SF Stifel Financial Corp

**grapes** Tue Jun 12, 2007 7:35 pm

SF Stifel Financial Corp
Blast and other gurus,

What do you think if SF? Currently it is trading at $56 but has $49/shr cash. It has some insider buyers recently. It recently bought some companies from a bank.

I totally don't know its business. But it looks like business are booming and the valuation is too good to be true.

**blast_investor** Wed Jun 20, 2007 6:34 pm

Hi grapes,

This stock is financial stock, cash value in financial is not as important as in the non-financial stocks because of various possibilities of hidden liability. Further more, although the financial stocks may have cash in balance sheet, it may be restricted by all kinds of hidden liability, guarantees.

Because financial companies typically has all kinds of guarantee and off-balance sheet asset and liabilities, the book value is much more important than cash.

I would do more research on the nature of cash, whether is "free" or restricted, and on the issue of off balance sheet entities.

Frankly, I lost any interest in studying financial stocks (except some simple business model financial companies) in recent years due to the danger in this sector. Financial companies pretty much can report whetever earning it wants, and it is almost impossible to know what is going there. This field is not worth my studying time.

In buffett's word, this stock would be "too hard" group for me.