF, and PHYS). Investors interested in leveraging this situation into higher potential profits may also consider buying gold miners such as Randgold (GOLD), Goldcorp (GG), Yamana Gold (AUY), and any of the other gold miners. Finally, those willing to shoulder much larger risks may consider some of the exploration and micro-cap companies that offer significant profits at a high risk such as Chesapeake Gold (CHPGF.PK), Pretium Resources (PVG), Western Copper (WRN), or any other of the junior exploration companies. Though investors should keep in mind that gold mining companies and explorers do not always rise with a rising gold price - do your research before you invest in the miners.
Top Up And Coming Companies To Own In Right Now: Vmware Inc.(VMW)
VMware, Inc. provides virtualization and virtualization-based cloud infrastructure solutions in the United States and internationally. The company?s products address planned and unplanned downtime management, system recoverability and reliability, backup and recovery, resource provisioning and management, capacity and performance management, and security issues. Its cloud infrastructure products and technologies include VMware vSphere, which is a data center platform that also enables live migration of actively running virtual machines across servers or storage locations without disruption or downtime; enables availability for all applications against hardware and operating system failures; and enables centralized point of control for cluster-level networking, as well as automatically manages the placement and balancing of a virtual machine across storage resources. The company also offers cloud application platform solutions that help organizations build, run, and manage enterprise applications in public, private, or hybrid clouds optimized for vSphere. In addition, it provides end-user computing solutions, which provide secure access to applications and data from various devices and location, as well as serves the corporate IT departments through managing and connecting end-user assets delivering them as a managed service. The company?s end-user computing solutions also provide the ability to manage software as a service, Windows, Mobile, or enterprise applications, as well as enhance communication and collaboration between end users. Further, it provides a range of professional services, such as consulting, education, and technical account manager services, as well as customer support services. The company sells its products through distributors, resellers, system vendors, and systems integrators. VMware, Inc. was incorporated in 1998 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. VMware, Inc. operates as a subsidiary of EMC Corporation.
Advisors' Opinion: - [By David Sterman]
We can glean a few clear trends from these share buybackers:
The majority of these plans are simply new plans to replace old plans that have now been completed, meaning these companies buy back their shares on a regular basis. Many of these stocks are valued right near the market multiple of 15 to 16 times projected earnings. Many of these stocks offer up a decent dividend as well, boosting their total cash return to shareholders. Most of these buyback programs represent a meaningful amount of the current share count. (Both VMWare's (NYSE: VMW) and Emerson Electric's (NYSE: EMR) buyback programs are not really meaningful as they are only likely large enough to offset stock option grants). Most of these stocks are near their 52-week highs, extending the theme of the current era that companies no longer wait for their stock to fall out of bed before buying back stock. Nor do any of these stocks trade below tangible book value, which also had historically served as a key litmus test of buyback efficacy. Still, the longer-term buyback programs for some of these firms have surely been impressive. Take toy maker Hasbro (NYSE: HAS) as an example. The company's new $500 million share buyback (which would reduce the share count by 11% at current prices) is reasonably impressive -- until you look at what Hasbro has already been doing for nearly a decade.
Top Up And Coming Companies To Own In Right Now: BMC Software Inc. (BMC)
BMC Software, Inc. develops software that provides system and service management solutions for enterprises in the United States and internationally. The company operates in two segments, Enterprise Service Management and Mainframe Service Management. The Enterprise Service Management segment offers service assurance solutions that manage availability and performance management, event management, service impact management, and capacity management; service automation solutions managing provisioning, configuration change, and compliance automation for servers, networks, applications, and databases; service support solutions, which manages service desk, incident management, service request management, problem management, asset management, service level management, change and release management, and identity management; and BMC Atrium that provides shared technologies that unify information and processes from disparate management tools, and assigns priorities to business servic es. It also offers consulting, implementation, integration, IT process design and re-engineering, and educational services related to its software products. The Mainframe Service Management segment provides mainframe data and performance management solutions that ensure the availability and reliability of the business critical data, applications, and systems; and enterprise workload automation solutions comprising CONTROL-M product line, a set of features enabling data centers to automate their complex workloads and critical business processes. The company serves manufacturers, telecommunication companies, educational institutions, retailers, distributors, hospitals, and other industries, as well as channel partners, including resellers, distributors and systems integrators directly. BMC Software, Inc. was founded in 1980 and is headquartered in Houston, Texas.
Advisors' Opinion: - [By Rob DeFrancesco]
Rob DeFrancesco: ServiceNow is disrupting the IT management space. They're cloud-based. They're going against legacy vendors like BMC (BMC). And ServiceNow, that's another strong revenue grower, up 50% expected for this year, 38% for next year.
- [By Tim Brugger]
The next best growth by any of the top five ITOM vendors last year? BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC ) was up a paltry 0�.9% year over year. Even IBM, the undisputed king of ITOM, grew a mere 0.8% in 2012. Granted, IBM's $3.28 billion in ITOM revenue in 2012 handily beats Microsoft's $1.48 billion, as does BMC's $1.92 billion, but the trend is clear: Microsoft is leveraging its enterprise and cloud computing customers better than its ITOM competitors.
- [By Holly LaFon] increased his stake in BMC software Inc. by 736,755 shares in the fourth quarter at about $36 per share, bringing his total holding to 822,460 shares. He opened the position in the third quarter of 2011 with 85,705 shares at $43.85, though he had traded the stock numerous times before. That quarter, the stock had a 30% downturn.
BMC Software makes software that helps IT organizations manage their business services and applications across distributed, mainframe, virtual and the increasingly popular cloud environments. It has the industry�� broadest choice of IT management solutions, that help clients cut costs, reduce risk and achieve their objectives.
BMC has been partnering with firms to increase its effectiveness in cloud-based services and software-as-a-service in recent years. In December it announced it would support Cisco Network Services Manager across its cloud management product line. It also has a strategic alliance with Cisco for more than 25 cloud customers and works with them often when they unveil new products.
The same quarter, BMC also announced its second-generation service solutions that will help IT professionals avoid many of the risks associates with implementing a cloud and enhance the rewards through workshops, architecture and roadmaps.
"Our strategy for success and market leadership is proven, as evidenced by large enterprises standardizing on BMC's universal management platform, the strong demand for our cloud management and Software-as-a-Service solutions, the ongoing expansion of our strategic alliances and the number of multi-product wins across both our businesses," said Bob Beauchamp, BMC's chairman and chief executive officer, in the company�� third-quarter earnings release.
Financially, BMC has a history of strong earnings, revenue and cash flow growth. Revenue has increased each of the last 10 years to a record $2 billion in fiscal 2011, and cash flow reached $743 in 2011, compared to $613 in 20
- [By Dan Caplinger]
But one big element pushing Splunk's stock higher was the buyout offer that rival BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC ) received earlier this month. A group of private investors that includes Bain Capital made the $6.9 billion offer for BMC, and with activist investor Elliott Management having blessed the deal, it's likely to go through. The strategic move establishes the value of companies in the data-analytics space, especially given that BMC had already lost its competitive edge against Splunk and other rivals.
