Value investing has been evolving in recent years, and perhaps that’s good in some ways. However, there are some things about value investing that will never go out of style, and one is buying undervalued companies. Fund managers continue to do that and probably always will.
Here are four value stock picks from three fund managers. Will Nasgovitz of Heartland Advisors picked Seaboard and Dentsply Sirona, while Andrew Reider and Gustavo Campanha of WHG Asset Management highlighted Sportradar and Pan American Silver. Ryan O’Connor of Crossroads Capital chose FTAI Aviation and Magnite.
Heartland Advisors is a value boutique management firm that targets micro- to mid-cap U.S. stocks.
WHG Asset Management is a Brazilian fund with a strong focus on the macro environment. The fund considers investments based on four lenses: bottom-up factors like business models and valuation, long-term trends, short-term trends, and top-down factors like economic cycles and geopolitics.
Crossroads Capital utilizes a strategy that fuses value investing in durable growth companies with opportunistic special situations. O’Connor seeks market-agnostic, value-unlocking changes at the companies he invests in.
Seaboard
Seaboard is a diversified global agribusiness and transportation conglomerate focused on North America, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa.
Nasgovitz said what drew his attention to Seaboard was its current valuation, which is hovering around the lows observed around the dotcom bubble. He believes this suggests similarities with that era, when other businesses that seemed dull but were creating value got overlooked.
According to Nasgovitz, the opportunity in Seaboard has come because the company “stubbed its toes significantly in the pork business.”
“My interpretation of what happened to them in that business is that during COVID, processing facilities didn’t have labor because people couldn’t go to work because of work-from-home requirements across different states,” he explained. “The ability to keep the machine working, whether it’s from raising the hog to processing the hog to selling the hog, had some significant challenges, and supply and demand got out of whack, where there wasn’t enough raising of hogs, so the supply of the herd dwindled. Prices skyrocketed.”
As a result, the hog business saw its margins shrink dramatically, resulting in significant losses. Nasgovitz believes that for Seaboard stock to work, the pork business only needs to improve slightly. He thinks business is so bad that it’s good because things can’t get much worse, and Seaboard has the resources to survive this challenging period. Nasgovitz said the stock is trading 50% below its long-term average, and he thinks the worst is behind the company.
Sportradar
Sportradar is one of the world’s top B2B sports data and technology companies, supporting sportsbooks, media companies and leagues with real-time data feeds, odds, live video, trading platforms and more.
The WHG team was drawn to Sportradar after closely monitoring OSB operators like Flutter Entertainment and DraftKings, turning instead to the data and technology that supports them. When they took a deeper dive into the infrastructure, they felt Sportradar’s scale and sophistication were impossible to ignore.
“As smaller rivals struggle to match SRAD’s automated data pipelines and proprietary archives, Sportradar steadily captures an even larger share of new rights deals,” the WHG team explained. “Each contract win not only broadens its coverage but also spreads fixed costs over a bigger base, setting the stage for outsized margin expansion and FCF growth over the next 3–5 years. On top of that, most models still understate the impact of continued U.S. legalization.”
Their base case calls for a fair value between $40 and $43 a share, versus about $21 currently.
Pan American Silver
Pan American Silver is a large-cap producer of precious metals with exposure to gold and silver. The company operates a diversified, low-cost portfolio with over 10 producing assets spanning five Latin American countries and no single operating surpassing 25% of total NAV.
Reider and Campanha were drawn to Pan American Silver after seeking exposure to liquid silver without the sacrifice of a solid balance sheet and operating resilience. They said the company is the only liquid producer that provides meaningful leverage to silver alongside a significant gold base.
The WHG team feels sentiment on the precious metals sector remains cautious after the cost surge in 2021 to 2023, when nearly every company missed as costs soared.
“As a result, investors prefer proof before paying for cost improvements or silver upside, and equities often embed a discount to spot and to the forward curve for gold and an even larger haircut for silver,” they said. “Such discount to spot in valuation has been sitting around 15% to 20%. Pan American also carries an unpriced option on Escobal and La Navidad that the market will not credit until permitting milestones are visible. That combination of skepticism and unmodeled optionality creates the entry point.”
Reider and Campanha expect further upside to silver prices to support their bull case of 30% to possibly even 60% upside from the current price of about $39.
FTAI Aviation
FTAI Aviation is a pure-play aerospace company focused on leasing engines for aircraft and offering aftermarket repair and overhaul services. O’Connor was drawn to the company because of its pivot from a traditional transportation asset manager to a high-growth, capital-light aerospace platform, which he described as a “rare transformation.”
He feels the opportunity in FTAI Aviation exists because of continuing market concern related to lease accounting distortions and allegations related to the Muddy Waters short report. O’Connor also feels the complexity of the transformation is obscuring the company’s earnings power.
He sees upside to $300 from the current price of around $162.
Disclaimer: No positions in any companies mentioned.