Yes, I’m going to write some about royalty investments again — and about a personal buy that I just made in the royalty space as a new speculation.

First, I do want to share with you that I put the results of our Annual Review into a new spreadsheet that has moved into the “Irregulars Performance” slot on the website — so you can see those thirty or so stocks that I’ve suggested that are split among watchlist, core and speculative ideas.

As I noted earlier in the week, we’ve also seen watchlist stock Dole Food (DOLE) get some unwanted (positive) attention from Barron’s that drove the shares higher before I had a chance to get comfortable enough to buy it. I’m still watching it, hopefully those folks who caused the Barron’s pop will lose interest and move on as the story is likely to take some time to play out.

And for those who have been asking me about Dan Ferris’ new pick for his Extreme Value newsletter over at Stansberry that they’ve been pre-teasing this week, I don’t think he gave enough clues to identify which stock it is — I know he has liked Intel (INTC) in the past as a “world dominator” in semiconductors, and this tease is all about the next wave of advanced semiconductors and some kind of younger tech stock that’s benefitting and that is also, presumably cheap.

So my guess (and that’s a wild guess) is that he’s probably recommending one of the semiconductor testing equipment stocks — I don’t know enough about the sector to pick the strongest company, but among the stocks I do know of that make equipment to test chips that should be in demand as the next generation of chips evolves are FormFactor (FORM), KLA-Tencor (KLAC), Advantest (ATE), Applied Materials (AMAT), LTX-Credence (LTXC) and Teradyne (TER). The cheapest of those by most of the conventional value investor metrics are KLAC and TER, so I’d guess that those would rise to the top of any list that Ferris was making, but, as I said, that’s just a guess — until he starts teasing with a few more clues I’ll be in the dark on that one.

My new personal buy today is not ready to be a recommendation by any stretch of the imagination (only about half of my personally owned stocks ...