In his Precedent-Based model, manager John Ward couples fundamental analysis with market timing strategies that he’s developed through a daily review of technical data. His main objective for the model is to minimize risk and to ignore the “noise” of Wall Street. Last week he added Grupo Financiero Galicia SA (NASDAQ: GGAL) to the model. GGAL is a financial services holding company. GGAL grew their net revenues from $1 billion in 2007 to $1.3 billion in both 2008 and 2009. Their shareholder equity grew from $521.1 million in 2007 to $541.3 million in 2008, then dropped to $540 million in 2009. On December 6th their stock price hit a new nine-year high closing at $16.77 according to Yahoo! Finance.
Gator Capital Management recently added shares of Aeropostale Inc (NYSE: ARO) to their Small Cap model. Within this model, they focus on 30 small cap companies and they look at buying stock as buying a business. Even in a tight economy, ARO has managed to increase its sales over the past three years. In 2008, ARO reported $1.6 billion in sales. That increased to $1.9 billion in 2009 and $2.2 billion in 2010. According to Yahoo! Finance, ARO’s closing price fell from $26.80 on December 1st to $23.04 on December 2nd after the company announced third quarter 2011 financial results that missed analysts’ expectations.
In their Tactical Asset Program model, manager Braver Wealth uses a top-down, technical investing methodology. One of the principal objectives of the model is capital preservation. Last week they added iShares Barclays Aggregate Bond Fund (AGG) to the model. AGG attempts to replicate the performance of the Barclays Capital U.S. Aggregate index, and according to Money.CNN.com, about 90 percent of the fund’s assets are invested in bonds of the underlying index. On December 8th, Morningstar.com showed the fund trading at a discount to NAV.
