Topic: How To Invest

Good morning: I have been following your newsletters diligently for one-and-a-half years. Thank you for your good advice. I wonder if you could give me a brief opinion on the following two stocks: Alpha Natural Resources and Codexis. Thanks.

Article Excerpt

Alpha Natural Resources, $20.76, symbol ANR on New York (Shares outstanding: 226.3 million; Market cap: $4.7 billion, www.alphanr.com), mines and processes thermal coal for electric utilities (86% of volume) and metallurgical coal for steelmakers (14%). The company has 60 mines and 14 processing plants in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Its mines have about 615 million tons of reserves. The stock has dropped over the last year, along with many coal stocks. That mostly reflects investor concerns about a slower global economy. But the company’s longer-term outlook is positive, especially as China, India and South Korea build more coal-fired power plants. Alpha Natural trades at 8.0 times its forecast 2012 earnings of $2.60 a share. Alpha Natural Resources is okay to hold. A: Codexis, $5.33, symbol CDXS on Nasdaq (Shares outstanding: 35.9 million; Market cap: $191.3 million, www.codexis.com), makes enzymes and other biochemical catalysts for the production of ethanol, biodiesel and drugs. (Catalysts speed up chemical reactions without being changed themselves.) Right now, Codexis…