For speculators, Martin Weiss has uncovered a stock that benefits from rising home foreclosures. In the higher risk section of his The Safe Money Report he looks at Lender Processing Services (NYSE: LPS).

"We have a new speculative pick: Lender Processing Services. This company was spun off from Fidelity National Information Services a couple of months ago.

"It is the biggest outsourcing firm in the business of processing home loan defaults and foreclosures.

"As you might imagine, that business is booming due to the massive flood of troubled mortgages -- revenues in the company's default services unit soared 90% to $197.2 million in the second quarter from a year earlier.

"LPS also has a division that helps investors, banks and other clients model prepayments, defaults and other characteristics of mortgage-related securities.

"With everyone trying to figureout the value of all the troubled paper out there, the demand for those services should also ramp up. We emphasize, however, that this is a speculative play."

Steven Halpern's TheStockAdvisors.com offers a daily look at the latest market commentary and favorite stock picks and investment ideas from the nation's leading financial newsletter advisors.

A stock that profits from foreclosures originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Bloomberg News

The bank believes that mortgage losses so far are "the tip of the iceberg." That's due to the enormous volume of variable rate mortgages scheduled to reset in the next couple years -- specifically $515 billion in 2007 and another $680 billion worth in 2008. If that's not bad enough, interest payments on about $900 billion of the riskiest subprime home loans are due to increase in 2007 and 2008.

I've been posting about real estate problems since last October. But Bank of America seems to think that two of the stocks most exposed to the mortgage mayhem have further to fall because they hold mortgages themselves as well as selling them on to investors and may not have set aside enough money to cover losses. These two:

• IndyMac Bancorp (NYSE: IMB) looks cheap. Its Price Earnings to Growth (PEG) ratio of 0.2 -- based on a P/E of 7.4 and earnings growth of 35% to $3.97 in 2008 -- makes it look extremely cheap to me unless the analysts who track IndyMac are way off the mark.
• Countrywide Financial Corp. (NYSE: CFC) looks cheap. Its PEG ratio of 0.5 -- based on a P/E of 9.7 and earnings growth of 19% to $4.55 in 2008 -- makes it look inexpensive to me unless the analysts who track Countrywide are way off the mark.

What investors need to figure out is whether their current stock prices reflect all the bad news or whether things will get still worse. I'd be inclined to think that the bad news is reflected in the stocks already and Bank of America is wrong about these two stocks. What do you think?

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned in this post

Bank of America thinks mortgages have further to fall originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 22 Jun 2007 17:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.