This firm, which provides retirement planning, asset management, and insurance products, was unjustly knocked despite its strong fundamentals. After the selloff, the opportunity to buy the dip has arrived.
The mid-cap value style ranks tenth out of the twelve fund styles as detailed in my Style Rankings for ETFs and Mutual Funds report. It gets my Dangerous rating, which is based on aggregation of ratings of 12 ETFs and 196 mutual funds in the mid-cap value style as of February 12th, 2013.
When I ran across the recent article "270,033 pages later, a chance to catch our breath…", I could not help but admire footnoted.org's marketing moxy.
The article provides a count of the number of pages of 10-K filings that have poured in during the real earnings season. It also highlight a couple of the largest filings. At first glance, it is easy for one to assume that all of the 270,033 pages were also analyzed.
Principal Financial Group, Inc. (PFG) reported accounting earnings in 2010 that are misleading compared to the true economic earnings of the business. PFG’s 2010 reported earnings are artificially boosted by a reduced loan loss expense, which is funded by a draw down of the company’s loss reserves.