4 Interesting 13F Buys (Q1-08)

May 15, 2008

I'll try as much as possible to keep this tradition up every quarter. Today is the day that the 13F's are released for funds managing over $100m. Below is a list of 4 picks that I find interesting:

1. WellCare Health Plans (WCG) — Pabrai Investments, Fairholme Fund — I don't know much about healthcare companies, but Wellcare seems like it might be a very low risk, high uncertainty situation. Recently, a summary of Pabrai's thesis on Wellcare was posted on the Value Investing Congress Blog. Using the last quarter with information available, WCG is trading at an EV/EBIT of about 1.8x (!).

2. EchoStar Corp. (SATS) — Greenlight Capital, Fairholme Fund (spin-out) — Spun off from Dish Network (formerly EchoStar) back in January. Has multiple holdings, including a set-top box business, SlingMedia, and 7 satellites. SATS could be extremely undervalued if you add up the valuations of its separate companies. See the VIC Writeup for more details. Charlie Ergan, Chairman and major shareholder, is extremely smart and should never be underestimated.

3. WellPoint Inc. (::yahoo("WLP")::) — Springhouse Capital, Greenlight Capital, Fairholme Fund, Berkshire Hathaway, Baupost Group — Quite the lineup. Another beat-down healthcare company, but with less uncertainty. If you net out cash and unrelated investments, enterprise value is about $16B. Pre-tax income in the past year was $5.3B. So, even if WLP has lower earnings going forward, it's trading for only 3x EBIT. It may pay to find out. (By the looks of it, healthcare companies must have a thing for logos with little swively waves in them.)

4. American Woodmark (::yahoo("AMWD")::) — Stadium Capital, Akre Capital, Fine Capital — A manufacturer and distributer of wood cabinets. Trading at about 8x TTM pre-tax free cash flow. It looks like they haven't done well in the last few years, but if they can get back on track this is a very cheap stock. I don't know a lot about wood prices, but it looks like gross margins have fluctuated widely in the past.

13F buys archive: Third Quarter 2007; Fourth Quarter 2007 Related link: Search for filings on the SEC website

Disclosure: We own a small position in SATS. This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security.