In summary, I agree with what ske wrote - particularly the closing sentence – to wit:
"With TGA, I personally consider any price between $1.6 to $2.4 to be fair. With a decent yield it makes holding $1.6 looking for $2.4 a reasonably safe exercise imho."
That is, at $1.60 you can buy in, enjoy a reasonable dividend, and have a good chance of making 50% on your investment ($1.60 to $2.40), and a near-zero chance of losing much, if anything. I would be happy with that, and the fact that I entertain the fond notion that the capital gain could be higher is not material to my advice to readers of this thread, which depending on circumstances is either, buy, hold or both.
When I originally drafted my last post it had words to the effect that the PER one would settle for required consideration of many metrics, plus "soft" information on the physical and social environments in which the companies operate. Size and liquidity are two factors to consider, which is why one would downscale TGA's PER relative to what one would do with WOW. On the other hand, TGA beats WOW on many metrics, so one would upscale the PER, and so on. WOW has more debt, but then it has been able to borrow cheaply, so there is both a negative and a positive PER-scaling factor in that. JBH has heaps of debt, which bothers me, which would incline me to lower its PER. TGA has locked-in streams of income which act as a income buffer – a reason to bump up the PER. FWD and MND are part of the China story, plus mining is exposed to political risks, and because I am currently wary of the mining industry, so relative to mining-industry plays, TGA's PER benefits from that prejudice.
What I did not detail is that future years' EPS guesstimates hugely influence the PER I would use for TGA for YE 30/03/2012. Past years EPS metrics are merely part of what occasions me to think what the future EPS metrics might be, and the momentum fallacy (after this, therefore more of the same) needs to be avoided. I think that TGA's EPS metrics for the next three or four years are going to be better than what analysts and Mr Market thinks – reasons that I'll articulate when I write my magnus opus on TGA when the annual report is released.
On EPS growth, I found looking at Rent-A-Center's metrics interesting, because in the face of plateaued revenue and profit, Rent-A-Center has grown its EPS via buybacks. It would be interesting to create a spreadsheet of EPS growth for TGA with a “growth decay” factor and a buyback factor, so that as TGA ceases to need the 50% of EPS that it now uses to fund growth, it uses that money to buyback shares, and hence keep the EPS growing, and hence the dividend growing. If one uses a set of optimistic factors and a set of pessimistic ones, the average of the two often turns out to be fairly realistic. There is an enormous amount of subjectivity in estimating a fair-value SP, which is why I think the words “intrinsic value” are misleading – dishonest even.
I have looked at FSA and BSA with interest in the past, but not having spare cash looking for a home, and tending to limit my portfolio size, I did not pursue investigating them. I'll look at them again, because their merits and demerits have faded from my memory.
I am not a trader, so I tend to rely on high-conviction investing, and not bother with stops.