What are your thoughts on Black & Veatch Stock in 2020
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I am a former employee. You were probably seeing an estimated value of your stock on the internal website. I have been away from the company for a while, but I believe the valuation is only completed at the quarter by an outside accounting firm. Because they are private, I don't think a daily stock price is officially evaluated until you get reconciled numbers from the projects, and I am pretty sure that doesn't happen daily. I don't know. They could be keeping tabs on the projects on a daily basis, but I would think that would have a fair amount of error in it. B&V has a tight grip on advertising and PR, and they hide or under-report layoffs, so I would imagine that perception of a well functioning company is, at the very least, part of the stock evaluation. B&V, Energy Division, could have been a good experience for me. But I had an unscrupulous manager who liked to blame others for his bad decisions. I am a layoff casualty.
You don't actually say if you are a former or current employee. Since you can't exchange you B&V stock while you are still employed, I'll assume you are a former employee. When I knew I was leaving B&V, I went on their internal website and found the stock valuations by quarter for every year. The advice in the accompanying reply that "they will make sure you don't lose money" is not correct. The stock price does fluctuate every quarter, and it most definitely can go up or down. One thing I did notice though is that a trend seemed to emerge: for whatever reason, the stock valuation in the 4th quarter more often than not went up from the third quarter. One of the problems with a private company like B&V is that there is no way for you to track the stock price or trend on a daily basis, so no one can ever really predict what the price will do at the end of the quarter. With the general rise though in Q4, there was always speculation that they made sure it would go up at the December valuation so that any upper-manager retiring after the start of the new year would benefit from a higher price than the previous quarter. So, I decided to retire during the first three months of the new year and, sure enough, the Q4 evaluation was higher than the Q3 evaluation. However, I didn't like the uncertainty of keeping my B&V stock, so I cashed in immediately and invested it into a IRA rollover.
If you are working somewhere new that has a 401k plan, you can roll the money over into that, though you will limited to the funds included in the new employer's 401k plan. For more flexibility, I would do a little research into a place like Vanguard or Fidelity and roll that money over into one of their IRA rollovers (same as a 401k plan). You'll have easier control of your money, and countless options for investing.
B&V stock faired pretty well through the Obama years, even though Obama destroyed the main money maker, the coal business line in Power. How did they do it? They froze pay, went to 20% temporary employees, and expanded the Telecom Division (moved excess Power people over to Telecom.) The problem is that Telecom is notoriously lucrative (execs are buddies with Sprint execs, right next door in OPKS), and the gamble of squeezing their clients for excessive charges didn't create repeat business. .... To answer the question of stock. Keep your money in the ESOP if you have a large proportion of it as BV stock. They will make sure it doesn't decrease in price. But when you have the chance, roll it over to a medium to high risk 401(k) at your new employer, ... OR .. a medium to high risk tax deferred retirement account without continued contributions. Now that you are no longer with BV, your contributions to your BV retirement will NOT continue to buy BV stock. Your contributions will only buy the mutual funds you probably had along with BV stock in the ESOP, and you can get that at another employer or through another investment account with Edward Jones, or Raymond James, etc. Lastly, I predict BV will be bought out in the next ten years by another engineering company. The way BV is currently run, it is not sustainable. They will continue to lose business. The revenue has been flat for over ten years, and things are not getting better.