Many thanks to Business Week for providing this contrarian investor with loads of leads and interesting companies to research.
A recent article "Five Stocks to Flee" listed 4 no brainers and one interesting Ticker symbol FGP.
Being a third generation snoop and first generation know-it-all, I just had to see why BW hated Ferrell Gas Partners (the Blue Rhino guys), sellers of Propane and Propane accessories ("That smell is added by man"). For those of you not fans of animated TV drama, this is a nod to the creators of "King of the Hill" who find Austin a rich source of story materials. With gas prices in the news, this stock struck me as a hidden gem, perhaps a TXU in the making.
It meets my personal criteria of having a reasonable P/E, positive margins, and a dividend. I also see the guys that work for FGP come into town for their weekly meeting, very sober fellows all. They book my local rent-a-room conference center every Friday like clockwork. So I kept digging.
It seems the key problem may not be the business fundamentals but their website. Math is a harsh mistress, and using someone else's calculator on your website, is a huge risk. The electric blue Ferrell website includes a link to a third party industry calculator so that the savvy homeowner can see just how much they can save by using propane appliances instead of electric.
I dug out my electric and gas bills to see what rates I am currently paying. Well, I could not make heads or tails out of the figures (all the line items seem to be fees and taxes) so I used the geographic norms offered by the calculator. Poor FGP, the calculator yields a lower annual cost for electricity than for propane.
When we lived in snow country folks played the cord-wood game every winter, trying to dollar-cost-average their woodpile so as to brag to their neighbor how much less they paid for their split hardwood. I have heard similar over the fence discussions here in Twister country regarding the various pro's and con's of electric vs solar, gray water vs rainwater, charcoal vs mesquite, and a hole in the ground vs geothermal. Everyone has their personal favorites.
I did find a home energy-savings calculator that did suggest moving to gas appliances to save money, the one set up by those mavens of user-friendly web design the US Govt.
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