2008 Guidelines For Turnarounds That Haven’t Turned Around

This week a673b.bigscoots-temp.com is featuring many stocks of active small cap stocks and mostly of larger mid-cap or outright large cap stocks that we feel are still viable turnaround candidates.  This list will not be focused on companies that have only recently run into issues, and we are not assigning any set probabilities that management will make the turn in the right direction.  We are focusing on stocks that have been turnaround candidates for quite some time that have either:

• failed to turn around at all;
• or started to turnaround but then failed to turn their turnaround the right direction.

These are also not part of a separate list of "stocks that could double in 2008" as these are all in different categories and under their own merits.    While it would be easy to include a myriad of companies tied to housing or tied to weak retail segment, we have mostly eliminated the following categories:

• housing
• suppliers to housing
• mortgage lending
• banks and credit cards
• specialty retail
• bond and exposure insurers
• autos

Sure, there are some of our turnaround stocks which are tied greatly to one of these troubled sectors.  But if they are in there it is because these have failed for quite a long time at conducting a successful turnaround.  In short it isn’t just a sector issue because then you could literally cover the sector issues across the board.

There are many companies which are also in new turnaround situations, but this is a list of habitual offenders whose stocks could see radical gains if they are able to turn the battleship.  Some of these routinely appear in our own "10 STOCKS UNDER $10" weekly newsletter and some may even be screened for our special situation investing newsletter.

We have also in most cases left off our "10 CEO’s THAT NEED TO LEAVE IN 2008" to avoid overlaps.  Those are in an entirely different boat and some of those companies may have a remedy as simple as a new action team. The following CEO’s made the list of CEO’s that need to go in 2008 (with links to the full story):

• John Thompson at Symantec
• Finish Line’s Alan Cohen
• Gary Pruitt of McClatchy
• James Tobin of Boston Scientific
• Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide
• Hector Ruiz at AMD
• BigBand Networks’ Amir Bassan-Eskenazi
• Circuit City’s Schoonover
• Patricia Russo of Alcatel-Lucent
• Michael Cherkasky of Marsh-Mac

We were originally going to run this as a list of Ten companies, but our screen of steady candidates blew past that number.

Jon C. Ogg
December 17, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he produces the SPECIAL SITUATION newsletter and he does not own securities in the companies he covers.