In The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham sums up his investment philosophy by saying that an intelligent investor must be “businesslike” in approach. Investing in shares in a company is just like owning a share in a business enterprise and the investment must be approached as if one were buying a business, or a partnership in one.

There are four guiding principles for Graham:

1. Know the business

The investor needs to become knowledgeable about the business or businesses carried on by the company in which they propose to invest – what it sells, how it operates, what is the competitive environment, what are the threats and opportunities, the strengths and weaknesses.

An investor who bought a fruit shop, or a shoe factory, without investigating these things, and knowing them, would be foolish. The same applies to share investment. An investor who does not understand the business should not be investing in it.

2. Know who runs the business

An investor who cannot operate the business for himself or herself, needs a manager. This is the position of the average share investor, who owns a share of an enterprise that is run by others.

The owner of a business in this position would want a manager who will manage the business competently, efficiently and honestly. The share investor should not be satisfied with less. Unless the investor believes, through sound research, that the company is managed efficiently, competently and honestly, in the best interests of the shareholders, the investment should not be made.

3. Invest for profits

An investor would not normally buy a business that did not, on proper research, appear to have reasonable expectations of producing good profits over time. Share investors should take the same approach and buy, as Graham says, “not on optimism, but on arithmetic”.

4. Have confidence

Graham encourages investors to properly research their investments and, if they believe their investment judgment to be sound, to act on it. He cautions investors in this position against listening to others.

“You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right [or wrong] because your data and reasoning are right [or wrong].”

A Plummeting Stock

You bought JCP at a higher price and now the price is dropping as sales declined more than expected, so, of course, many analysts are dropping their price targets to $15 or lower.  NOW, they tell me! Then the New York Times comes out with: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/a-dose-of-realism-for-the-chief-of-j-c-penney/?ref=penneyjccompany.

You can feel the fear, anger, and despair (visit the Yahoo Finance Board for JCP to get a feel for what small investors think), because you own the company. Whom do you blame, what can you do? The only way to stop the price from going down is to turn off your screen.  

A Dose of Realism for the Chief of J.C. Penney  By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

To gain a more realistic view of J.C. Penney’s prospects, however, here is the Deutsche Bank analyst Charles Grom: “Trends at J.C. Penney are obviously getting worse, not better, and we are becoming more and more convinced that sales in 2013 will also decline, which could lead to a going-concern problem next year.”  (CS Editor: OK, if that were the case would the management and Board of Directors take a different course? Slow spending, sell off assets, etc. OR is the analyst just linearly extrapolating to come up with his thesis?)

The company’s stock has fallen nearly 50 percent since the beginning of the year. Even its online sales, through jcp.com, fell 37.3 percent last quarter from a year ago.  Yet Mr. Johnson, a well-regarded and charismatic retailer who worked at Target before his meteoric rise at Apple, appears to be trying to mimic Steve Jobs and create what Mr. Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, called a “reality distortion field.”   An opinion not a fact.

Andrew Burton/ReutersRon Johnson, chief executive of J.C. Penney, says the store renovation plan is a success. Mr. Johnson has spent the last several months trying to persuade investors that his transformation of J.C. Penney was the equivalent of Mr. Jobs’s efforts to turn around Apple a decade ago.

“You know, I watched this movie before. When I joined Apple in 2000, Apple was a company dwindling. Everyone said to me, ‘What are you doing there?’ ” Mr. Johnson told investors in September. “Apple wept through 2002 and I think sales were down 38 percent as we dreamed about becoming a digital device company. But Apple invested during that downturn. That’s when Apple built, started to build its chain of stores. That’s when Apple transitioned to Intel. That’s when Apple started its app division. That’s when Apple imagined and built the first iPod.”

O.K., Mr. Johnson, but that was Apple. And J.C. Penney is not Apple — and let’s be honest, it can never be Apple. The company doesn’t make its own magical, revolutionary products that bring tears of joy to its customers. It is a low-end department store that Mr. Johnson is hoping to turn into a slightly higher-end department store that sells clothing made mostly by other manufacturers.
Still, Mr. Johnson has sought to remake the company quickly, perhaps too quickly, by eliminating promotions and discounts, moving the stores more upscale, rebranding the company as JCP and putting in place a “fair and square” pricing model. (J.C. Penney is, however, putting on a special sale for the holidays.)  Granted, JCP is no Apple, but what did Ron Johnson accomplish at Target–probably a better comparison.

Yet the renovations are hardly finished — or in some cases even started. Only 11 percent of its stores’ floor space has been remodeled with his successful specialty-store-within-a-store concept, in which he has opened up outposts for brands like Levi’s, Izod, Liz Claiborne and the Original Arizona Jean Company.
J.C. Penney may have been dying a slow death before Mr. Johnson’s arrival — some rivals used call it “death by coupon,” given the retailer’s penchant for discounts — but the company’s decline has only accelerated.

But the lessons, and successes, of the rollout of Apple stores are proving that they do not apply to Penney. While the customer experience at Apple is in a class by itself, and Mr. Johnson should rightly receive credit for that, the success of the stores was in large part a function of stunning products with a fan base that would stand outside stores for days in the rain to get their hands on them without any chance of a discount. Do you think there are customers who will ever stand outside J.C. Penney overnight for the next Liz Claiborne sweater? (J.C. Penney bought the Liz Claiborne brand last year.)

“Ron Johnson’s remake of JCP has assumed the consumer — the only one who matters — is the one who shops at Target or Macy’s or Nordstrom’s. Instead of pivoting on and strengthening the historic JCP brand (What brand?), Johnson’s decided to recreate the Target and Apple wheel, a move akin to Toyota suddenly deciding it’s Porsche. In short, a ridiculous and condescending move,” Margaret Bogenrief, a partner at ACM Partners, a boutique crisis management and distressed investing firm, recently wrote.

There is something romantic about watching Mr. Johnson try to remake a dying classic icon (So why did Sorkin call JCP a brand in the prior paragraph). At some gut level, you have to root for him. He’s making a bold bet. Transitions are inherently painful. And everyone loves a great comeback story.

Here’s the good news: In the stores that have been transformed, J.C. Penney is making $269 in sales a square foot, versus $134 in sales a square foot in the older stores. So the model itself is working. And Mr. Johnson has the support of the company’s largest shareholder, Pershing Square’s Bill Ackman, who personally recruited Mr. Johnson. If Mr. Johnson were starting with a blank slate, it might be a great business.

Mr. Ackman declined to comment. J.C. Penney did not make Mr. Johnson available.

Now here’s the bad news. Mr. Johnson still has to convert nearly 90 percent of his square feet of shopping space. That will very likely take $1 billion and as long as three years. If the sales decline that occurred last quarter accelerates, the company could run out of money. It now has about a half-billion in cash and access to a credit line for as much as $1.5 billion.

Of course, it remains possible that Mr. Johnson, who people close to him say is a realist, could always decide that the transformation is not working and change course to return to the old model of J.C. Penney and save all that money remodeling. But that would be a huge setback.

The question Mr. Johnson may be asking himself now is: What would Steve do?
A version of this article appeared in print on 11/13/2012, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: A Dose Of Realism For the Chief Of J.C. Penney.

Let’s pile on: JC Penny Down in the Rubble http://seekingalpha.com/article/1000571-down-in-its-own-rubble-the-sorry-state-of-j-c-penney

Rebuttal and Commentary from JCP’s Largest Investor

You hear and read the good, bad and the ugly, but what do YOU do?

My suggestion: I turn off the CNBC, set aside the NY Times, ignore the Wall Street Research Reports and do this:

But ASK yourself if the people who are commenting have ACTUALLY SHOPPED at JC Penny RECENTLY.

http://www.gurufocus.com/news/192562/jcp–a-consumer-perspective

So What is JCP worth? Forget the price today, what is the value of JCP? Since this is NOT a franchise, then this would be an asset type of investment. What is the real estate worth for JCP? I would start there and review with a critical mind  my valuation of the company.  Oh, and forget blaming anyone for the price being below your purchase price, perhaps or perhaps not, today is your luckiest day.