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I am currently going through my Watch List to ensure that each company still deserves to be on the list. Because of the number of companies on my list, I am going to try to knock out 2 per weekday.

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 Good
EBIT growth Good

ANALYSIS

Confident Investor Rating Good
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $83.55
Target stock price (averages with growth) $97.67
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $63.3
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $78.96

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

Balchem Corporation 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 operates in three segments: Specialty Products, Food, Pharma & Nutrition and Animal Nutrition & Health. The Food, Pharma & Nutrition (FPN) segment provides microencapsulation solutions to a variety of applications in food, pharmaceutical and nutritional ingredients. The Company’s Specialty Products segment operates in industry as ARC Specialty Products. Ethylene oxide, at the 100% level, is sold as a sterilant gas, primarily for use in the health care industry. The Company’s Animal Nutrition & Health segment provides the animal nutrition and health markets with products derived from the Company’s microencapsulation, chelation, and basic choline chloride technologies.

 

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

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: $59.2

Growth: 0.17

Current EPS (TTM): $1.45

P/E: 40

Future EPS Calc: $3.17

Future Stock Price Calc: $127.16

Target stock price: $78.95

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

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ID-100203460The beginning of the year is when it seems like every financial website puts out its top or worst stocks. In that vein, I offer my 15 recommended stocks for 2014 – or at least the first half of the year. I cannot list the worst stocks, as there are too many of those to list. I can at least list the 15 recommended stocks that will give you a good basis for the first half of 2014.

Many sites do all year lists, but I am only committing to this list for the first 6 months. There is a great reason for this. It is almost impossible to predict the market farther out than 6 month. In fact, it is quite possible for the market to do a massive correction and even this list would be a fallacy. There is always some risk with any investment and you are encouraged to read this site’s disclaimer before acting on this list.

I would expect all of these companies to maintain their status as Good Companies on my Watch List. I would not expect all of them to make a top 15 recommended stocks list at the end of June. Some of them will grow a bit slower than I expect, and a couple of the 15 recommended stocks are probably going to lose money. As Peter Lynch famously said:

“In this business if you’re good, you’re right six times out of ten. You’re never going to be right nine times out of ten.”

By Peter’s standards, I hope to right on this list with 9 of these picks. I don’t expect all 15 recommended stocks to be massive growth stocks in the year. I also think the list is successful if the list of 15 beats the S&P 500 and the Dow30. In July, perhaps I will publish a list for the second half of the year.

If we would go back in time (starting from December 1) and buy the 15 recommended stocks 3 years ago our portfolio would have grown very nicely. These stocks would have appreciated by 73.35% year over year. They would have grown 184.79% over the last three years. These stocks would have beaten the market (as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average) for the last three years by 330.57%. In the past year, these stocks would have beaten the market by 212.17%. With that track record, we should expect good results in the next 6 months.

All of the stocks on this list are rated as Good Companies using the method that I describe in my book The Confident Investor.  You can purchase my book wherever books are sold such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books A Million. It is available in e-book formats for Nook, Kindle, and iPad.

The 15 recommended stocks were chosen from Good Companies on my Watch List. This means we already know they are fairly well managed and have a history of solid growth. While all of the stocks on the Watch List are Good Companies, these 15 recommended stocks seem to be the most well setup for aggressive growth in the first half of 2014.

The 15 recommended stocks for the first half of 2014 also performed very well over the past year and the past 3 years. As I have written before, the past is not a perfect indicator of the future, but it is probably the best indicator that we have to use.

I didn’t try overly hard to make this list of 15 recommended stocks to be a balanced portfolio covering multiple industries. I am happy to report that it isn’t a terrible unbalance. The most glaring omission is that it is very light in banking and in consumer technology. I simply could not find a banking stock that was worth the risk compared to other industries. Also, the consumer technology vertical is simply not performing that well right now. I anticipate that trend to continue for the next few months at least.

It might be possible to criticize this list by its heavy reliance on healthcare and retail. That would be fair but, once again, I wasn’t trying to get a perfectly balanced portfolio.

If you want a more balanced portfolio, you may want to consider some of the Honorable Mention stocks at the end of the list. Also, I always maintain that you should have approximately 30% of your portfolio invested in index funds. These funds should be divided by large and small cap funds, an index bond fund, and an index international fund. This would help to balance your portfolio.

You could also look at the Watch List of stocks. These stocks have shown that they are well-run companies. If you are concerned about a balanced portfolio, I suggest that you compliment the 15 recommended stocks with a couple stocks from the Watch List.

The list of 15 recommended stocks for the first half of 2014

  • ABMD
  • ALXN
  • BCPC
  • BLK
  • BWLD
  • CBI
  • CERN
  • GPOR
  • PCLN
  • QCOR
  • SAM
  • TMO
  • TSCO
  • UA
  • ULTA

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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 Fair
EPS growth Good
P/E growth Poor
EBIT growth Good

ANALYSIS

Confident Investor Rating Fair
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $48.53
Target stock price (averages with growth) $56.04
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $41.76
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $46.22

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

Balchem Corporation (Balchem) 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., Aberco, Inc., Balchem BV, Balchem Trading BV and Balchem Italia Srl. The Food, Pharma & Nutrition (FPN) segment provides microencapsulation solutions to a variety of applications in food, pharmaceutical and nutritional ingredients to enhance performance of nutritional fortification, processing, mixing, and packaging applications and shelf-life. Balchem’s Specialty Products segment operates in industry as ARC Specialty Products.

 

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. I am leaving this company on my Watch List since it barely missed a Good company rating. Also, my list is very low on industrials and I am hesitant to cut one at this time.

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

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I realize that Pinterest and Twitter are not public enterprises so you cannot truly take advantage of this Infographic in your investing strategy. Many investment advisers suggest that the investor should choose companies that have a “moat” around their business. While I don’t fully subscribe to that theory, there is no question that businesses that have a very strong advantage in the marketplace tend to be more profitable. Great examples of large moat companies are Ansys [stckqut]anss[/stckqut] and Balchem [stckqut]bcpc[/stckqut] which appear on my Watch List and have for quite some time.

The below infographic appears to show that Facebook [stckqut]FB[/stckqut] is currently the leader in generating shopping activity at its partners’ sites but its moat is not very wide. Pinterest is a relatively new company and it is already showing signs of impacting shopping behavior.

The following infographic was found on Blog Herald but appears to originally come from richrelevance. I did not do this study nor does the following image belong to me.

Shopping-Traffic-From-Social-Networks-Infographic

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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 Good
EBIT growth Good

ANALYSIS

Confident Investor Rating Good
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $47.17
Target stock price (averages with growth) $54.66
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $39.44
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $45.46

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

Balchem Corporation (Balchem) 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., Aberco, Inc., Balchem BV, Balchem Trading BV and Balchem Italia Srl. The Food, Pharma & Nutrition (FPN) segment provides microencapsulation solutions to a variety of applications in food, pharmaceutical and nutritional ingredients to enhance performance of nutritional fortification, processing, mixing, and packaging applications and shelf-life. Balchem’s Specialty Products segment operates in industry as ARC Specialty Products.

 

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