Espey Manufacturing and Garan

I have not recommended stocks before because the firm I work with trades a lot and it is hard to know all of the positions at the exact moment I write the article. Tonight I will mention a stock though. At the moment I have no position in it and I know that the firm I consult for does not either.

The symbol is ESP and the company is called Espey Manufacturing. The stock is a microcap with the market cap at $52 million. If you read the profile about me you will see that years ago I went through an entire S and P stock guide looking for value stocks. I would do rough calculations in my head moving from one stock to the next. There were possibly 8,000 stocks in the guide but definitely at least 5,000. Any way I gathered a list of names and came up with maybe 30 - 50 names form the initial 5,000. What was strange about these stocks is that many were microcaps that never traded. And often the stocks would just sit there for days and never really do anything. Two of the names that were on the list were Garan (Old symbol - GAN) and Espey Manufacturing symbol ESP. This may have been around 1993 or so. Well I did my due diligence and liked both of these companies but only bought Garan. Garan was an interesting company and easy to understand as they made stuff for little kids. I think like clothes that kids would wear and these animals would be on the clothing. Kids loved them and the animals were called Garanimals. So I bought it. I then held the stock and I waited and waited and there were days that the stock did not even trade. After about 4 months I had enough as the stock just sat there. So I sold the stock and maybe wound up making a little money on it. Any way maybe about 18 months later or maybe even 5 years or so later Berkshire came in and bought the company at a huge premium. Had I held the stock I think I would have at least tripled my money.

Fast forward to today and I was watching CNBC the other day and actually saw ESP go by on the tape. I remembered ESP it was one of those value stocks I picked from that S and P guide back in 1993. Immediately I remembered the Garanimals story and that Berkshire wound up buying the company out. I am not saying to buy ESP. I have not done any work on it but I was just amazed to see the stock on the tape and to see the market cap at $50 million, amazing. I can tell you that in 1993 when I found it, it was a bargain. Is it still a bargain today? I have not done my due diligence on it yet to know but I am interested in finding more about it.

Disclosure: I do not own ESP, nor does the firm I consult for. However at some point I may buy the stock if after doing my research I decide to step in.