ITT Educational Services Inc.  (ESI) Trade Now »     Rate ESI  -  Discuss ESI  -  Add to Watch List        

Filed under: Industry, Stocks to Buy, Recession

Financial winter is here and the temperature of the market seems to be dropping anew. Credit markets are frozen and the line for government handouts grows by the day. There is no easy fix to the morass.

That much is clear.

As such, we will have plenty of time to contemplate exactly where it is we want to go from here. Hopefully, we won't make the same mistakes twice, and, in that way, some good may come out of the carnage after all.

We all know how we got into this mess. Greed and debt led to asset value growth that was unsustainable. The piper is

I was looking through the list of the top % gainers on the NYSE today and saw that an old favorite of mine, ITT Educational Services (ESI) had made the list, trading at $91.25, up $7.88 or 9.45% today as I write. I do not own any shares of ESI nor do I have any options on this stock.

I say "revisit" and an "old favorite" because it has been several years since I first reviewed ESI. This stock was written up early on this blog, when I wrote up ESI on July 17, 2003 , when the stock was trading at $36.13. With the stock currently trading at $93.62 (as I write), this represents