stock pickers

FAIR ISAAC CORP. $24.38, symbol FIC on New York, rose this week after it announced a number of restructuring measures. The company’s main business is its FICO software, which lets creditors use information about a customer to calculate a credit score. Fair Isaac will sell more than a dozen non-strategic businesses. These include its government research, advertising and veterinary diagnostics businesses, as well as some of its telecommunications applications. It has already sold its insurance-bill review business to Mitchell International. The company will also cut 420 jobs (out of 2,824 employees) and consolidate facilities. In total, Fair Isaac aims to reduce annual costs by about $100 million through the restructuring....

We created our Stock Pickers Digest Hotline to keep you up-todate on our recommendations, and tell you when they change. We also make the Hotlines available to you on the Internet, so you’ll never need to worry about missing a Hotline. As a subscriber, you can receive our Stock Pickers Digest Hotline every week (48 or more time per year) by phone or email. To get the Hotline by phone, simply call the current Hotline number, which appears each month on the top of our front page. You can also email your email address to us, with the name and address under which you subscribe. Just send it once and we will email the full text of the Hotline to you each week, as long as you continue to subscribe....

Before letting any investment rule for tax shelters play a role in your retirement investing decisions, make sure it makes sense for you in today’s market. For instance, one long-standing retirement investing rule for tax shelters says you should hold fixed-return investments, like bonds, in your RRSP and hold stocks outside your RRSP. Its rationale is two-fold. First, bonds are safer than stocks because they guarantee repayment of principal....

BAFFINLAND IRON MINES, $3.65, symbol BIM on Toronto, reached as high as $4.40 this week after it reported a near tripling of mineral reserves at its 100%-owned Mary River iron deposits on Baffin Island in Nunavut. Results from the latest exploration program now indicate total proven and probable reserves of 365 million tons, up from 120 million tons. The high grades of this deposit should let the mine achieve production grades of 66% to 67% iron for at least the first five years of its estimated 25-year life. Baffinland is still a buy for aggressive investors. CELTIC MINERALS $0.50, symbol CME on Toronto, has begun a 2,000-meter diamond drilling program at its 100%-owned Muscocho nickel-copper-cobalt-platinum property in eastern Quebec. In the 1950s, a Noranda drilling program revealed promising nickel-copper showings on this property. Results from preliminary fieldwork completed by Celtic in December, 2007 confirmed high grades of copper-nickel-cobalt mineralization....

Like any year, 2008 could turn out good or bad for investors. Everything I see leads me to believe it will be a year of rising stock prices. But it may be a difficult year for aggressive investors who fail to apply our risk-cutting approach to investment. First, the positives. The next U.S. presidential election takes place in November 2008. As long-time readers know, I view the U.S. presidential election year cycle as the single best indicator for North American stock prices — Canada as much as the United States. Historically, stock prices are much likelier to rise in the two years leading up to a U.S. presidential election than in the two subsequent years....

At Stock Pickers Digest, we look for aggressive investments that combine high potential with low risk. It’s a difficult job. All aggressive investments — ours included — expose you to more risk than you find in the conservative investments we recommend in The Successful Investor, our flagship advisory. (That’s why we advise you to limit your aggressive investments to a third of your total portfolio.) But we try to cut your risk by applying the conservative approach of The Successful Investor. That has the welcome side effect of making takeovers far more common among our buys....

In this month’s issue, you’ll find seven new buys which we first recommended in our service for aggressive investors, Stock Pickers Digest. Their subsequent gains ranged as high as 1,920.0%, but we feel each of them has further gains ahead. The Successful Investor has two main goals. First, we explain our 3-pronged investment approach, which consists of investing mainly in well-established companies, spreading your investments out across the five main economic sectors, and downplaying investments that are in the broker/media limelight. Second, we provide you with conservative investment recommendations that you can use to implement our investment approach....

NOVATEL INC. $49.74 (Nasdaq symbol NGPS; SI Rating: Speculative) (403-295-4500; www.novatel.com; Shares outstanding: 8.6 million; Market cap: $428.7 million) is now the subject of a friendly $50 U.S. per share cash takeover bid from Swedish technology group Hexagon AB. Hexagon is a global technology group with strong market positions in measurement technologies and polymers. NovAtel has supplied Hexagon subsidiary Leica Geosystems with satellite navigation systems since 2002. We first recommended NovAtel in the June 2001 issue of Stock Pickers Digest at $1.62 U.S. That’s a gain of 2,986.4% over the past six years....

So far, the market downturn seems to have stayed within the limits we envisioned for it in our July 27 Stock Pickers Digest Hotline, and last month’s issue. However, no one can consistently predict the market’s future. That’s why you need to take a portfolio approach to your investments, including any aggressive investments you hold. Our aggressive recommendations vary widely in risk, but we stay away from “all-or-nothing” aggressive stocks that can evaporate overnight. We prefer aggressive investments that can prosper on a variety of fronts....

In our July 27 Stock Pickers Hotline, I said the market downturn that had just begun could carry on till October and knock another 5% to as much as 15% off the market indexes. That’s still my view. I doubt that the liquidity problems are going to spread. I do think that subprime lending is dead for five years or more. This will hurt real estate and related industries. But ultimately it could lead to new profit opportunities in other areas. That’s because former subprime borrowers will quit overextending themselves on housing and instead spend their money on consumer goods, investments, education for their children and so on....