STUDENT TRANSPORTATION INC 5.25 PCT DEBS T.STB.DB.A

You make some good points ...

[emba33]

Hi BlueCollar51:

Thanks for your thoughful post.  I think you make some excellent points, and it is a good balance against the convincing argument Dennis makes for the company.

Time will tell if the yield is safe here.  I assume the new buses are necessary because of the rapid expansion.  If Student Transportation can renew those new contracts and utilize the same older buses, there could be some opportunities to increase operating margins in the future. 

What price to do think is the true value of this stock?

  Emba33

[BlueCollar51]

The Book Value on 30 June 2015 = $2.08 USD x 1.3 = abt. $2.70 CAD The Tangible Book Value on 30 June 2015 = $0.68 USD x 1.3 = abt. $0.88 CAD   The P/E is way out of whack for a company of this type in my opinion.   $3.00 CAD or less would be an attractive re-entry point for me. The only reason STB trades at higher prices is due to the Unearned Dividend.   PS. goldsternp; The

[goldsternp]

Stockholders equity per share was up 15% and that is not dilution.

[BlueCollar51]

From Page 5 2015 Financial Statements in USD   30 June 2014 Shareholders’ Equity $159m / 82.8m shares = $1.92   30 June 2015 Shareholders’ Equity $199.8m / 96.1m shares = $2.08   (2.08 – 1.92) / 1.92 x 100 = 8.3%         which is a decent y/y improvement (not 15%)   From Page 05 2010 Financial Statements in USD   30 June 2009

[goldsternp]

Depends on  share count used . For the year, basic shares would be 15% and diluted shares  would be 18% increase in equity. You are correct that equity has decreased over the past years.  It now equals 50% of share price while for AAPL it is 5% of share price. That's a big difference in favor of STB. I  suspect the company is still using a large number of fully

[Jmark1]

Not surprising the book value is low with the model being used, and it isn't that much different than other companies using the same model. This company is basically a modified trust company designed to return $$ to the share owner. They all do some funky stuff in order to maintain their model. Cash flow is king. As long as cash flow is available to distributre then it sounds like management

[BlueCollar51]

Actually when I established my STB position on 06 June 2009 I paid $3.45 CAD per share and the Book Value was $3.33 USD. (I don’t know what the exchange rate was at the time but it was much better than now).   As I said Student Transportation is a Good Company that does a Good Job for their customers which doesn’t mean that it is a Good Investment at the current share price.   There is

[ffhwatcher3]

SNCF - They had 15.1M shares at July 15, 2015.  That makes their dividend $500k/mo (or 100,000+ shares if they are a member of the DRIP and they get more and more each month) and if you follow Sedi.ca you can track that, in fact, this is happening with SNCF each month. Going fwd, that is 1.2M shares in the DRIP via SNCF and in 2015 there are only 1.45M shares in the DRIP.  Are you

[BlueCollar51]

It definitely was SNCF that sold 4m shares on Aug 05 through a secondary offering. I did not have access to the Term Sheet but d_trump did and he confirmed that. They had originally proposed to sell a bit less than 8m shares to raise $41m CAD but scaled it back. d_trump advised us that as per the term sheet SNCF would have to wait 90 days to sell more shares if they chose to.   SNCF had