Company name Union Pacific Corporation
Stock ticker UNP
Live stock price [stckqut]UNP[/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) $177.53
Target stock price (averages with growth) $235.79
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $195.58
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $163.52

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

Union Pacific Corporation (UPC) owns transportation companies. Its principal operating company, Union Pacific Railroad Company, links 23 states in the western 66% of the country. Union Pacific Railroad Company’s business mix includes agricultural products, automotive, chemicals, energy, industrial products and intermodal. Union Pacific Railroad Company connects with Canada’s rail systems and is the railroad serving six gateways to Mexico. Union Pacific Railroad Company (UPRR) is a Class I railroad operating in the United States. In June 2012, the Company’s wholly owned subsidiary, PS Technology (PST), acquired the Yard Control Systems division of Ansaldo STS USA.

 

Confident Investor comments: At this time, I think that a Confident Investor can cautiously invest in this stock 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: $157.32

Growth: 0.12

Current EPS (TTM): $8.79

P/E: 17

Future EPS Calc: $15.49

Future Stock Price Calc: $263.34

Target stock price: $163.52

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

I recently came across this list on Forbes on the largest 25 tax payers. Forbes does a bit of analysis on each of them. It is probably worth your time to jump over, but I thought I would give the highlights here:

 

Rank of tax expense

Company

Symbol

Effective Tax Rate

1 ExxonMobil XOM 39%
2 Chevron Corporation CVX 43%
3 Apple Inc. AAPL 25%
4 Wells Fargo & Co. WFC 31.2%
5 JP Morgan Chase & Co. JPM 26%
6 Wal-Mart Stores WMT 31%
7 ConocoPhillips COP 51.5%
8 Berkshire Hathaway Inc. BRK 28%
9 IBM IBM 24%
10 Microsoft Corporation MSFT 22.8%
11 Philip Morris International Inc. PM 29.5%
12 Goldman Sachs GS 33%
14 Comcast Corporation CMCS 32%
14 The Procter & Gamble Co. PG 23.5%
15 Johnson & Johnson JNJ 23.7%
16 Intel Corporation INTC 23.6%
17 Occidental Petroleum Corp. OXY 42%
18 UnitedHealth Group UHG 35.9%
19 The Walt Disney Company DIS 32.7%
20 AT&T T 27.8%
21 Oracle ORCL 21.4%
22 The Coca-Cola Company KO 23.1%
23 The Home Depot Inc. HD 37.2%
24 McDonald’s MCD 32.4%
25 Google GOOG 19.4%

While you are enjoying the beginning of summer with a 3-day weekend. Please do not forget why you are not working today.

Remember those who served. All gave some and some gave all they had.

This is a message to my StockTwits followers that is prompted by StockTwits’ change in policy that went into effect today, 3/1/2013.

To date, I have been communicating to my StockTwits followers primarily via Twitter. If I put a dollar ($) symbol in front of the stock symbol on Twitter, StockTwits would pick up that change and repost the tweet on StockTwits. StockTwits is a great service that is focused on stock information in its community. As of today, this linking between the Twitter and StockTwits seems to be turned off.

I have about 250 followers on StockTwits and over 15,000 followers on Twitter. I will try to cross-pollinate my comments across the two services but my first priority has to be Twitter. If you are following me on StockTwits and NOT following me on Twitter, you may wish to follow me on Twitter. I value my followers on StockTwits greatly and I will do my best to cross-pollinate posts but I am sure that some conversations will be lost.

My Twitter page is https://twitter.com/ConfidentInvest.

Here is the announcement that I received today from StockTwits:

Dear StockTwits Member,

This email contains an important product announcement that impacts your StockTwits account.

Effective today, March 1, you will no longer be able to post to your StockTwits account via Twitter by including a $TICKER or $$ in your message. All messages you want to share on StockTwits need to be posted directly to StockTwits at StockTwits.com, using our browser extensions or API partners.

We continue to work with Twitter in other ways, you can still automatically send messages you share on StockTwits to your linked Twitter account (or your linked Facebook and LinkedIn accounts).

Much has been written over the last several months about how Twitter has changed their developer rules and, like many other developers, these new rules have forced us to make changes in order to continue to deliver a great experience to you and all of our users.

We know this changes the way some of our members use our service – since we announced this change earlier this year we have helped many members set up tools like our Chrome or Firefox Browser Extensions or our HootSuite plug in to minimize any impact on the way they work, while ensuring their best stock and market ideas continue to be seen on StockTwits.

If you have any questions or we can help you please email us at support@stocktwits.com or contact any team member on StockTwits.

Sincerely,

StockTwits

 

Company name Balchem Corporation
Stock ticker BCPC
Live stock price [stckqut]BCPC[/stckqut]
P/E compared to competitors Fair
MANAGEMENT EXECUTION
Employee productivity Good
Sales growth Good
EPS growth Good
P/E growth Poor
EBIT growth Good
ANALYSIS
Confident Investor Rating Good
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $50.7
Target stock price (averages with growth) $56.6
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $38.58
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $46.29

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

Balchem Corporation (Balchem), incorporated in 1967, is engaged in the development, manufacture and marketing of specialty performance ingredients and products for the food, nutritional, feed, pharmaceutical and medical sterilization industries. The Company has three reportable segments: Specialty Products, Food, Pharma & Nutrition, and Animal Nutrition & Health. The Company sells its products through its own sales force, independent distributors and sales agents. The Company operates five wholly owned domestic subsidiaries, such as BCP Ingredients, Inc. (BCP), Balchem Minerals Corporation (BMC), BCP Saint Gabriel, Inc. (BCP St. Gabriel), Chelated Minerals Corporation (CMC) and Aberco, Inc. (Aberco). In June 2010, the Company acquired Aberco, Inc.

Confident Investor comments: At this price and at this time, I think that a Confident Investor can confidently invest in this stock.