Value Opportunity, page-3

I think it is a good speculative buy, because of the discount to NTA and there's reasonable chance they can control the debt and survive. If they do this will seem cheap.

However, one thing about these out of favour industries though is that bad news doesn't come at once. So say it trades at 20 cents at 30%NTA and then some more bad news comes out (lose a contract, get in a dispute, lose the support of their bankers...) and they have to write down the value of assets to reflect the likelihood of having to sell them and the going rates for that in the market, or take a hit to expected receivables because of a dispute, and before you know it it's trading at 10 cents and still at 30% NTA!

However, these stocks have had several rounds of bad news over the few few years and we are probably getting to the point where the stronger ones will stabilise (he says hopefully...)

I'm a buyer but there's still a good chance that ASL (or MAH, NWH, EML etc etc) will get hit by more bad news so it's advisable to not go all in and spread your bets a bit!

Cheers,
pb