gtp and tim, page-15

re: gtp and tim - where's the stock trigger? As most of us know, following broker recommendations is not usually the way to get rich. There are more than enough studies on that subject in the U.S. and Australia for starters.

Just for interest, Hartley's put out a report on GTP and TIM last October, which was a rebadged Shareanalysis.Com report. They made some interesting statements, all the while treating GTP and TIM as if they were almost one and the same:

They wrote "Given the attractive dividend yields", but unfortunately, TIM wasn't even paying a dividend, unlike GTP.

Then they said "this tax change alone will not increase project sales!". All I can say is that GTP's figures are well up for starters. They also said "continued investor boycott of woodlot sales remains very real", seemingly not realising that most sales were not due to take place until nine months later.

They also rated both stocks as a "hold" (which we all know is often double speak for "sell"). Unfortunately for them, GTP doubled in the next six months and TIM went up over 50%.

In the mean time, this is a nervous market and brokers and punters are looking for any excuse / reason they can to justify selling anything and everything and to justify stocks going lower. Small wonder obscure comments keep surfacing about blue chip style NPATs and so forth, usually without checking with the company or putting it in context of the bigger picture.

On the matter of unloved special stocks with paradoxically good fundamentals, there usually has to be a significant and meaningful trigger to get such stocks going. In the case of GTP, that included the excellent article last September in the Australian by Robert "Gawd-Leave-Us-Alone-Son" (you know who I mean, I'm sure ;-) ), which helped to put things in a much better perspective than most commentators had been doing.

In the case of CMQ, which I'd been studying on and off for nearly a year while it was in the mid-30's, that included the 911 anthrax scare and overseas biotech conferences, which was also the cue for the company to make its next significant move.

I'm not really sure what triggered the move in ASL in early to mid-March this year, but I'd noted the assets worth many times the share price and the mining boom people kept talking about and was wondering for so very long why it wasn't moving (don't buy the gold mines, buy the companies that sell shovels being an old catch cry), I didn't have my eye on it when it suddenly doubled overnight and after being told for such a very long time by all and sundry that it was a dog, just watched in awe as it went up five-fold in a month.

If after all that has been said in the last year and after all the dividends that have continued to be paid and all the checking that has been done with the company that some have done, punters still believe GTP is a dog, then it's a dog, for it's what people perceive, rather than the facts that matter most in the market in at least the short term. One day there'll be a trigger to make it take off or else it will just keep going about its business, debt free, growing a product which on the projections of the best supply-demand consultants (J-P, see the old APL site) in the business, has a bright future and is Government assisted because it's so important in turning the sector deficit around and taking the pressure off native forests.

It's worth reading the recent TIM and especially CHY announcements on Japan and China to get an idea about some of this. CHY refers to the commonly bandied about "wall of wood", which is scary to the average punter who knows little about the subject and makes investment decisions largely based on white noise coming from apparently respected and presumed authoratative (and not self-promoting?) figures such as Van Eyk. Once again, I realise that CHY is in a different forest (literally), but the comments about 2010 and China should be of significant interest to those considering planting now. CHY, the self-proclaimed leader in their field thinks they can only meet one-fifth of the demand from that country alone. In all the muck raking in the middle of last year about whether Japan would keep buying (which they have), China (recently admitted to the WTO and host of the Olympics in 2008) wasn't even mentioned, let alone India (suffering more from the lessening supply of recycled computer manuals from the U.S. for instance). Makes one wonder.

Disclaimer: I don't own any forestry stocks at the moment.