Today, on the same day that the New York Times published a piece that asked if investors were investing like it was 1999, Herb Greenberg produced a piece on CNBC that questioned the same thing. Make no mistake, this is a momentum driven market where valuation considerations for many companies are secondary at best. Clearly, that cannot last forever; it never has.
It may be that many momentum purchases are being… Continue reading
Christopher Risso-Gill has written a biography of Canadian Peter Cundill, legendary value investor of the Cundill Value Fund. In it, Gill quotes Irving Kahn–another legendary value investor: “There’s always something to do. You just need to look harder, be creative and a little flexible.” The first sentence of that quote has become the title of the biography.
The book starts off brilliantly by describing Cundill’s EUREKA!!!… Continue reading
From March 21, 1996 (via Real Science)
Scientists studying
In a recent blogpost, Aswath Damodaran talks about his conversion on the road to Chicago (that is, his acceptance of reality as it is versus his belief in reality as stipulated by Eugene Fama of the University of Chicago). Enjoy:
I must confess that I was a skeptic on behavioral finance until a few years ago. At that point, the amount of information that had been accumulated… Continue reading
Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, has a lesson for investors in Salesforce.com and Netflix:
After decades of breakneck expansion under Mr. Schultz, tight-fisted consumers abandoned it. The company’s sales and share price sank so low (between December 2006 and December 2008, Starbucks’ stock price dropped 73%) that insiders worried Starbucks might become a takeover target…
“Everything Starbucks did in the past, more… Continue reading
Both ratios show that conditions in the US stock market are getting frothy.
Shiller’s ratio is the same as the one created by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd in 1934. It is self-explanatory. If we ignore the outrageous peak in the Technology, Media, and Telecom (TMT) bubble of 2000, we can see that the P / 10-Year Earnings Ratio is approaching the level of prior peaks in… Continue reading
This is much worse than I thought.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/41969508
Even as the economy has recovered, social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960, according to TrimTabs Investment Research using Bureau of Economic Analysis data.
“The U.S. economy has become alarmingly dependent on government stimulus,” said Madeline… Continue reading
…is a publication that tries to identify excellent, unknown investment managers. I have placed a link to their website in the resources section to the right.
In the comment below they wonder how many David Einhorns there are who never got the chance to succeed as Einhorn did because of a lack of capital.
This may be the only time that I will mix investing with anything to do with religion, but it struck me as appropriate, even consilient.
My parish, which is Roman Catholic, has been blessed to have the services of three outstanding priests in the eighteen years that my family and I have been members. Father Tom Hagan was a pious and hilarious priest who left us… Continue reading
Based on this excerpt from Seth Klarman’s 2010 annual letter, I think Klarman and I share some DNA. I have written similar sentiments in my communications for several years.
Much of the investment business is centered around asset-gathering activities. In a field dominated by a short-term, relative performance orientation, significant underperformance is disastrous for retention of assets, while mediocre performance is not. Thus, because… Continue reading
