If you're like me you have probably been consumed by the Freewest deal to the point that it is only now that I am starting to look at the Cliffs numbers. I was a little alarmed to see that in 2008 they had earnings of 6.55 per share whereas this year the mean estimate for EPS is 0.68 (high of .91 low of .15) which seems to be way off. Official EPS for nine months ended Sep is 0.78 cents vs 4.34 a year ago. Also, revenues were down sharply for the same period 1.444 B vs $2.444 Billion for the same period. Kind of scary.

So what's the good news?

I read the financial information that was provided in the telephone book and to summarize it, Cliffs said for 9 months ending in Sept "they had were experiencing a pretty tough year but things were stablizing and looking up". The stock seems to be a buy with majority of the houses polled - targets about $55 which seems to indicate that the stock is on an uptick.

Unless the yearly results are really horrible, I don't expect anything to change drastically with the upward pattern of the stock. I'm still waiting for CLF to get back to the $46 level which is a minimum it would have to reach for the FWR exchange to be at $1, but it appears that there's some upside so I've been channeling some of the cash that I made on the FWR that I sold back into CLF, buying at about $39-41.

Good luck to all of you that are new CLF shareholders.