Stock Gumshoe

OK, so moving on … this one took a little more time, but I think we’ve worked out the ‘The Canary Warf Estate” so it can join the first four secret socieities we’ve sniffed out from the Porter Stansberry Investment Advisory teaser.

Here’s what this one owns:

Part of Canary Wharf (a big London office development).

“14 office buildings in New York, 2 in Boston, 32 in Washington DC, and 22 in Los Angeles.”

129 “power generating stations.”

“over 6,000 miles of power transmission lines.”

And, to whet your appetite, “They have “given shareholders 884% gains since the beginning of 2000.”

Other specific clues?

49% year over year earnings growth in the last quarter.

Shareholder return of 513% since “the beginning of 2003.”

So what are we looking at here?

It’s yet another holding company, but this one’s a little bit different — it’s primarily an investment management firm, it Canadian, and it’s …

Brookfield Asset Management (BAM)

BAM! Love that ticker symbol. And we’ve seen this one teased before, back when Navellier was calling this the next Berkshire Hathaway (or calling Bruce Flatt the next Warren Buffett … I forget which). Navellier could well have sold it since then, that was a long time ago.

Brookfield, formerly known as Brascan, is known for a lot of things — a strong presence in Brazil, including a homebuilding firm that went public down there in the last year or so, a nice portfolio of hydroelectric power, lots of timber, and, of course, lots of real estate holdings, including the aforementioned piece of Canary Wharf.

Like Macquarie in Australia, Brookfield focuses on infrastructure and helps investors, especially institutional investorts, to invest in infrastructure assets, especially things like electrical power (almost all of their power generation capacity is hydroelectric, too, which also has the benefit of being clean and green). The company itself owns interests in a lot of these properties, but they also leverage their influence, I suppose, because they also run specialty investment funds that invest in more or less the same kinds of assets.

I’ve liked this company for quite some time, but don’t own shares — they’ve always seemed a little pricey to me, though that’s not perhaps that fair. The PE is quite high, with a forward PE of about 37, much higher than the trailing PE of 20 or so, which must mean they sold some assets this year and I’m guesing that analysts are somewhat nervous about the growth potential of their real estate and timber holdings. Among the other holding companies we’ve looked at here BAM stands out as pricey partly because they’ve got a more asset-light model, as an asset manager, so that’s why we see a price/book ratio of 3.6, dramatically higher than Berkshire, Icahn Enterprises, or Loews.

I think part of my hesitation about the price of Brookfield comes because I haven’t taken the time to really understand the value of their holdings, many of which are probably on the books at lower than market prices … it’s starting to look like August might have been a real buying opportunity in this one, since that’s the only real hiccup in its shares that we’ve seen since 2000.

Any Brookfield fans or investors out there? Let us know what you think — again, it’s not much of a secret anymore, thanks to that incredible run of the last seven years, and it’s not much of a society, but it certainly is a well-respected, profitable asset manager with a pretty compelling (to me) portfolio of infrastructure, power, and real estate investments.

full disclosure: I current own shares of Berkshire Hathaway, but not any other firm or investment noted above.

I got an email solicitation from Louis Navellier the other day, one of dozens we all get every day from various investment advisors, and to those who signed up for a trial of his Emerging Growth investment advisory service he promised something special:

The name of the company that might be the next Berkshire Hathaway.

The promise, as always with these letters, was dramatic — “Imagine investing in Dell back in 1990″ as he recommended, you’d have turned $100,000 into $4,000,000. Of course, these letters always cherry pick their best ideas from the past 20 or 30 years, or the best ideas they might have had had the service existed, to prove their brilliance. The idea that you could have invested in Starbucks or Dell or Berkshire Hathaway before they grew is extraordinarily compelling, probably compelling enough for many folks to take the free trial of a newsletter.

But you don’t have to take a free trial of any newsletter to find out what stock he’s promising info on in this email, I’ll tell you.

That’s why this blog exists.

Here are the clues/teases provided that we had to work from:

• The “next Buffett” is named Bruce. He’s 41.
• His company was formed in 1895 to invest in latin american mines.
• Today, they buy “ports, pipes, railroads, timber and hydroelectric dams.”
• “A few days ago, he walked away from a deal to buy a bankrupt outlet mall business.”
• Operating cash flow per share grew 35% last year, and 45% in 2005.
• “The company is virtually unknown to individual investors and brokers, although pension funds looking for income love the stock.” (I’d dispute this)
• The stock has tripled in the last three years.
• The company provides exposure to power-transmission in Chile, timber in Canada, and shopping centers in Brazil.

So what do we have? The stock gumshoe tells you: this company is undoubtedly Brookfield Asset Management (BAM).

BAM, the Canadian asset manager that does indeed own all those things, and does indeed have a CEO named Bruce Flatt. It walked away from an offer to buy Mills Corp, operators of giant outlet malls (they were outbid).

Whether or not he’s the next Warren Buffett, and whether BAM is the next BRK … well, that’s a question you’ll have to answer on your own.

On my other blog, by the way, I have written about BAM before — and I’ve been tempted to buy for many of the same reasons Navellier is touting the company, but I haven’t caught it at a price I’ve been comfortable with yet.

So there you have it — make your decisions about choosing an investment newsletter or advisor based on their track record, their portfolio, their writing style, or the deal they offer you … but don’t sign up to get the name of a company they’re teasing you with in an email — that’s what the Stock Gumshoe is for!

I don’t currently own shares in any company mentioned in this writeup. I don’t have anything against Louis Navellier or any of his services, and I don’t subscribe to any of them.