First National Financial (NYSE:FNF) missed their estimate relatively large but a somewhat muted reaction after hours - this is more of a multi year play on housing recovery so I am more interested in what they have to say than the numbers. That said I wish it was up 30% on a massive loss while the CEO says he sees stabilization - but we don't seem to own those type of stocks.

Analysts are just guessing at the numbers as the range was -0.05 to 0.31, and they basically hit the low end of the range with a 6 cent loss. MANY caveats I will lay out below since a very large integration was undertaken that slowed them down this quarter but will be a major tailwind as we move forward. This was a digestion quarter. The stock is down 50 cents in after hours but judging from the stock price I was thinking this sort of thing was being telegraphed. I cut back to about a 1.9% stake as the stock was at threat of falling below its 50 day moving average after testing it just about each day for 2 weeks straight. (i.e. not participating in the rally) I'd love to see a pullback to $16s to reload up.

Here are the results with the important commentary; I might be the only financial presence on the internet who actually cares about this result since tonight it's all about the Baidu.com (BIDU) economy. Keep in mind First National did a quite material acquisition so these are not organic numbers; and the "losses" are due to the acquisition

• Revenue up from $1.13B to $1.36B
• Earnings/loss from +$27.2M to -$12.4M (more on this later)
• Cash flow from -$74.9M to +$128.3M (awesome)

In this quarter in 2008 they opened 562K orders and closed 308K orders
In this quarter in 2009 they opened 746K orders and closed 429K orders

So that's a 33% gain in opened orders and 39% gain in closed orders year over year (not organic though, partly due to acquisition)

This follows up on very positive comments they made a quarter ago (Feb 4, 2009: First National Financial Seems to be Turning the Corner) on a surge of titles changing hands...