I love reading stories about virtually-unknown companies in decidedly unglamorous sectors which are doing spectacularly well, and the WSJ has a classic today on a firm with the unhelpful name of M&F. (Would it help if you knew that stands for MacAndrews & Forbes? Didn't think so.)

It turns out that M&F, which is controlled by the legendary Ron Perelman, is doing very well with a very modern strategy. It buys unsexy companies in old-fashioned industries such as licorice extract and check printing, and uses the very predictable cashflow from them to raise vast amounts of debt, which it then uses in turn for more acquisitions. The strategy has helped M&F's share price to rise to more than $65 today, from less than $17 six months ago.

So congratulations to the WSJ on finding a stock which really has flown under the radar and which has some very interesting shareholders. But I'm only giving the paper two cheers, here, because a lot of the article is very confusing. There are a lot of numbers in it, but most of them are presented out of context, in a way which seems designed to make it very difficult to understand what's really going on.