Serious Money: Fortune's 25 leaders among leaders

Here is the list from Fortune:

1. International Business Machines (IBM)
2. Procter & Gamble (PG)
3. General Mills (GIS)
4. McKinsey (private)
5. ICICI Bank (IBN)
6. McDonald's (MCD)
7. General Electric (GE)
8. Titan Cement (TITCF) (OTC -- limited data)
9. China Mobile Limited (CHL)
10. Hindustan Unilever (This might be considered the P&G of India; however, more appropriately, it is the Unilever ADR (UL) of India by a 52% stake in HUL, which was voted the most respected company in India over the past 25 years in a poll conducted by Business World, one of India's leading business magazines. Since Unilever is the majority stakeholder, and on my watch-list, I will use its metrics for this review.)
11. Natura Cosmeticos (NUACF) (OTC -- limited data)
12. Colgate-Palmolive (CL)
13. TNT Post (TNTTY) (OTC -- the Dutch Postal Service made private and competing with other major international messenger services)
14. Deere & Co. (DE)
15. Whirlpool (WHR)
16. 3M (MMM)
17. Cargil (private)
18. Olam (OLMIY) (Singapore, wholesale food distributor, OTC -- limited data)
19. Eli Lilly (LLY)
20 PepsiCo (PEP)
21. American Express (AXP)
22. Lockheed Martin (LMT)
23. Intel (INTC)
24. Infosys (INFY)
25. FedEx (FDX)

Clearly, a list of just 25 companies does not do justice to the hundreds of top-notch companies in the world. I would have thought Exxon Mobil (XOM), Raytheon (RTN) (which was 25th among North American firms) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) might have made a good showing. No Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), how could that be? What jumps out at you as a surprising omission?

My first screen examines the price-to-book (P/B) (from 11/27/09) to establish value as most bottom-up investors are likely to do. They are ordered accordingly from lowest to highest.

1. ICICI Bank -- 0.81
2. Whirlpool -- 1.44
3. General Electric -- 1.49
4. FedEx -- 1.56
5. Deere & Co. -- 2.4
6. Procter & Gamble -- 2.59
7. China Mobile Limited -- 2.74
8. Intel -- 2.74
9. American Express -- 2.89
10. TNT Post -- 3.37
11. General Mills -- 3.57
12. Eli Lilly -- 3.83
13. 3M -- 4.23
14. McDonald's -- 4.67
15. Unilever ADR -- 4.78
16. Infosys -- 6.46
17. International Business Machines -- 8.54
18. Lockheed Martin -- 9.45
19. Colgate-Palmolive -- 13.64
20. PepsiCo -- 14.52

If the P/B was a singular point of departure for investing, very few of these great companies would receive consideration. However, I will give all of them a pass until tomorrow when we screen further. There are five foreign companies among them: three from India, one from China, and one from the Netherlands. Five companies get cut here because they are private or I was not satisfied with the available data on these pink sheet stocks: Cargill, McKinsey, Natura Cosmeticos, Olam, and Titan Cement.

Tomorrow, the most commonly referred to metric, price-to-earnings, and the more reliable price-to sales will create the hurdles. Perhaps a few of the survivors might make it onto my 2010 stock pick list.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture and planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money. Disclosure: Among the stocks mentioned at time of publication, I own shares or options in APC, GE and JNJ.