Bummed that you missed the skyrocketing advance of credit card vendor Visa when it debuted as a stock last month? The 50% move higher in the shares in the first few days paid for a whole lot of shopping sprees among shareholders, you can be sure -- and they could pay with cash, not plastic.
Well fret no more, because this crazy market is giving you another shot right now with the shares of the company behind a different credit card issuer: American Express. And the author of a brilliant new book about buying super-discounted stocks says this is one idea you should definitely not leave home without.
Vitaliy Katsenelson, a Denver portfolio manager whose cagey Active Value Investing was published last year, says Amex is one of the “cleanest” financial stocks you can buy right now, not to mention one of the cheapest. Its value is down, he says, because it is mistakenly lumped in both with banks and with companies that will suffer in a recession. He says that, to the contrary, Amex is in the virtually the same business as Visa and Mastercard, whose own shares are up a stunning 406% since they debuted in mid-2006: They just take fees from merchants and earn interest on cardholders’ balances.
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