Aiming, The only gambling stock I follow (sort of) is Penn National Gaming (PENN). They were on the Forbes "America's Best Managed Companies" list several months ago. Heebner's other pick also looks interesting (Deere), with a nice long term chart.
>>> America's Best -Managed Companies
The Best Of The Best
Matthew Miller 01.29.07
Hotels, Restaurants & Leisure
Penn National Gaming
The glitz and glamour of gambling might be in Las Vegas or Monte Carlo, but the real scratch is made on the slots--no matter where they are. Just ask the bosses at Penn National Gaming, which operates 21,000 slot machines at 16 casinos, racetracks and off-site betting centers in Pennsylvania, Maine, Colorado, Louisiana and Mississippi. Penn National's stock was up 12% in the first 11 months of 2006 and up a staggering 984% since the middle of 2000. Sales have grown four times what they were in 2001, from $520 million then to roughly $2.2 billion in 2006.
That swelling stack of chips comes from tapping regional markets and local gamblers, and adding slot machines to existing horse racing facilities. "Our bread-and-butter customers are middle-income American gamblers with average incomes between $40,000 and $90,000 a year," says J. William Clifford, Penn National's chief financial officer. "And they are almost always within a 90-minute drive of our casinos. We haven't focused on destination gambling; we are not trying to get people to travel across the country."
At least not yet. Look for the company to enter Las Vegas soon. "We'd like to buy several properties at once, probably on the Strip," says Clifford. The company was reportedly bidding for Harrah's Entertainment, the largest gambling company in the world by sales ($7.1 billion in 2005), but lost out to a private equity group last month. <<<
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