Reading Time: 2 minutes This is the second part of my thoughts on bank nationalization, I hope President Obama and his finance team can read my blog, as they are thinking through the “bank rescue”, the No. 1 issue facing this country, and the world economy for that matter. As I said in my previous post, bank nationalization appears
Reading Time: < 1 minute (Update Mar07, 2009) I found a good example on performance comparison of regular ETF vs. leveraged ETF. In the past year, the finanicals ETF XLF lost about 75%, while the ultra financial proshares UYG (2 times bull) lost 95%. You can use google finance to draw the comparison. MorningStar link here.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Who is better positioned to weather the recession (or depression as some people like FT Martin Wolf said), American Express (NYSE: AXP) or Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS)? I got some DFS last week so my opinion maybe biased, but wait: I hold Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) which in turns holds significant number of AXP shares
Reading Time: 2 minutes (Update Feb 5) It appears BoA CEO Ken Lewis bought additional 200,000 BAC shares yesterday (source: bloomberg). (Original Feb 4) Today Bank of America stock (NYSE: BAC) fell below $5 the first time since 1990s. The company was in trouble earlier this month as the loss from Merrill Lynch turned out to be much bigger
Reading Time: < 1 minute Good reading I found John Bogle’s 6 Lessons for investors (WSJ op-ed, Jan 8 ) to be good. A few years ago I read John’s Little Book of Common Sense Investing, and was not impressed by it because at that time the market was very hot. Now it all makes sense to me. John is
Reading Time: 2 minutes Madoff story continues to occupy the news these days (e.g., this one from NYTimes). Yesterday, Satyam, the No. 4 Indian IT outsourcer, broke the news with giant accounting scandal (BBC news, wiki: Satyam). But the story does not end here. In my mind, there are many other ponzi schemes in our lives, and sometimes people
Reading Time: 2 minutes Summary of 2008 Aren’t we glad 2008 is finanlly over? I am sure most people (who are not hiding under rocks) are. On a positive note, most of us survived from the crash (so far). But we do learn a lesson or two on economy and market: live within means, don’t over extend yourself, and
Reading Time: 2 minutes It seems to me the panic selling in the stock market never ends. I can think of the following sources of sellers: 1) Hedge fund. Yesterday Congress has an testimony on Hedge Fund, and five famous Hedge Fund managers were there. Hedge fund industry has grown rapidly in last 10 years. Besides wealthy clients, they
Reading Time: < 1 minute Well, I am not going to short. Two reasons: 1) In order to short a stock, I need to open a margin account, which I dislike. Margin account means I have to borrow from the broker, which increased the risk quite a lot, and increases the “anxiety factor” which is something I dislike. A good
Reading Time: < 1 minute NOT TO DO list first 1) Watch CNBC and other financial news and got confused, and worse got panic. Same goes to checking your brokerage acct or 401k acct every day; 2) Try to be the hero: pick up “cheap” financials, commodities, technology stocks simply because you think they are “cheap” compared to 2 weeks
Recent Comments