National Interstate Corp (NASDAQ:NATL)

brancwp (25.75) Submitted: 12/4/2007 5:45:27 PM : Start Price: $31.17 NATL Score: -23.05

I think it will be a mild winter, so transportation insurance should be good!

dvcnut (94.06) Submitted: 3/20/2007 2:32:46 PM : Start Price: $21.05 NATL Score: +17.11

First, I don't know much about the insurance business, but I found NATL from a screener that showed it had good cash flow, good growth potential and a very reasonable valuation (based on earnings), so I decided to buy it and learn more about this industry. Now that I've owned it for a while this is what I know. They generate a lot of cash - looking at their most recent quarter (4Q06), they generated over $83M in cash from operations. This gives them a ridiculously low price/ocf ratio of only 6! Comparing cash flow to revenues, almost $0.35 of every revenue dollar is turned into cash they can use to increase the dividend, growth the business, buy back shares, etc. Now maybe this is usual for insurance companies, I don't know, but in any case these are very good numbers. As for the dividend, while it isn't much, they just increased it 25% to $0.20/year. They are also a subsidiary of a larger insurance company (Great American), so that gives me some extra confidence that they could maybe receive some extra support from their parent if they ever need it. They are trading at about 14 times TTM EPS and are expected to grow about 13.5% (in 2006 earnings grew almost 18%) a year for the next 5 years, which gives them a very reasonable PEG of about 1. Finally, Yahoo! Finance reports that 19% of the shares are held by insiders, so company management should definitely have their priorities aligned with other shareholders.

nau99 (27.71) Submitted: 3/6/2007 5:54:01 PM : Start Price: $21.53 NATL Score: +10.85

Wish I would have picked this year over the weekend before the HUGE rebound. Still a buy at these levels (around $25).

knudfool (96.50) Submitted: 3/2/2007 5:20:05 PM : Start Price: $20.69 NATL Score: +14.93

Looks like a good growth potential with a low PE.

jazper292 (20.80) Submitted: 12/4/2006 4:04:33 PM : Start Price: $21.20 NATL Score: +13.65

short term buy