Any deep value investor who labors late into the night in search of really cheap stocks has heard of Handleman Co. (NYSE: HDL), a distributor of CDs, DVDs and video games for companies including Wal-Mart Corp. (NYSE: WMT). Its anemic price to book ratio of 0.43 lands it near the top of any screen for net-current asset value plays, but there's just one problem: Handleman has been showing up on those screens for more than a year. I first started looking at it when it was trading around $12 per share; it hit a new low today of $4.96.
But now there's a reason to look anew at Handleman, and it's another name every deep value investor has heard of: Marty Whitman (author of one of my favorite books, The Aggressive Conservative Investor) and his firm Third Avenue management recently reported a 17.2% stake in the company, up from the 15.6% it first reported in April.
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