Year: 2008

Categories
Master Series

Walter Schloss also beats S&P

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Last Updated on January 3, 2008 by stlplace

and he had done it for 47 years (maybe not every year, but compound annual return), that’s pretty good.

The following is quoted from Buffett 2006 shareholder letter, you can get the full letter at Berkshire web site:
……
Let me end this section by telling you about one of the good guys of Wall Street, my long-time friend Walter Schloss, who last year turned 90. From 1956 to 2002, Walter managed a remarkably successful investment partnership, from which he took not a dime unless his investors made money. My admiration for Walter, it should be noted, is not based on hindsight. A full fifty years ago, Walter was my sole recommendation to a St. Louis family who wanted an honest and able investment manager.

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Categories
IPO Stocks

Year end investments summary

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Last Updated on January 3, 2008 by stlplace

My performance
The Scottrade account did beat the S&P 500 and Nasdaq (detail to be calculated…). This is pretty easy because the market did not go up much in the past year (3.5% for S&P and 9.8% for Nasdaq).

More importantly, learned the risk, portfolio management (weighting), IRA/401K/mutual funds, all from hands on experience and can not be measured by the numbers.

What went right
1) Sell the losers: XFML, SBUX
2) Ring the register on winners: HMIN
3) More focus, 3 or 4 stocks maximum in the portfolio; work on same stocks (MR) if it’s working
4) Basic research: reading F1/S1 prospectus, 10K, 10Q; using google spread sheet
5) Read the five stocks/investing books (listed in my aStore), learned a lot from the masters. I still need to complete Buffett’s book (a little harder) and Ken Fisher’s book (a little long).

What went wrong/lesson learned
1) Did not sell CROX before Oct 31 ER: if a stock went up a lot and its weight on overall portfolio increased dramatically, make sure ka ching some…
2) Speculate on small companies (GSIT) without much research

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Categories
Stocks

Fourth quarter 2007 update

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Last Updated on January 3, 2008 by stlplace

The miserable performance of CROX erased much of my 2007 gains. But thanks to the rebound of Mindray (MR), I am still be able to be above water 🙂

Some random thoughts of Q4 and year 2007 stock performance:

1) Crocs (CROX): I agree with my friend StrengthTrader, Crocs is a fashion product. It’s almost unbelievable for Crocs to become popular in much of the world in such a short time. At least it grew much faster than Nike did 20 years ago. But will Crocs be as big as Nike some day? I don’t know. The market thinks it will NOT (traded at PE of about 20, the company projected 35 to 40% revenue growth in 2008).

2) Mindray (MR): benifit from the global spending of healthcare. Although the US market did not turn out to be as successful as we like, other interntional markets especially South America made up the slack.

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