Fascinated by Fastenal

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Sometimes really good things come disguised in boring, mundane and misunderstood disguises. There's no mistaking a company like Starbucks (SBUX), what they do and how they make their profits.

But I don't want to find the next Starbucks -- although I wouldn't mind. I want to find the next Fastenal (FAST) and as their stock symbol tells me, I want to find it "FAST"! That sounds daunting, but in analyzing a company like Fastenal perhaps we can find some clues.

It's hard to find a stock that has performed better than Fastenal over the last 25 years. If you had owned this stock beginning in 1987 you'd be ahead by almost 35,000%. That's about five times the return that Apple (AAPL) has provided.

Of course I must admit I was surprised to learn that on Oct. 13 founder and Executive Chairman Robert Kierlin sold 100,000 of his FAST shares at $45.26, equal to $4.526 million dollars. I felt a whole lot better when I learned that Kierlin still owned as of Oct. 14 -- are you sitting down -- 12,910,000 shares. At the closing price on Oct.19 of $44.74 that means his stake in the company is a staggering $578 million.

For those who are mathematically challenged, that's well over half a billion dollars of equity in this diversified conglomerate. Why not? After it reported its earnings on Oct. 11, we learned that FAST, which has zero debt and levered free cash flow of more than $227 million, in the quarter ending Sept. 30 racked up earnings growth (year-over-year) of almost 13%!

They increased their trailing-12-months revenue growth by 10.4% to $3.07 billion. That's an impressive $10.39 of revenue per share on gross profits of $1.43 billion. This company is a money-generating machine that sells, if you'll excuse the pun, everything from nuts to bolts (but no soup).

FAST is a wholesale and retail supplier of fasteners -- including a range from screws and washers to concrete anchors and wire ropes -- in industrial and construction markets in the U.S. and internationally. Things must not be bad in the construction industry, in spite of what you read in the headlines.

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