Making a list

What an ugly market! That may be the most obvious statement I have made today. That said, what may not be so obvious is that if you have some cash and patience, times like these can be very interesting. We are witnessing excellent companies, with strong fundamentals, being sold as if they have some kind terminal disease. There are numerous purchase opportunities developing and we are doing our homework. We have a list that we refer to as our “Farm Team” consisting of stocks we are considering owning, and this list of prospects is getting quite long.

I will emphasize that we are not going to deviate from our discipline of focusing on quality, value and dividends. This discipline has served us well in the past and will again in the future.

Keeping with our baseball analogy, I think we will be promoting several stocks from the Farm Team into the big leagues shortly. I am also pretty sure that we may have a future hall of famer or two on that list!

(Written on 7/11/08)