Month: March 2010 (Page 7)

Zac Bissonnette over at Blogging Stocks has an article about Sardar Biglari of Steak ‘n Shake trying to emulate Warren Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway. He starts off the story with “done an admirable job of turning around operations at Steak ‘n Shake” which I have a hard time accepting.

By nearly every measure that matters for me to be confident in a company, SNS is bad.  I haven’t bothered to do an analysis of the company because they are at the bottom of every scale that I measure them on. In fact, as a company the only way they could score less is to not be profitable! Rather than do a reverse stock split to bump the price up to the hundreds, they should spend time running a business that is growing and profitable. While their revenue trend isn’t terrible, their earnings growth is a sin! I don’t invest in companies that cannot figure out how to grow.

Here are the first few thoughts that Zac shared. Click through to read the rest.

Sardar Biglari has done an admirable job of turning around operations at Steak ‘n Shake (SNS), but over the past few months, he’s made a few less-than-subtle efforts to imitate his idol Warren Buffett.

Back in December, he announced that he would do a 1-for-20 reverse split of the stock to boost the share price over $300 and “dissuade speculators.” “We are attempting to eliminate those who erroneously think that it is easier for a $10 stock to go to $20 than a $200 one to go to $400,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders.

The New York Post has called him a “wannabe Warren.” Last month he made headlines when he announced that he would be changing the name of the company to Biglari Holdings. C.L. King analyst Michael W. Gallo wrote that “While progress over the last couple of quarters has been encouraging, we believe the key determinant of value creation going forward will be the success of Steak ‘n Shake in transitioning into a conglomerate-like holding company similar to the Berkshire Hathaway model.”

Editor’s update: On April 8, 2010, Steak ‘n Shake changed its name to Biglari Holdings. I am not going to change the article as written but I am adding the tag for Biglari Holdings [stckqut]bh[/stckqut] so that readers can track this company. The stock symbol SNS no longer is associated with Steak ‘n Shake nor Biglari Holdings.