MarketWatch was running a interview today with Will Nasgovitz, co-manager of the Heartland Select Value Fund (NASDAQ: HRSVX). The $332 billion fund has absolutely trounced the S&P 500 (AMEX: SPY) since 2000. Even with an extremely rocky 2007, the fund is up over 100% since 2000, where the S&P is actually (ugh) in the red for the same time period.

The secret sauce?

MarketWatch quotes manager Nasgovitz as saying that the team running Select Value has a background covering small- and micro-cap stocks, which don't get as much analyst research coverage, that they apply when delving into larger companies.

What's Nasgovitz buying of late?

Back in 2004, Pascal Rossini founded ADS-click S.A, which is based in Geneva, Switzerland. Basically, the vision was to create a dynamic marketplace for trading online advertising. And yes, it's a way to get a piece of Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) lucrative business.

Today, ADS-click represents more than four billion ad views per month. The firm also recently raised $4 million in venture capital from BayTech Venture Capital.

I had a chance to interview Rossini:

Q: "Background on the company?"

A: "ADS-click was founded in 2004. It is an innovative, disruptive company and pioneer in new advertising technologies. Our technology is used by major Internet players in Europe, Japan and Australia.

Over the past couple weeks, we've seen some interesting IPO filings from on-demand software players. There is NetSuite, as well as Constant Contact.

In light of the success of Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), it's a good bet investors will be interested.

So to get some insight, I talked to the CEO of Centive, Mike Torto.

Founded about ten years ago, the company uses on-demand applications to help companies with compensation management.

How are things going at Centive?

We've just completed another fantastic quarter, and year to date we're winning about 70% of the deals we compete in. We have over 80 customers representing almost 13,000 subscribers, and we're two weeks away from the 5th major release of Centive Compel®. By any measure – most customers, most subscribers, most product awards, most mature solution – Centive Compel continues to be the clear leader in the on-demand sales compensation market.

Ralph Whitworth, the head of Relational Investors, was interviewed on Bloomberg last night. Stocks Whitworth likes are Sprint Nextel Corporation (NYSE: S) and National Semiconductor Corporation (NYSE: NSM).

It appears Relational still owns Home Depot Inc (NYSE: HD) where a Relational partner has joined the board. Relational helped force the ousting of former Home Depot CEO Bob Nardelli in January.

What is Whitworth's formula? While he did not explicitly say, it appears he likes companies that generate a lot of cash with underleveraged balance sheets. The combination of which can be used to return cash to shareholders via dividends and share repurchases.

One stock Whitworth said he did not like is Motorola Inc (NYSE: MOT), saying the business is too competitive, citing RAZR phones which sold at one point for $300 now sell for as little as $30.

Whitworth also does not like the auto industry saying it is going the way of the U.S. television manufacturing industry.

Shrek 3 and Spider-Man 3 are coming to a movie theater near you, just as the sector is coming out of an ugly downturn.

Overcapacity and over-leverage had led to an ogre-ish performance causing theater operators to file for bankruptcy or get picked up by private equity.

Now theater companies are going public or emerging from bankruptcy with little fanfare. However, according to Buzz Zaino, long-time great stock picker at Royce Opportunity Fund, it is time to start looking at these stocks again. In Barron's fund-manager interview (subscription required), Zaino said box-office receipts are up 7.2% year-to-date with a summer of good new releases expected to keep the momentum going.

Carmike Cinemas Inc (NASDAQ: CKEC) looks particularly attractive since it has upgraded 75% of its screens to digital, on which, in addition to showing movies, new alternative concepts are expected to generate additional revenue. Other movie chains Zaino likes are Regal Entertainment Group (NYSE: RGC) and Cinemark Holdings Inc (NYSE: CNK).

Expected improvements in box-office receipts should lead to nice incremental EBITDA margins especially for Carmike since its theater upgrade is mostly completed.

Few have mentioned theater stocks as a place to invest in. Zaino is one of the best at find long-forgotten industries as fundamentals are on the upswing. This ogre of an industry appears ready to return some princely profits to shareholder.

Barron's interview this weekend was with John Buckingham [subscription], portfolio manager with the Al Frank Fund and a long-time believer in investing in low-priced, out-of-favor stocks.

Two stocks to focus on from the interview are Rowan Companies Inc (NYSE: RDC) and Tsakos Energy Navigation Limited (NYSE: TNP). Many energy stocks have consolidated during the past year and rallied nicely since the beginning of 2007. The big issues with small- to mid-cap energy stocks in the energy sector are that they have been printing money and are under-leveraged. Many top energy company executives entered the business in the boom period of the late seventies, only to see their businesses completely collapse for some 20 years. The industry really did not begin an upswing until the early part of this decade.

This fear derived from 20 tough years has led to very conservative balance sheet management. However, this could possibly begin to change. With enormous cash flows and oil and natural gas prices meaningfully above the cost to get out of ground, these companies can lock in a lot of profit by signing long-term contracts. This could provide some of these companies the opportunity to issue some big dividends or be acquired by private equity. Rowan and Tsakos are two companies that fall into this camp.

Larry Jeddeloh of TIS Group, publisher of the Market Intelligence Report, was put on Barron's Magazine (subscription required) interviewee pedestal this past weekend. Jeddeloh foresees a market drop of 15% to 20% post April.

Jeddeloh cites subprime mortgage woes and global central bankers still biased toward raising rates that could translate into a much quicker drop in GDP growth than investors are expecting. Actually, for such a substantial drop to occur, credit conditions will have to be much tighter than the market is currently discounting.

Is this a possibility? Remember the yield curve has been inverted for some time, meaning banks have had a tough time making money from the brainless act of taking deposits in and investing them in medium-term treasuries. Further, income derived from providing mortgages will also be down. The business that has continued to grow is fee income--whose growth has been masking weakness in other areas.

The Fed, prior to lowering rates during the past ten years, has liked to see liquidity conditions get tight before fueling up the monetary pump again. Maybe this will happen again.

Areas that Jeddeloh liked are similar to areas we have been blogging about -- cotton and gold. See our blog from last week on corn and cotton as to why cotton might be an attractive place to look for profits.

Regarding gold, the strategist has a $3,800 price target, expecting gold to mirror what stocks did from 1982 to 2000, increasing 1,400%. As we have blogged about in the past, Newmont Mining (NYSE: NEM) is a good place to look.

We wrote two blogs this morning agreeing with a lot of what was said in this weekend's Barron's Interview with Michael Cahill, but not everyone agreed with all of his calls.

Jay Sanjay Somaney from GlobalStocks.com disagreed with Cahill's call on Sify Limited ADS (NASDAQ: SIFY) as an emerging market pick. Somaney stated that nobody knows Indian names better then he does, and he cannot see any reason for the bullishness (The stock is up over 9% today). He calls the stock a show-me stock and says he would use this as an opportunity to sell here.

An article in Sunday's London Times reveals first hand how some unscrupulous sellers on eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) are defrauding honest customers out of their hard-earned cash. A reporter, posing as a well-to-do individual looking to sell high value antiquities, easily talked one of eBay UK's largest sellers into admitting that, oftentimes, the practice of shill bidding was used to assure adequate value for items sold on eBay.

In explaining how the process of shill bidding to inflate prices is accomplished, the subject of the interview stated:

"I've got some of my big clients who buy big items off me, I look after them. So I can get on the phone to America and say: Mr XXXX . . . you're a multi-millionaire. You buy a hundred grand's worth off me a year. Do me a favour would you. Just put - yeah. Exactly."

In response to the investigation, eBay claims that its new practice of hiding user ID's from view during the course of bidding has helped to address the shill bidding problem. I and many of my fellow sellers fail to see the connection. In times past it was fairly simple to formulate and chart patterns regarding systematic bid manipulation by specific seller groups, and we had success in shutting some of them down. Now however, there has been a iron wall placed between the identities of bidders and the balance of the eBay populace. This means that eBay itself is solely responsible for scouting its site for bidding violations, and I feel eBay's actions have made it abundantly clear that while the company will try to help, it's really not eBay's responsibility to protect you or your money.

I want to know: how does reducing transparency within the eBay auction venue result in greater safety for eBay buyers? It's problematic that eBay is only set to gain from high prices; if fraudulent sales practices do drive up final value fees, eBay's bottom line is given a boost. Obviously shill bidding is not an accepted practice; but why would eBay create the appearance of trying to hide it?

Richard Branson has never been afraid of big ideas, or standing outside the CW, with businesses like Virgin Galactic. It may have taken him a while to come around to the evidence of global warming, but now that he has, he is using his new-found belief to create another business based on innovation: Virgin Fuel. In a recent Interview with Business 2.0, Branson talked about his new awareness of long-term climate changes and his new enterprise to develop a super fuel -- clean burning and, he hopes, very profitable. Branson plans to invest "something like $1 billion in alternative fuels" across the board through the end of this decade. But Virgin Fuel is something else. He's cautiously mum on the details, noting only that it will be a "clean burning" but non-ethanol-base fuel, but he's not cautious about his expectations, predicting the new fuel will not only fly Virgin's jets, but also predicting the fuel "will work in cars and trucks and trains within a year." And I admit to salivating when he talks this way.

Will Virgin Fuel become the next Virgin Records, or will it become the next Virgin Brides?

(Disclosure: I have no financial interests or involvement with Virgin.)