Friday, March 11, 2011

Credit Suisse: The Best Fertilizer Stocks (AGU; CF; POT)

The ferts have been on a rocky road, most recently because of Citigroup's downgrade* of Potash and Mosaic a couple days ago. Looking at the other side of the coin CS analysis is featured at Barron's Hot Research:

Credit Suisse likes Agrium, Dow Chemical and others.
Credit Suisse
The main takeaway from Credit Suisse's 16th annual Agricultural Productivity conference was a widespread optimism among the companies servicing the agricultural sector as well as from farmers.

However, we see a major difference between the current optimism and that seen in 2008 when the optimism shifted into euphoria and selected grain prices gained to unprecedented levels.

We see the present optimism as more solidly anchored into realistic expectations supported by low global-grain inventory, strong demand and more broad-based food-cost inflation and much more reasonable fertilizer prices.

The companies presenting talked extensively about the challenges in meeting near- and long-term food demand and how to develop and grow respective companies' business to enable food production to satisfy expected demand.

The near-term challenge is significant with a need for global grain production to increase by 5% in 2011 to avoid a further reduction in already-low global-grain inventory. The world has previously been able to increase grain production from one year to the next....MORE 
*Fertilizer growth seen slowing

POT in particular has a lot of air under it. On the one year chart the big gap and the double top are pretty obvious. Currently at $54.37 it would take a drop to $37 to fill the gap.: