dealraker

Inherited a tiny bit of PepsiCo or whatever LOL the hell it was called in 1975. It's been "YUM(my)" along the way. To make a long story short, the geniuses in my investment club decided to sell Pepsi (this is just before the spin off of the Tricon stuff) and buy the hypergrowth Worldcom which of course was run by a former pro wrestler Ebbers...quite the "man" of macho business of the time. I was the 1 of 25 "no" vote. They rubbed it (with good nature) in my face for a short time. But...humble little me just held fast with my slow-mo Pepsi/YUM stocks. The long story here is that the tiny-tiny-tiny-tiny bit of Pepsi I inherited? If it was the only stock I owned I could feel comfortable in retirement with it. Yep, just this one stock...and of course the hyper-successful spin-offs. All while we must buy/sell Ben Graham style to "beat the market" and as I've been told on COBF "you'd have done better buying zero coupons" or whatnot. All is fine I guess, but that's the wrong world someone is speaking of, one I don't live within. The investment club, after the tech blow ups of the early 2000's including Worldcom going to zero, decided (forced me to be) to elect me president of the club again. They did that twice through the 40 years I was in the club, both times when their obsessions sent the club portfolio to living hell. Life is great...if you can stand it. Now they (the club) are all over the place with "value" investing and land purchases (leasing mining rights). I'm trying to exit the club these days, the young guys are flying high! Morning ramble. The Pepsi/YUM thingy is worth double digit times what it was when the club sold it to go to zero with Wroldcom. These things? Well, they do actually count in the long run.

I bought a tad of 30 year 15% treasury bonds back in 1981. I need a magnifying glass to find the t-bill yields today.

For what it's worth, as mentioned previously the other stock I'd sold was Auto Nation.

Yes.

dealraker's ruining the buy-and-hold model today: Sold the last shares of Old Dominion Freight LInes Sold Enphase Sold First Solar

Interesting choices of what to put in vs leave out. I'll degress from this topic as I've found that anything remotely related to Hunter Harrison and Brookfield's Bruce Flatt doesn't work for debating. Don't take my response personally, I'm just reading different facts.

To Japan? $20-some thousand gets the door open. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/realestate/japan-empty-houses.html

The unanimous view on Amazon and AWS as evidenced by the current stock price. We will see!

For your entertainment Spek, Amazon is my "20 year" stock. 20 years later it will sell for less than a former high point. Is it this go-round? It really all depends on when investors as a whole begin to put the normal or traditional valuation model into effect.

When we were all the same race, religion, with no gender changes...Scotland and England for centuries... we got along beautifully, didn't we? Don't worry, if we aren't at war with somebody else we'll be at war with one-another. Let's kick 'em all out and get down to one race, all extreme Christians, and for God's sake no gender options/changes...and just watch bloody outcome. Life is great...if you can stand it! Rupert was a ****ing genius!

So my interest in this topic may be off-topic but given we are small investors and those fearing lower quotes are out-and-about on other threads stating bargains are being bought... In the last couple or few months I have in typically slow pattern put 2/3rds of a $500k trust that we are assigned to manage into stuff, the averaged prices: Berkshire B $300; Lowe's $180; AJ Gallager $185; Meta $150; Google $95; XLE $80...these seem at least to me to be likely to equal bond performace at what was the comparison when bought. And each time the market falls the postings as to bad outcomes gets stronger. Is it rational for small investors to obsess over general market prices? I don't do bonds, somehow survived not doing so. Whoops: Markel $1215 and got close on some of those US railroads run by CEO's that make some really questionable decisions.

Harry will get some CNBC time as soon as we get a downturn in prices. Harvard number 2 in his class...and this is what came of it!

Once the best selling market predictor ever, yet again Harry is making his case...which in my view is as relevant and likely as any: https://news.bitcoin.com/economist-harry-dent-expects-biggest-crash-in-our-lifetime-to-hit-between-now-and-mid-june/

A tad of long term humor to go along with today's concerns. Jan 10, 1975 dad dies, mom died years earlier. I get a trust accessible at 30 years old, I'm in my teens. 13 stocks! Chaos rules the world and most of them worth less over a decade later when I had access to the trust. Along the way some got bought, one went to zero, and new stuff arrived out of some of them. But none of them in 1975 exceeded $5,000 in market value. The thing is I didn't volunteeringly sell anything ever, I was either too young (for over a decade) or too fearful and/or busy to sell. Today just one of the stocks, yep just one, went up more in value than the total value of them all in Jan 1975. LOL.

Hey John...the August/September 2011 panic out of stocks was one I remember very well. It even almost, but not quite, got some of my otherwise very solid family members. But it wiped clean the equity stakes of many I know... ...right at the dead bottom! Stocks, expecially according to the younger guy in my investment club, were to be avoided at any cost. We had some 1 vote victories to keep stocks like Lowe's. It was a very close call with cut-and-run. Years of fear dominated from March 9th 2009 and the only thing that got the conversation changed was the lust for Bitcoin. Not that family members or club members did much biting on the bit, it was just the Bitcoin story was so fascinating that these people forgot they were supposed to be in panic mode! But a full decade of horrors and fears conversation with those making ten times their fear stating point would in most cases get people to stop talking about it. But not this bunch. Of course fears seem far more rational today. The problem is simply that that's always the case. Sell before May...they say!

Meta was a truly unique situation. A very rare thing that went in many ways extreme, but an easily defined and easily fixable issue. Zuck got himself under control and it ended immediately.

Pardon my medieval wording but I'm an English history book reader. TwoCities, I'm envisioning an online battle between you and your small group of believing knights here and Saul's Investing Discussions on Motley Fool. It would be: Anything But Stocks vs. Only Hyper Sales Growth Stocks With No Profits likely ever. Both sides claim the past as proof of their intense beliefs! Be aware though that Saul, when he's gone way out there with his use of past stats, gets 800 to thousands of likes. So you are up against quite the opposition! My view is that some businessmen, via their reasonably priced stocks, are going to get filthy rich during the years of this discussion.

Guys-guys-guys...just buy Brookfield damn-it. Bruce is and surely will be out-and-about with his overly simplistic spoon fed verbage vividly describing to you that they (you know....that yard sale of entities) only own trophy properties and all is well. Maybe time for some creative distributable funds from operations or a sale, maybe half sale to somebody and itself, of something above IFRS (that surely means all things are worth far above IFRS). Oh lord, I woke up on the cynical side of life today! I'm looking for yet another article on New York office tragedy that includes an upbeat sentence or two about a floor or so at 660 5th avenue, the Kush-Kush bailout (for West nukes in Saudi).

For a further perspective, I 100% disageeed with Kudlow as early as 2004 and had urged all my friends to get out of their bank stocks (of course while holding my CATY and EWBC). I thought, of course, that I was a ****ing genius...and for a while it seemed I was! "It is a housing and banking thing" I thought, one where MY stocks would be just fine. Then...? That was my last "forecast" as I decided I knew just enough to be slightly smarter than Kudlow but still a royal ****ing dumbass --- next to dead last, just above Kudlow in the bottom of the barrel.

For comparison, Larry Kudlow was ranting buy banks in what he called every day "the Cinderella economy" well up into 2007.

For a perspective related to my lifetime (I'm 68 almost 69 and inherited less that $50k of stocks in my teens): This is, by far...by leaps and bounds, the most obsessed over, most predicted rampant inflation and recession in the last 50 years.

Wow Greg...you mean you aren't in awe of someone like Bloomstran ---- who routinely assaults Cathie Woods while citing the never attained value he claims Berkshire is worth along with listing in detail the out-performance of the stocks he owns for the last 10 years...all while his fund (of course) never keeps up with the indexes? How dare you be so radical?

Yes you're right John.

I was interested, yet confused, at what made a few Berkshire people so enamored with Tilson. I am the same way with Bloomstran. If you want some entertainment then read the performance part of his fund reports and note what he emphasizes vs what he doesn't. So you market via Berkshire and make that stock 25%, claim value culture sliding in a fee between Berk and its shareholders, and sledgehammer anyone saying anything at all that isn't basic worship. So far a small boutique of cultists.