The Next Governor of Texas October 24, 2013October 23, 2013 SMBC Andy Frank: “You posted this 23 months ago: Aristides’ Chris Brown: “The SMBC secondary priced at $19 last night, though it was 2x oversubscribed. Tangible book value of the bank drops from $22.47 to $21.26. It’s a great buy in the $21 range. Management stated it should take them 18-24 months to deploy the extra capital. All things being equal, I believe this will be a $27-$31 stock at the end of that period.“ “Chris sure got this right. The stock closed today at $28.50 at the 23 month mark. I’m comfortable holding, as they’re doing well and a 2.4% dividend isn’t bad, but would you know what Chris is thinking now?” ☞ He is thinking: “I still like SMBC very much. They just posted a very good quarter, and had a conference call yesterday afternoon. The management team has executed very well, yet the price/book ratio still hasn’t gone up that much. I think the stock trades at least at 1.3x book 24 months from now, which gives you a $38 stock at that point, plus a 2% dividend while you wait. It is one of our top five holdings. A kicker, which is not needed to make this investment successful (I did not include it in my estimate above), but will help, is that as steady as the company’s growth has been, it seems likely to be a Russell 2000 addition in 2015. That could give shareholders an additional 10% upside, along with some better liquidity.” PRINTING FROM MYM12 William Herbstman: “I, too, use Managing Your Money software. I am currently using MYM DOS version 12 on a 15″ Mac Pro laptop. It runs great in Parallels using Windows 7. I am able to print to a USB printer using a program called DOS2USB without any problems. I track a muni bond portfolio and have not found any other software that does a better job than MYM.” Master MYM-er Mike Starkey: “There are some workarounds for getting your USB printer to work, but one of the easiest, requiring no technical knowledge, is dosprn, a small utility that captures your printer port and sends print jobs from MYM to the USB printer instead. It costs $15, but works great.” Craig D.: “I still use MYM12. Every week since the first MYM for almost 30 years. I have 27 years of stock transactions on it so I am really leery of moving to a new program. I also like the loan setup where I can keep track of current loan balances on my mortgage and car loans. I keep a couple of old computers around with MYM on them so when my main computer does die I can move my backup to the other computer. I can’t imagine what I would do if my MYM got wiped out.” JENNIFER Tamara Hendrickson: “I have a friend named Jennifer who was born in 1967. Her parents picked the name because it was uncommon. The Washington Post link that you posted doesn’t actually say why all 40-something women are named Jennifer, as your title suggests. It just shows when Jennifer became a popular name. Supposedly, Jennifer came in style because of the 1970 movie “Love Story,” in which Ali MacGraw’s character was named Jennifer. The graphic you posted backs this up because Jennifer becomes popular in 1970 and dominates for the next several years. I keep waiting for ‘Tamara’ to sweep the nation but I don’t think it is going to happen.” WENDY I got to spend an hour with Wendy Davis, who used to work down at the Orange Julius — read her remarkable life story here — and who just may be the next governor of the great state of Texas. She already has 70% name recognition a year and some out from the race (it took our last candidate $26 million to get that far) because of that amazing Texas Senate filibuster you probably saw on the news. And the phrase people most volunteer when asked to free associate, interestingly, is not “abortion” but, rather, “a fighter” — someone who fights for what she believes in. Which she does. And more good news: she’s something of a centrist. Boy, do we ever need more of those in the red states.