Stock market memories and an update on the Big Dog Feeder
What the Dow did in 1954, what small animals can do for investors, and much more information that doesn’t show up in too many places.
It is with a great deal of interest each month that we pick
up The Bowser Report, chock full of information, tables, recommendations,
snappy quotes and even cartoons.
This advisory is put out by Mr. Max Bowser in Newport News,
Virginia (the oldest continuously-named settlement in the United States,
in case you were wondering — and that’s just the kind of tidbit
you’d find in this market letter).
With this report’s homey approach comes a veritable
cascade of information, all of it based on a few simple rules clearly
set down by the editor/publisher. Chief among them is the injunction never
to buy a stock selling for over $3. The rest flows from there.
With that price ceiling, readers find a healthy list of low-priced
stocks broken down into three categories: Our Best Picks, Worthy of Consideration
and Very Speculative. Then there is the Follow-Through section for stocks
that have breached the $3 level. And finally, Stocks We Said Should Be
Sold.
Many of the stocks appear on the infrequently-covered Over
the Counter (OTC) market in New York (which is, among other things, the
place where American investors can most easily trade in Canadian income
trusts).
There’s also a Warrant Register, yet another area of
investing that rarely achieves anything but mouseprint status in the mainstream
business media.
Russians in space depress Dow
The Bowser Report devotes
the front page of its latest issue to the reminiscences of a colleague,
Mr. Michael Burke who, unlike Mr. Bowser, specializes in high-priced stocks.
Those recollections are rich in detail.
For example, when Mr. Burke was in high school in 1952 (and
ushering at a Bronx movie theatre for 55¢ an hour), the public preferred
savings bonds to stocks; the Dow’s high for the year was 292.
In 1954, when Mr. Burke was in business school, the Dow Jones
pushed past 381 for the first time since 1929, the year of the Great Crash.
And in 1957, with Mr. Burke fresh out of the army and the
Wall Street Journal at 10¢ a copy, the launching of the Russian space
satellites Sputnik I and Sputnik II helped depress the Dow, which finished
down for the year.
Much as we would like to continue these nostalgic notes from
the 50s and 60s (Xerox was the darling of the market in 1963, for instance),
it is time to proceed to Mr. Bowser’s pet stock of the month ...
literally.
It passed the cat test
A home test wasn’t the only thing that tipped the scales
in favour of the advisory’s latest “Company of the Month,”
but it didn’t hurt. Mr. Bowser put a new toy from OurPets Company
(OTC-OPCO) in front of the family cat, a “senior citizen” and
therefore not one to be easily impressed.
It worked — and the toy is only one of 250 products
made for dogs, cats, domestic and wild birds and other small animals by
this company from Ohio.
The first of those products was the Big Dog Feeder, introduced
in 1995. Still going strong, the Feeder offers ergonomically correct feeding
— better for digestion and posture — for dogs over 50 pounds
and 19” high at the withers.
Mr. Bowser gives his readers five demographic trends
that bode well for this company: 1) There are 350 million pets in the
United States; 2) Some 69.1 million American homes have at least one pet,
an increase of 10 million since 1992; 3) The trend toward “humanization”
of pets, which leads Americans to spend $2,101 per capita on dogs and
$1,320 on cats; 4) Pets live longer — 40 per cent are “seniors”;
5) The pet industry is estimated to be $38 billion, with accessories,
treats and veterinary care growing at 10 per cent a year.
SmartScoop and DockDogs
OurPets has launched three new brands in 2007. One is SmartScoop,
a family of products that includes a self-cleaning litter box.
It is also introducing ecoPure Naturals brand of beauty and
health products, aimed at promoting pet health and wellness. OurPets has
also entered into an agreement to supply products for DockDogs, a fast-growing
sport that features dogs leaping off docks to retrieve things (neither
we nor Mr. Bowser are making this up; this is now an organized sport).
With his customary thoroughness, Mr. Bowser supplies profiles
of the company’s chairman, vice-president of operations, largest
shareholder and newest member of the board, who is from the Ohio State
University College of Veterinary Medicine.
Revenues for OurPets were up 22 per cent last year and should
rise again this year with the new products on board. The company has a
respectable balance sheet, with little long-term debt. And officer salaries
are low.
In the end, there’s not much you’d want to know
about this stock that Mr. Bowser hasn’t told you. He rates it as
one of his Best Picks and, at the close of trading yesterday, the shares
stood at $1.45 ... still a good buy in The Bowser Report’s
books.
Oh, and by the way, do you know what the hot speculative
plays were in 1961? Bowling and vending machines.
You can never have too much information in this business.
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