India unveils restrained pre-election budget; finance minister says fiscal deficit lowered + MORE Feb 17th

MUMBAI, India – India’s finance minister unveiled Monday a restrained mini budget for the government’s remaining months in office, saying the budget deficit has narrowed and pledging to keep public spending steady.
Palaniappan Chidambaram said that the Indian government’s finances are in better shape than a year ago, with a projected budget deficit of 4.6 per cent of gross domestic product for the financial year ending March 31, lower than the target of 4.8 per cent.
He also predicted the new budget, if carried out for the full year, would bring the deficit down further to 4.1 per cent of GDP by March 2015. India’s elections are due by the end of May, and the new government will determine the full-year budget.
The upcoming election had renewed worries of budget-busting populist giveaways in an attempt to woo voters. The budget was mostly free of big-spending new programs though it did offer some voter concessions in the form of excise tax cuts on some goods…

MANILA, Philippines – A senior official says the Philippines is on track to achieve its target of economic growth averaging 7-8 per cent for the next several years.
Economic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan said Monday that challenges remain in cutting poverty, increasing investment and creating quality jobs.
The government has a six-year development plan through to 2016 that hopes to spread the benefits of economic growth to the country’s poor.
Apart from the growth target, the government wants to reduce unemployment to 6.5-6.7 per cent and slash poverty to 18-20 per cent of the population from 25.2 per cent.
The economy grew 7.2 per cent last year despite a series of disasters including Typhoon Haiyan.
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I’m still far from my 7 live positions and while I continue to work on this, I ended up closing 2 trades on Friday morning so I guess I’ll have to wait a bit longer. I can’t complain though as returns have been very solid so far and while the year is still (very) young, I will appreciate it while it lasts.
As will be the case all year, my long & short stock picks will be available to see in my live spreadsheet:

http://www.intelligentspeculator.net/livetrades

You can see the numbers for both companies involved in today’s trade here:

TickerNamePricePE RatioPE Next YearSales GrowthAnalyst ratingBook ValueRevenue/ShareSales 5Y Avg GrowthEPS 5Y Avg GrowthSales 5Y Avg GrowthEPS 5Y Avg Growth

ADBEAdobe Systems Inc68.34115.1632.83-7.913.9613.558.094.11N/A4.11N/A

TRIPTripAdvisor Inc91.2565.4634.0123.813.546.086.61N/AN/AN/AN/A

It could seem pointless to look at 5 year numbers when one of the stocks turned public just last year but I think it’s important to see how poorly Adobe is fairing in this new era of software so having these 2 companies trading at nearly the same forward P/E seems like a no-brainer for me, don’t you think?

TRIP Revenue (Quarterly YoY Growth) data by YCharts
Long TripAdvisor (TRIP)
Last week, I got a very good question about one of my recent trades…

Company could raise as much as £200-million, is exploring sales of European assets