Good Stocks?

Three stocks that recently caught my attention are SKUL, STX and WDC. These are maybe a bit risky, but they appear to be of very good value, and I think their share prices will likely go up a lot in 2013.  All three have low debts and very attractive P/E ratios. All three have good sales levels (exceeding Mkt Cap) and good profit margins - they are selling lots of product and are quite profitable.

The below chart and table come from Google Finance - an excellent source for financials, trending, descriptions and other information regarding stocks.

Add or remove columns

		Valuation				Dividend	Financial ratios	Operating metrics			Margins	Profile
	Company name	P/E ratio	Price-to- book ratio	Price-to- sales ratio	Mkt Cap	Dividend yield	Total debt to assets	Return on avg assets	Return on avg equity	Return on investment	Net profit margin	Employees
SKUL	Skullcandy Inc	6.83	1.69	0.79	183.28M		5.86	14.22	44.36	22.80	8.01	290
STX	Seagate Technolog...	4.61	3.96	0.84	12.53B	4.34	28.33	29.61	96.04	45.89	19.16	57,900
WDC	Western Digital C...	5.91	1.56	0.94	11.74B	2.06	15.38	14.44	24.50	20.00	12.92	103,111

SKUL, Skullcandy, Inc. develops and distributes headphones and other audio accessories to retailers throughout the United States and to distributors in various countries worldwide - more on SKUL from Google Finance.

STX, Seagate Technology plc (Seagate) is the provider of electronic data storage products - more on STX from Google Finance.

WDC, Western Digital Corporation (WD) is a provider of solutions for the collection, storage, management, protection and use of digital content, including audio and video - more on WDC from Google Finance.

Skullcandy is a bit small for my investment tastes.  It has only $150 million Mkt Cap, and it has just 290 employees. This makes the company susceptable to a lot of things that a bigger company might not be. For example, loss of one key executive or a couple of key employees in manufacturing or sales might hurt them severly.

Of the three, my favorite is Western Digital..  

Like Seagate, Western Digital's Mkt Cap is about $10 billion.  These are good sized companies and they've been around a long time.  They have solid long term track records.

Western Digital's business is is developing, manufacturing and selling hard disk drives (HDDs).  This is the uncertaintly: will SSD's (solid state drives) kill the HDD market in the near term?    My guess is no,

I believe the "demise of PC's", consumers switching over to portable personal devices (PPDs) such as smart phones and tablets (which use SSDs instead of HDDs), has been much overblown. Yes, sales of PC's dropped significantly in 2012 when many consumers, instead of buying PC's, grabbed up the shiney new PPDs. And 2012 HDD sales dropped because of this  But in having experienced first hand the serious i/o limitations of the PPDs I am convinced there will be a major resurgence in PCs in the next 2 years. For me, when doing anything on PPDs that involves typing, the speed of getting I want  is 80% reduced, and the visual loss due to small screen size is anywhere from 60% to 90%.

Besides, with a shift of memory storage from devices to "the cloud" (as has occured with the shift to PPDs), data storage devices will still be needed - just in different locations. And I believe the 3x to 10x lower costs of HDD vs SSD storage is going to remain a factor for a long time to come. SSD's have the advantage of much faster data access time, but, as long as there's a big cost differential, speed is not everything.

For 40 years now HDD products have closely followed Moore's Law - for units of the same or lesser physical size and cost, storage capacities have doubled every 18 months:

There is nothing to indicate this trend will not continue many years into the future. SSD capabilities are improving too, but in going after HDD, SSD is chasing a rapidly moving target - it could very well take SSD a decade or more to catch up, if they ever do.

Will Western Digital prove to be a good investment?   We'll see..

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On a different subject here's a nice little vid relevant to today - Valentine's Day:

             Love Dart

and:
             the relevant article link    : )