Company name Ultratech, Inc.
Stock ticker UTEK
Live stock price [stckqut]UTEK[/stckqut]
P/E compared to competitors Fair

MANAGEMENT EXECUTION

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

ANALYSIS

Confident Investor Rating Good
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $45
Target stock price (averages with growth) $75.42
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $73.64
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $42.36

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

Ultratech, Inc., develops, manufactures and markets photolithography, laser thermal processing, and inspection equipment. The Company manufactures for manufacturers of semiconductor devices, including advanced packaging processes and various nanotechnology components, such as thin film head magnetic recording devices (thin film heads or (TFHs)), laser diodes, high-brightness light emitting diodes (HBLEDs) and atomic layer deposition (ALD) for customers located throughout North America, Europe, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and the rest of Asia. The Company supplies step-and-repeat photolithography systems based on one-to-one (1X) imaging technology to customers located throughout North America, Europe and Asia. In December 2012, it purchased certain assets of Cambridge NanoTech, Inc. (Cambridge).

 

Confident Investor comments: Ultratech is a relatively small company so you should be cautious how many small companies that you have in your portfolio. If you are looking for a small company to add though, at this price and at this time, I think that a Confident Investor can confidently invest in this stock.

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

This is not a political site. I try very hard to avoid political issues, especially those that are controversial. The last thing I want people to do is to get bad advice on investing because of political preferences. One of my readers asked my advice on health insurance companies though. The theory was that since so many people thought that health insurance companies were making a ton of profit (one of the reasons for Obamacare), they should be great investments.

My first comment is that you should never buy the stock of a company due to an entire industry. You should evaluate the company by itself and not based on the industry. If you don’t know how to do this, I suggest that you buy my book, The Confident Investor.   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.

My second comment is that you should avoid sector investments. You can buy mutual funds or ETFs that follow a single sector. Avoid putting these into your portfolio. Find the best companies to invest in and then invest in them with a plan. Once again, if you don’t know how to do this, check out my book.

To answer the reader question, I started researching United HealthGroup [stckqut]UNH[/stckqut]. I went to Morningstar for my initial research and used that tool to generate the data for United HealthGroup and its top competitors. Morningstar gave me a list of companies and then I did a bit of quick analysis.

Symbol Revenue Net Income Profit Market Cap
    (M) (M) percentage (M)
UnitedHealth Group Inc UNH $113,700 $5,330 4.69% $72,879
Express Scripts ESRX $107,800 $1,418 1.32% $54,365
WellPoint Inc WLP $64,000 $2,684 4.19% $26,071
Cigna Corp CI $30,500 $1,309 4.29% $22,209
Aetna Inc AET $37,200 $1,637 4.40% $21,017
Humana HUM $39,400 $1,447 3.67% $14,030
Centene Corporation CNC $9,600 $1 0.01% $3,019
WellCare Health Plans, Inc. WCG $7,900 $155 1.96% $2,675
Health Net Inc HNT $11,300 $198 1.75% $2,640
Odontoprev S.A. ODPVY $1,000 $161 16.10% $2,276
Molina Healthcare, Inc. MOH $6,200 $21 0.34% $1,812
 Sum   $428,600 $14,361 3.35%

 

As we can see, the health insurance companies don’t generate that great of a return. These companies average out to 3.35% profit. The S&P500 averaged 16.14%! That means that health insurance companies aren’t just rolling in cash like Michael Moore implies. Taking the profit motive out of healthcare doesn’t seem to be the driving focus of Obamacare.

This article points out the fallacy of following the news to find your investments. While it is worthwhile to research companies that you hear about on the news or read about in the newspaper, just because they sound good there doesn’t make them great investments. The only sound way to make a great investment is to research the company using solid tools.