RS Weekly Update - A Motley Portfolio, ONE & ABCB
December 03, 2010
– Comments (4)
Dear Fools,
Part of becoming a successful investor is building a plan and having a strategy on how to implement that plan. And it’s not etched in stone either. It needs to be a fluid concept which allows the investor to change when the situation deems it necessary.
Maybe you’ve heard me refer to my portfolio as a “motley” portfolio. But what is a motley portfolio and where can we all get some? Well, for me it’s pretty simple. The bottom line is that I just can’t stick myself in one category of investor. I want a fair price. I want a new growth story that has yet to unfold. I want killer management; management that I can trust. I want to go global. These things rarely come cheap, so is it worth it to pay up? Or do I wait for that drop that may or may not come?
If you diversify your portfolio enough, then you can do a little bit of a lot and satisfy that dilemma that I am convinced is in all of us. So from this perspective, you’re gonna see my investing philosophy shine through in my portfolio. I’m going to have a nice mix of small caps, mid caps and large caps; growth and value; foreign and domestic; and any sector where I see opportunity. As long as I understand it, it’s fair game.
So follow along as I start building my motley portfolio. You can swing by my discussion board or even follow me on Twitter. And while I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to get every idea into the portfolio, I am certain it is going to be a lot of fun as we go along.
Fool on!
Jason Moser (TMFJMo)
Higher One
When Roger Friedman asked me a couple of weeks ago about some of the ideas on my watchlist, I was happy to get a chance to mention Higher One (Nasdaq: ONE). It’s a stock that caught my eye a few months ago and I’ve been following it ever since.
Higher One helps colleges and universities manage the financial aid refund and disbursement process so they don’t have to worry about the labor intensive process of balancing books, cutting and mailing checks, making deposits and dealing with the lines and crowds on “refund day.”
With products including CASHNet, OneDisburse and One Account, Higher One is able to offer the total relationship for schools to manage their refunds, disbursements, payroll and even student banking services. With 1.5 million active accounts, OneAccount is a great example of the company’s reach. It’s a free student checking account with all of today’s current amenities to make banking easy, from free online bill pay to a MasterCard debit card and everywhere in between.
Make no mistake; Higher One is not a bank. They have a relationship with a bank to provide the actual banking services, but they are not in the banking business, nor do they provide credit of any kind. The value proposition is that Higher One generates income from banking-based fees as they provide the customer service on the accounts and the bank gets use of the cash from deposit accounts to invest. And because they work with a smaller bank, the operations are much more transparent and less-risky; especially important in today’s environment where many banks are still recovering from the worst financial crisis of our lifetime.
While they have been in business since 2000, the IPO was just this year, so it is still pretty new to the market. But I like what I have seen and management strikes me as being the real deal (they own almost 20% of the shares outstanding). I’ll be keeping a close eye on this one as it looks like it has an A+ future ahead.
Ameris Bancorp
In case you missed it, I came out with a new buy for the portfolio. Ameris Bancorp (Nasdaq: ABCB) was a proposition I just couldn’t pass up. While there is a lot of risk that comes along with buying a Georgia bank with a market cap of only $225 million, there is a lot to like about Ameris and I think there is some real potential for growth here once the economy gets on more stable ground.
Jason owns shares of Ameris Bancorp
Straight from the Onion
Takes me back to my first job bussing tables
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