These Stocks Are Cheap Enough to Buy Themselves

I love bear markets.

Without them, my job would be damn near impossible.

Without times of great financial turmoil, it's hard to make a lot of money in stocks. For most of 2007 and 2008, it was almost impossible to find stocks with the potential to rise 100%-500%. For value investors, it was downright demoralizing.

We need bad times to buy stocks cheaply enough to make us rich over the long term. That time is now.

Since the beginning of the year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen about 34%. The S&P 500 is down 36%. And the Nasdaq is off 37%. So far, this is the worst year for stocks in history.

That's created dozens of opportunities to buy world-dominating franchises with great balance sheets and good businesses for half of what they're worth – or even less.

Software giant Microsoft (MSFT) is a great example of a super cheap stock. Microsoft is making more free cash flow than ever before in its history, about $18 billion a year. It's also got $21 billion of cash on its balance sheet. It literally makes more money than it knows what to do with.

All of Microsoft's outstanding shares added together at today's share price total roughly $218 billion. If you used $20 billion of Microsoft's cash as a down payment, you could borrow enough money at 5.6% interest (about what Microsoft would have to pay) to buy the rest of the outstanding shares. And you'd still clear over $6 billion a year to do with as you please.

I don't think anyone's angling to takeover Microsoft at this price. That's not the point. These numbers just illustrate how utterly cheap Microsoft is right now. And Microsoft isn't the only one.

Big Oil blue chip ExxonMobil (XOM) is super cheap, too. ExxonMobil always makes money. It can make tons of money even if oil sells for $30 a barrel, let alone for $75. Over the last four quarters, it generated a record $43.9 billion of free cash flow. All of the outstanding shares are available today for less than eight times that amount.

ExxonMobil makes more money than any company on Earth. And it gives most of it back to shareholders. Over the last four quarters, it spent $41.8 billion on dividends and share repurchases. It has raised its dividend every year for 25 years in a row. Everyone should own some of this stock.

Back in 2002 and 2003, I told my subscribers to buy stocks trading at big discounts to their net asset values. Extreme Value readers watched them rise as much as 600% over the next few years. Those stocks weren't nearly as cheap as some of the stocks I'm finding today.

Good investing,