On Sunday I purchased the third and final part of the Barron’s Roundtable 2006.  This featured the stock picks from John Neff, Abby Joseph Cohen, Felix Zulauf, Art Samberg, and Scott Black.  As usual, I learned a ton.

I was also surprised to see a few of my stocks in their recommendations:  Chesapeake Energy (CHK), XTO Energy (XTO), and American Eagle Outfitters (AEOS).  Could they be reading StokBlogs?  

John Neff picked the same 4 stocks from his meeting with the CFA Society of Philadelphia.  One of them, Huntsman Corp. (HUN), was up 11.44% today.  Huntsman announced that it is talking with multiple suitors about a possible acquisition of the company.  Simply amazing John Neff is!

This is what Neff said about Huntsman in Barron's:

Huntsman is a chemical company that came public in February 2005.  It was founded by Jon Huntsman in 1982.  It came public with $6.3 billion of debt.  The offering raised about $1.5 billion, almost all of which went toward paying down the debt.  Huntsman is big in Europe and the Gulf of Mexico, where it was hit badly in the last two quarters.  It has an increasing footprint in China.  Today the company’s market capitalization is about $4.7 billion, and Huntsman and other family members still own 59%.  Differentiated chemicals account for about 60% of sales, commodity chemicals 40%.

I see tight supply and demand in the industry.  Huntsman was going to earn about $3 a share last year until Katrina and Rita hit.  The company wasn’t hurt structurally, but it didn’t regain full capacity until Nov. 15, so it’s going to earn only $2.25.  But $3 looks probably in ’06.

It came public at 23 and almost immediately went to 30.  Then it perished for seemingly no good reason other than the hurricanes, falling to 16.50 in September.  If the company earns $3 a share, it ought to sell around 9-10 times earnings, or for 27 to 30.  The stock is 18.77 now.