Can Turtles Fly?

Here is what I am concentrating on right now. Revlon (REV) I removed Revlon (REV) from the main list of stocks I was tracking as an opportunity. I have some corporate governance concerns. The majority owner, Perlman, may own most of the bonds that are hampering Revlon right now. It is quite possible that Perlman may not care about the stock performance as long as Revlon keeps paying interest on the bonds to him. I took a quick look and I can't tell how true this is, but it is good enough of a concern for me to ignore Revlon as an investment. Spectrum Brands (SPC) SPC has been hammered in the last month (what else is new?) and is finally approaching attractive levels. The company is trading almost at book value now (according to Yahoo Finance numbers (need to confirm manually)). Needless to say, this stock will become attractive if it drops significantly below book value. The debt problems make this a very risky company, but I am attracted by the fact that they are in the consumer s...

A contrarian area that I am watching is the tech high flyers from 2000. You know...those companies with ridiculous valuations back in 2000... at least the ones that survived and are big. I'm Canadian so I'm paying particular attention to the Canadian ones that fell from their lofty valuations. In particular, I am keeping an eye on networking/telecommunications companies like JDS Uniphase (JDSU; TSX: JDU), and EMS (electronics manufacturing) companies like Celestica (CLS; TSX: CLS.B). Some of these have fallen 90%+ from their peak and still aren't attractive. One of the problems is that their margins are still low, while having massive capital requirements. Celestica seems to operate on thin margin while requiring billions in plant & equipment investment every few years. To make matters worse, some of these are cyclical so any economic slowdown will hurt them. But all these issues present an opportunity. It's generally good to buy cyclicals when the P/E ratio is high...