Category: Investing

Glass half full? Glass half empty?

Post author By stlplace
Post date March 7, 2009
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Week in review 030109 to 030709

We are officially in Obama bear market (source: Bloomberg), in other words, the stock market (i.e., Dow industrial for most people) dropped 20% since President Obama took office in Jan 20. Yesterday S&P 500 briefly touched 666 (the number of devil), pretty scary, huh? I am sure this economy/financial crisis has been the hot topic in many kitchen table, or office cafeteria. The financial media is also taking the crisis as oppertunity — we have seen numerous experts, panel discussions, such as the “Help Wanted” talk last night on CNN money, which is mainly talking about the Feb. job (loss) number: 650,000. This number is actually small, if we put it into perspective that 20 million Chinese migrant workers already lost job since the end of last year (read my friend Bo Peng’s article if you are interested).

Tags Dow, employment, Mr.-Market, S&P

Economy Investing

Bank nationalization: II

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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 bad for the existing shareholders of bank common stocks, in the sense they will get wiped out or diluted. But I also said this is merely “mark to market” for them, whether they want to face it or not, the day of reckoning will come soon or later. In the mean time, when we are waiting for the eventual take over of some of the nation’s largest banks, consumers and business get scared, they either withdraw money and put under their mattress (consumers), or stopped investing and started hiring freeze/travel freeze/lay off (business). This will have spill over effect on the world, as we are living in a increasingly globalized economy. When the rumor of China new stimulus started, the US stock market started to rally. You got the idea.

Tags bank-nationalization, China

Investing

Leveraged ETF pitfall (from MorningStar)

Post author By stlplace
Post date February 28, 2009
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(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.

Tags leveraged-ETF, MorningStar

Investing

Discover Card

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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 so I think I am ok here.

Fun aside, I think DFS is better positioned in this downturn because their consumer (like yours truely) continue to use them for daily stuff. On the other hand, American Express, which derives significant amount of revenue from high end consumers and business travel, has experienced and will continue to experience challenges in the near term. It’s about affordability or necessity.

Tags DFS, discover-card, Discover-Financial-Service

Investing

Friends don’t let friends buy BAC

Post author By stlplace
Post date February 4, 2009
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(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 then originally thought. There are lots of talk about the potential nationalization, as the rumor also hit another big troubled bank, Citi group (NYSE: C). Some retail investors got excited about the “appears cheap” price, and they bought into the stock and hoped for a big profit in near future.

Don’t !!! Although the insiders of BoA, including its CEO Ken Lewis, bought a bunch of stocks on Jan 20 when the stock dropped under $6 briefly (and around the same time, JP Morgan CEO Jemy Dimon bought JPM stocks), the insider buy looked more like the “confidence showing stock buyback” nowadays. Note in the good old days, companies bought back stocks because they felt the stocks are really cheap. Nowadays many companies bought back stocks to prop up stock price, or to offset the excessive stock awards to its employees. This “Ken Lewis” smelled more like a show to me, just like the Obama’s blaming Wall Street excessive bonus (before he hand out another round of carrots to banks soon).

Tags BAC, bank-of-america, BoA

Investing

Back to coding

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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 the founder of Vanguard group which is famous for its low cost and index fund.

Back to coding
New year also means doing something new, so I went to my first computer related user group meeting for many years (Lambda Lounge). Interestingly, the meeting location Appistry is just 5 minutes walk from my home.

BTW, I decided to take up the Objective C these days (in my own time).

In the news (week in review Jan 06 to Jan 11)

Investing

New Year Resolution?

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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 don’t borrow heavily and bet…I think those simple rules will apply in year 2009 and going forward too.

On a personal note, I changed my job in 2008, right in the middle of financial crisis. While it’s definitely a comforting thing to do, I thought it was time to move forward, and I will try to make it successful. Also, I took CFA level I (twice) in last year. Like the financial market turmoil, the CFA test did take some toll on me. While the outcome is still unkown, I think in a way I already achieved something: a systematic approach to look at equity and bond.

401k/IRA performance

Investing

Who is doing panic selling?

Post author By stlplace
Post date November 15, 2008
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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 manage money for pension funds and university endowment funds, which in hindsight are not suitable investors for hedge funds. A recent example is T. Boone Pickens lost his $165 million endowment to his alma mater University of Oklahoma. How big is hedge fund? One source I heard is the hedge fund industry manages $1.3 trillion in the US.

Investing

My take on this ugly market

Post author By stlplace
Post date October 15, 2008
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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 example is: someone bought Berkshire Hathaway stock in its early days on margin could get wiped out, because the stock dropped 50% on the way. A more recent example is the CEO of Chesepeake Energy (NYSE:CHK), if we believe the story.

2) So I can not short. Why not buy the puts (or sell the calls)? Welcome to the wonderful world of Options. Well, from my observations (both my own small experiment and others experience), Options are totally different ball game. Basically we are play against time. Options have its expiration dates. While I think in this bear market, the down trend of some stocks are obvious, I have no idea how much the stock price will be at a certain period of time. Remember the old saying “dead cat bounce”. While it’s unlikely a company will use precious cash to buy back stocks these days, it’s likely we will see something like we saw on Monday Oct 10: a 960 points pop on Dow.

So what to do?

Save. Retire some debt. Get some more sleep. Do some research. Buy some fundamentally good stocks at bargain price because I believe the world is not coming to an end 🙂