Friday, April 26, 2019

Westinghouse Air Brake

I bought some Westinghouse Air Brake yesterday (WAB). It's a stock I l have been trading for awhile. Here's a link to a post I wrote on Seeking Alpha on it. LINK Note: this may have a paywall to some of you.
I like the US railroad story, particularly the two eastern RRs, CSX and NSC. The key part of the story is that many highways in this region are at full capacity. No more highways will be built. So RRs, which have extra capacity, should benefit. This is already happening as RR intermodal booms from the port of New York and on Florida east coast. This same story is true to a lesser extent on the west coast.
Wabtec recently bought GE's locomotive business. Wabtec and Caterpillar now produce a large majority of the world's diesel-electric motive power.
That market has been down for some time (why GE sold it). But I think the long run is great, not just in the US, but in EM as well. So I like Wabtec.
Risks:
- Company is now highly levered.
- New CEO is from GE. GE was a terrible company for many years.
- Precision railroading may reduce the number of locomotives needed.

For now this is a trading long. There's still enough skepticism about the situation, particularly the GE connection, to prevent a runaway market.

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