On January 5th, 2012 Amvona published the article American Greetings Corp. and the Triple “W”.  The thesis was comprised of two primary components:

a) The value and impact of the stock repurchases the company had made and would be making.
b) An appraisal of the real value of the company’s tangible assets.

The following is the price performance one year later of the two purchase made in the shares at the time.

On November 29th, 2011 Amvona published the article “Why we’re still buying Skechers stock”.  The article indicated that shares in the company had been purchased for investor accounts between $11.86 and $12.77 per share.

Here were a few of the reasons for the purchase outlined at the time:

On July 25th, 2012 Western Digital Corp. (WDC) announced their FY2012 results - and beat consensus EPS estimates of $2.47.  In after hours trading on July 24th as well as today, the shares moved up slightly, so it seemed like a good time to take a look back at some of the Amvona analysis of the company.

We went on to make impressive sounding arguments about sociology like this artifice:

We were going to title this article “We’re so smart”, but we thought that there was at least a small possibility that readers would fail to appreciate the depth of our humility if we did that, so we went with the second most obvious title we could think of.  Besides after SeekingAlpha’s editors picked up our article “Houston, we've got a problem - Bevilacqua” a few weeks ago and exposed it to their 50 million visitors a month by featuring it on “Market Currents”, then selecting it as an “editors pick” once we did finally submit it to on our own, we began to think that our humility may actually not be as secure as we once thought.  

Exactly one year ago, on September 28th, 2010 we purchased shares of Sanderson Farms for investors. Two days later we published our opinion on Amvona in our article "Can you say 'Chicken Feet' in Russian? The case of SAFM and PPC". Three days later SeekingAlpha published the article Here.

We thought we would take a look back at the thesis in that article, now that the period for short term capital gains tax has passed and examine how the issues performed against one another, but also against the benchmark S & P 500 (Alpha).

On August 11th, 2010 we acquired shares of Western Digital Corp. for others accounts at $24.15 a share in the midst of tremendous pessimism about the storage industry.  On September 17th, 2010 we outlined a few simple views that brought about this decision and published our article “640K ought to be enough for anybody…” WDC vs. STX (we used prices as of Sept. 10th, 2010 for the purposes of the article, although the shares were actually purchased on August 11th, as noted in the article itself in reference to “early August”).  On October 1st, 2010 Seekingalpha also published the article here.

Amvona Store: August 1999 - April 2010

• - Initial capital: $300
• - 1999-2003:  One employee -  (mostly) in a dorm room
• - 1999-2005:  Growth completely self-financed - zero debt.
• - 1999-2006:  Compound Annual Growth Rate ~120%
• - 1999-2010:  Shipped over 1 mil products to ~ 300k customers worldwide.
• - April  2010:  Precisely zero bank debt on our balance sheet.

We have seen and been part of a miracle.
 
G.M. Lemelson
Founder and CEO
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