rpadebet

I am forced by my employer to be only long in everything i do :(. No Buying puts on SPY even! compliance departments can be crazy that way I am seeing if they will accept me being long the inverse ETFs!

It just means the viewers and short term guys are about to get sick. that feeling in their stomachs starts just about now... Down 1% on the day. That will get people thinking.

I personally think this one is a big one..at least 20% correction here if not more. Problems in China are not to be ignored. It is not contained just like Housing problem here wasn't contained to subprime. I don't think it is 2008 here but it is similar to the last Asian currency crisis 1997 i think.

I think we saw 100$ oil around June end 2014. Maybe the futures curve had 100$ oil until July/August 2014. Typically the futures market is liquid until a year out, even 12 months out, it is difficult to hedge in size. So assuming they all did hedge then and assuming your rationale is sound, now would be the time those $100 hedges expire. Wait for a quarter to see the effects in PnL of companies. So this quarter and next quarter we will know..

the world is interconnected. even the first order effects are hard to predict. then there are second order effects..+ more Maybe Europeans are affected more than US by china problems. US also exports to europe, a fairly large chunk, what are the effects of that on US? To continue with the GFC bank analogy, GS wasn't exposed to housing, they were short, they thought they were going to make a killing, until they realized their insurer AIG might go kaput. So it suddenly became an existential threat to them. It is safe to assume that issues in China will affect us in someway. We are not insulated, not partially also. If they deflate their currency in response, imports into US become cheaper, chinese goods will flood the market and then US producers are not competitive. there could be job losses and impact on housing etc. more than CNBC, I enjoy when CNN, MSNBC and O'Reilly give investment advice....it happened this week. They all said hold and sit tight. That scares the shit out of me.

$40 oil - CHECK disinflation & unemployment - TO FOLLOW "mother of all QE's" - QUITE PROBABLE Elizabeth Warren front runner for US presidency - YET TO BE SEEN, BUT THINGS GOING IN THAT DIRECTION WITH BIDEN TRYING NOW.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/25/gartman-im-on-the-sidelines-on-oil-for-now.html?trknav=homestack:topnews:7 There you go... the bottom is most likely in in Oil. Gartman's timing on these kind of things is simply unbeatable.

+1 I have made so many and some so embarrassing, I wouldn't want to be sharing them here. :). To top it off it was during the 2008-09 downturn. It affected me so much, I couldn't take advantage of the bargains. I questioned my investment philosophy ( turns out it wasn't much), read a lot of books and slowly stumbled my way to value investing framework. I am just getting started as each day I find there is so much more to investing intelligently. So don't be too hard on yourself. As long as you learn... Mission accomplished

Bought RLGT and a little bit of BIDU today (mostly to do force myself to do more research this week). At around 15-20% correction, I will probably use up my recently raised cash and start using my margin. I think I might even restart selling SPY put LEAPS if it gets to 13 fwd PE (The Buffet trade) to raise cash/float. I did this successfully in 2013, 2014 which I closed out this year in June. I don't care about volatility much, so this kind of works for me. Carefully watching 2017 Dec put LEAPs .

The hope is it goes down more.... but the fear is like all these years, the relatively puny deals we might have now also might not last long or go deep enough... the 52 week lows set today will be staring at us for a long time even though it was virtually impossible to take advantage of those lows this morning. I hope china doesn't do anything again tonight...another 10-20% or so of decline there and names like BABA,BIDU etc are in deal territory.

WTF?? just down 1% now?, guess we will be up 5% by EOD at this pace. FDN is back to flat, so some lucky souls made 80%+ in 3 hours Is this the long awaited correction? Nothing again for what another 3-4 years?

This is not exactly Black Friday, more of a step in the right direction Yes, market seems to be going back up.... I may have gotten excited too soon...

You can buy anything...its like Thanksgiving Black Friday...only the wait was much longer. Any ideas on which names have the highest bounce back potential? I am thinking BABA calls, JPM warrants, selling IWM/QQQ/SPY puts

I am bored too... This is too tough to predict though.. There is a race to the bottom in terms of currencies, but it is happening because of deflationary threats. Lots of people assumed when US was doing the QE that inflation would be an inevitable consequence. We saw inflation in Fixed income assets but little else. Now with potential for rising rates, lower oil, china devaluation the fear is for deflation. In a perfectly symmetrical world we should see deflation of fixed income assets and nothing much..... however, we could also easily see wage deflation and hence consumer deflation with some asset deflation and some other asset inflation. Who knows where the deflation happens? It will most likely happen where most people are not looking right now, that I am sure of. Bottom line world wide growth will be a function of population growth and productivity growth. Population growth is pretty stable and wont change overnight unless there is a big war/uncontrollable disease. Last i checked it still takes at least 9 months to produce a human, so short term upside to population growth is not a concern. We have some more things to do about the productivity growth. The last paradigm shift here was with the information revolution. I don't know what phase we are in of this revolution, but it seems to be slowing. Cloud computing, mobile computing, social sharing economy etc will continue to add some productivity growth for sometime. Maybe the next revolution is in health care, who knows, but even this takes a lot of time. As a planet we are slowing down from the rapid pace of past 3 decades yet still growing. Some parts are growing very fast while others are rapidly declining and countries like US are somewhere near the average. I am in the camp that we have a muddle through economy for a long long time. Inflation and Deflation will be equally threatening and rational policy makers will keep adjusting the dials. the risk here is something irrational or out of the ordinary happening like a big war, some new very powerful technology, big disease or some crazy person/group being given the control over some significant part of the global economy. This by definition cant be predicted as it is a black swan, but I think it will eventually have to happen to disturb this uncomfortable equilibrium we are in. I don't know when.

This is something I agree with somewhat... Not all drugs in pipeline are going to be wonder drugs...but how can we be sure and exclude the ones which are going to be? If the thesis is to short a basket... Also like in venture capital investments, does one blockbuster drug make up for the losses for the rest and still provide an adequate return on capital? It could be a bubble if that threshold is passed....how could I be reasonably certain about that without knowing how many blockbusters, how big of a blockbuster and how quickly it will be a blockbuster.

I am probably a minority here.... I don't think we will have a 2001 style tech crash at these valuations. I don't think all the companies mentioned are insanely valued - maybe some like TWTR and LKDN now, but I haven't researched them enough to have an informed opinion. AMZN,FB,NFLX are most likely bargains at these prices. I subscribe to the philosophy that price is what you pay now and value is what you get in future As others have pointed out PE multiples don't necessarily tell the whole story when companies are in reinvestment mode and typically multiples look awfully high in this phase. While evaluating these and any company, the questions you need to ask yourselves is 1) whether the next dollar of reinvestment into the business is going to provide you above average returns 2) Do they have sufficiently long runway, given the market size, competition,technological change etc to keep making these reinvestment's for long enough time to allow for decent above average returns even after assuming return drag due to multiple compression to "reasonable" levels. I believe that most of the value you get out of any investment is from the future earnings growth from that business. Typically their past can inform/influence but not predict how the future will look like. I believe if you buy it at cheap PE multiples you will tend to do better than the business on average. And if you buy at high PE multiples you will do worse than the business does, assuming PE normalization in both cases. The critical factor here is all businesses don't do the same in the future, some have outstanding returns on their reinvestment, some average and some worse. This is why I spend my time analyzing the business prospects rather than worrying too much about the current price and multiple. I invest if I think I can meet my return hurdle assuming multiple compression/expansion to the average as the case maybe AND only if the candidate business prospects meet the criteria I have listed above. I agree that this analysis is not as simple as buying something at discount to TBV or NAV and hoping for the gap to close. But even this form of investing is not as easy as it seems on the surface most of the time. The discounts are most likely warranted and they go away only if future business prospects are better than what the market currently anticipates.

I'm curious, may I ask why you've sold out of MSFT? I've pared back as well over the past couple of years based on valuation. By why sell out if you don't need cash? Just valuation or do you have something about the business you don't like? Needed cash, had 140% exposure on margin earlier this year. Didn't sell MSFT because i think its over valued. I think they have a decent strategy now and runway with cloud. But it will take time and investment to show up in earnings. I had too much tech and financial large caps over the last couple of years. Did well. I think the valuations have now become more reasonable. Forward growth there is not as attractive, so scouting for other smaller fast growers. I will do large caps only if they are very cheap or growth runway is very attractive relative to price. I am looking for 20%+ returns annually, so multiple expansion from valuation + dividends alone wont get me there, need growth and growth runway so I don't have to keep replacing these every year. Also avoiding margin leverage in the short run, until this rate hike, china devaluation, oil decline etc plays out.

I don't see any obvious buys. Fairfax and BRK are closest to being buys for me... Well, maybe oil sector, but that's also not obvious. ;) Been selling a lot too recently. Out of MSFT,EBAY,AAPL, MTB warrants, NOV, half of AMZN etc. total exposure cut by half almost. Waiting to cut AIG as well. Only invested in things with long term value (5+ years). I don't believe investments with positive catalysts will pan out in the near future. Recent buys include FAST,RX,INP.V, PKTEF, LILAK Hoping for a nice correction in the next 12 months.

WEB: Media Selloff not enticing http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000405121 I think I agree with him, this selloff if real, has to go more deeper to entice real M&A buyers.

I had a small position in SNI sometime ago when I thought it would be bought out. I don't have any now, but would like to own some. I am looking at DIS and FOX as the most likely candidates. I am just not very comfortable with the other smaller but cheaper names at this point. My current thoughts are that this sector is moving towards consolidation. There are too many players compared to their distributors, the cable networks which have heavily consolidated. Their suppliers, content producers are also nicely consolidated. Advertising revenue is moving away from traditional media. There is also competition from "new media" such as Netflix and You tube for content as well as advertising. Add the de-bundling phenomenon to this and you can understand the selloff. I think the recent selloff is warranted and potentially just the beginning. Things might have to get more cheap for the M&A wave to start. We have seen content producers squeeze these media companies and we have also seen advertising revenue declining . FX might be a temporary headwind, but I am more concerned about what the cable companies can do now. What if these distributors start charging for network maintenance instead of paying fees as they have been doing? they have tried this with Netflix and others for hogging the internet bandwidth. If they force de-bundling or ask for a "bundling premium", I think the profitability can be severely affected. I am only trying to understand the potential downside scenarios and get a feel for the price I would like to invest. At this point I feel this is like the oil industry at the beginning of last year where things start to look cheap/fair on historic basis, but then future estimates can then come down potentially drastically and the initial price drop makes a lot of sense later. Same thing happened with financials in late 2006. Old tech in 2012-13 to some extent, but this group mostly worked through their troubles due their flexibility and pace of change in the industry but not without some casualties. Can any of you come up with any other "bad scenarios" which might happen to these as a group?

I think the earnings report coming out tomorrow for Amazon will continue to be a positive. They're relentless in going after new and existing markets. 8) 8) 8) 8) 8) 8) 8) 8) 8) 8) ;D :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:(

I think the earnings report coming out tomorrow for Amazon will continue to be a positive. They're relentless in going after new and existing markets. I don't think it matters. The stock only goes up. Yes. Very hard stock to get into for value investors, but very easy to hold. You basically can stop worrying about competitive threats because 9 out of 10 news releases will be about how AMZN is the competitive threat to some other business. :) Very difficult decision for me to sell, but I had to fund LILA purchase and this AMZN was up 50% in 6 months, so please pull back!!

Over the last few days, sold AAPL completely, AMZN partially, NOV completely, put all proceeds into LILAK. >10% position now. hope to get back into AMZN on any pull backs or if GM stake works out sooner.

I assume a fairly large growth rate in the average human lifespan, apply a fair multiple to terminal value based on current low interest rates and calculate the cumulative time I have left. I then spend less time that on a daily basis and as everyone knows if you spend less than you have, you can't help but save time and get rich!

Yes it's possible. Look up ctcm, it's a media company in Russia. I for one thought the issues with sanctions against Russia wouldn't impact a small local media company. I thought I was being contrarian and smart by avoiding banks or resource companies there. Then out of the blue ( at least for me), they pass a law limiting foreign ownership in media companies. From 80/20 in favor of foreign ownership, ctcm was suddenly required to figure out a way to get to 20/80. It's been downhill for ctcm since that law was passed. Moral of the story is when things start getting crazy, you can never underestimate the extent of craziness.