Company name Verisign, Inc.
Stock ticker VRSN
Live stock price [stckqut]VRSN[/stckqut]
P/E compared to competitors Good

MANAGEMENT EXECUTION

Employee productivity Good
Sales growth Poor
EPS growth Good
P/E growth Poor
EBIT growth Good

ANALYSIS

Confident Investor Rating Fair
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $95.08
Target stock price (averages with growth) $114.46
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $81.59
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $79.58

The following company description is from Google Finance: http://www.google.com/finance?q=vrsn

VeriSign, Inc. (VeriSign) is a provider of Internet infrastructure services. The Company provides network confidence and availability for mission-critical Internet services, such as domain name registry services and infrastructure assurance services. Its service capabilities enable real-time name resolution for a number of global top level domains (TLDs), enable domain name registration through registrars, and provide security intelligence and cloud-based network availability services to enterprise customers. It has one reportable segment is Naming Services, which consists of Registry Services and Network Intelligence and Availability (NIA) Services. It has operations inside as well as outside the United States (U.S.). Registry Services operates the authoritative directory of all .com, .net, .cc, .tv, and .name domain names and the back-end systems for all .gov, .jobs and .edu domain names.

 

Confident Investor comments: At this time, I think that a Confident Investor can cautiously invest in Verisign, Inc. as long as the price is correct. Most of the fundamentals of this company are good but there are some concerns.

If you would like to understand how to evaluate companies like I do on this site, please read my book, The Confident Investor.

For owners of my book, “The Confident Investor” I offer the following analysis (you must be logged in to this site as a book owner in order to see the following analysis). If you have registered and cannot see the balance of this article, make sure you are logged in and refresh your browser.
[s2If current_user_can(s2member_level1)]
In order to assist you in using the techniques of this book, the values that I used when calculating the Manual pricing above were:

Stock price at the time of the calculation: $61.45

Growth: 0.16

Current EPS (TTM): $2.26

P/E: 27

Future EPS Calc: $4.74

Future Stock Price Calc: $128.16

Target stock price: $79.57

I hope that this makes you a better investor. [/s2If]

Company name GFI Group Inc.
Stock ticker GFIG
Live stock price [stckqut]GFIG[/stckqut]
Confident Investor Rating Poor

The following company description is from Google Finance: http://www.google.com/finance?q=gfig

GFI Group Inc. (GFI) is a provider of wholesale brokerage services, clearing services and electronic execution and trading support products for global financial markets. The Company provides brokerage and trade execution services, clearing services, market data and trading platform and other software products to institutional customers in markets for a range of fixed income, financial, equity and commodity instruments. The Company provides execution services for its institutional wholesale customers by either matching their trading needs with counterparties having reciprocal interests or directing their orders to an exchange or other trading venue. It offers its customers a hybrid brokerage approach, combining a range of telephonic and electronic trade execution services. The Company operates in four segments: Americas Brokerage; Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Brokerage; Asia Brokerage, and Clearing and Backed Trading.
Confident Investor comments: At this price and at this time, I do not think that a Confident Investor can confidently invest in GFI Group Inc. It is not possible to confidently invest in a company that is not currently profitable.
If you would like to understand how to evaluate companies like I do on this site, please read my book, The Confident Investor.

target stock price

target stock priceUsing mathematical analysis to determine the target stock price, we can help to insure a great return on investment. If our analysis shows that target stock price is significantly above today’s stock price, the potential ROI is much better.

My book, The Confident Investor, which is available wherever books are sold, can help you decide the target stock price of a company. This should aid you in earning a profit.

If the target stock price is not high enough compared to today’s price, you may do well to find a different investment with a higher target stock price. Much of this analysis will require concepts that are more fully described in my book. To this end, I am restricting the technique discussion to registered readers. If you haven’t read my book, The Confident Investor, then you may not understand how to find the target stock price. In fact, if you haven’t purchased the book and registered here on this site as a book owner then you won’t be able to see this example. If you have registered and cannot see the balance of this article, make sure you are logged in and refresh your browser.

[s2If current_user_can(s2member_level1)] A quick example will make this calculation easier to understand. Let’s pretend that you found a company that has a TWCA of 13%. You know that the company is growing fast enough to achieve your 10% minimum target. Also, pretend the company has an EPS of 6 and a P/E of 20.

Without even looking up the company, you know that P/E multiplied by EPS will give the current stock price, which is $120. The first check is to calculate the Future Value of the EPS in 5 years. Using the format prevalent in most spreadsheets, this would be typed in as: =FV(13%,5,,-6). This gives you an EPS of $11.05.

Assume the P/E growth is stagnant for the next 5 years. This means that the company will have a price per share of 20 times $11.05 or $221.00 (or $221.09 if you use a spreadsheet and do not round the numbers).

Now, you must find out what the price of a stock is today that could grow to $221 at the minimum acceptable growth rate of 10%. You can find the Present Value of that stock price with: =PV(10%,5,,-221.09) which is $137.28.

Based on this calculation, you know the company might grow from $120 per share to $137.28 and still deliver a 10% return on your long-term investment! Therefore, in addition to your desired growth, you are buying this company on sale for a discount of $17.28 per share.[/s2If]

You can purchase my book wherever books are sold such as AmazonBarnes and Noble, and Books A Million. It is available in e-book formats for NookKindle, and iPad.

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