Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Is BP A Good Buy?

Today I got an email inquiry from a fellow private investor and longtime reader of my blog.  He wanted my opinion on whether BP is a good buy given its current troubles. Here's my reply in its entirety. 

Hey! You've definitely got the right mindset. Buying a beaten-down stock is often a winning play but I just don't know enough about BP's other operations to say whether this is true. Looking at some stats on Reuters for BP . . .

5yr EPS growth is abysmally low - bad
Cap spending growth exceeds industry average - bad
ROE 5yr ave is 23% - good

And from Yahoo Finance . . .
Long-term debt less than 2X net income, thus manageable - good
Free cash flow is positive - good

I wouldn't buy BP given the two bad items above. I also haven't read their annual report and thus I'm not sure what their total reserves or extraction costs look like. Those are the two most important factors in estimating a commodity producer's future profitability. 

BTW, thanks for giving me my blog post for today. I'm still not profitable yet but I'll wait as long as that takes.
 

I don't mind admitting that my business hasn't reached its breakeven point yet.  I'm well aware that it will take a very long time for me to earn an income from my online presence.