In early June, Shopping.com shareholders enjoyed a 19% pop in the value of their holdings when eBay said it would buy the Israeli online comparison shopping service. Robert Goldman, chief investment officer at Banneker Capital Management, says that isn’t unusual for Israeli companies.

“They tend to dominate a specific area,” explains Goldman, who also oversees investment for the Blue & White Fund, a mutual fund devoted to investing in Israeli stocks. And once Israeli outfits reach a certain size and mastery of their niche, he argues, bigger buyers often come calling.

Full story at Forbes.com

The world’s brokerage houses employ 6,000 stock analysts. That’s a lot of opinions to follow, but we cut through all the noise and zeroed in on the elite in the business. Our rankings present equity analysts who in 2004 proved themselves superior at one of two skills: accurately forecasting earnings or recommending when to buy, hold or sell.

The bulk of our information comes to us courtesy of StarMine, a San Francisco research organization and our partner in this project. Since 1998, StarMine has built a business on a simple premise: Certain brokerage analysts are worth listening to more than others. With the right amount of number crunching, it’s possible to not only identify the best analysts but to profit from that knowledge as well.

Full story at Forbes.com

Omnicell is roger King’s kind of stock. In barely a year the medical information company has let down WallStreet with its quarterly earnings and seen its market value shrivel 68% to $173 million. But King, comanager of the Fountainhead Special Value Fund, believes Omnicell could be worth $300 million and that one day the company will prove it.

“Omnicell will make it on its own,” says the 62-year-old Houstonian, “or somebody’s going to put it under their umbrella.”

After 36 years in the investing business King has settled on several ways to root out stock bargains. His favorite among them is to find stocks selling for less than what a buyer of the whole company might pay, the so-called private market value approach.

It’s largely a matter of guts, King explains, as impatience or jitters will always lead certain investors to sell stocks at prices below their true economic worth. “If there’s a significant discount,” he says, “we’re interested.”

Full story at Forbes.com

Two ways to make money on Wall Street: Run with the crowd or bet against it. Whatever your preference, the Value Line Investment Survey has statistics that can help you sort out the prospects.

Forty years ago Samuel Eisenstadt created the “timeliness” ranking formula that made Value Line famous. It scores 1,700 stocks for expected performance over the next 6 to 12 months, using a plethora of technical (stock-price-related) and financial factors. The formula, still in use, has had a remarkable run. A hypothetical investor reshuffling his portfolio every Jan. 1 to hold only the 100 top-ranked stocks would have earned a 19% compound annual capital gain over the 40 years, says Value Line, against 10% for the S&P 500. (These numbers exclude dividends.) Transaction costs would have dampened the return, but even so the performance has been strong enough to baffle proponents of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which says that no statistical formula can keep beating the market.

Full story (reg. required) at Forbes.com

Every Autumn we have 17 equity experts–some bulls, some bears–test their mettle against the S&P 500. They get one pick and 12 months to either beat or lag the index. Those who succeed stay in the contest for the next round. Only a handful of the experts from our recently concluded contest have reason to brag. On average the five shorts skidded past the market’s 8% rise since October 2003 with a 55% gain. Bearish pick Research in Motion, which rose 300%, did most of the damage.

Nor did the bulls deliver. Their 12 picks collectively finished in the black but still fell shy of the S&P 500’s advance by three percentage points.

The best among the bears was Clarion Group’s Morton Cohen. Last year he warned of trouble at Bradley Pharmaceuticals, which fell 38%. For 2005 he puts the finger on Travelzoo, an online aggregator of travel deals. It’s an easy business to get into, Cohen says. He thinks that Travelzoo faces threats from upstarts below and giants like Yahoo above. And the stock doesn’t look cheap at 90 times projected 2005 profits.

Full story at Forbes.com

WASHINGTON, D.C. – If you’re looking to invest outside the U.S., here’s one way to go about it. Start with international stocks listed on U.S. exchanges. Then tap into the expertise of Wall Street’s most accurate analysts.

The first part of the equation is easy enough. You can buy shares of foreign corporations traded on U.S. exchanges via American Depositary Receipts, which are certificates issued by U.S. banks acting as the depositary for shares in the non-U.S. companies. Although ADRs don’t eliminate currency risk, these securities are as easy to trade as shares of U.S.-headquartered companies. Dividends from some issues may be subjected to a foreign withholding tax, but U.S. investors receive net distributions in American currency.

And the accurate analysts? For that we turn once again to our friends at San Francisco’s StarMine. Since 1998, the firm has specialized in identifying brokerage analysts with track records for correctly forecasting profits. The technique enables StarMine to create a “SmartEstimate,” or an estimate that is weighted to timely calls from accurate analysts.

Full story at Forbes.com