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NormR

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Posts posted by NormR

  1. matjone and Hester,

     

    Why don't you start by looking at the 30 components of the Dow? Once you realize that many of the prime companies in the U.S. trade at well below normal valuations or between 7 and 10 times earnings then maybe that we will talk about cheaper, but lesser known companies.

     

    Yia Yahoo ...

            Price   P/E    Yield    P/B     P/S
    TRV 	56.68 	7.75 	2.80 	0.95 	0.95  	
    HPQ 	34.90 	8.58 	1.40 	1.81 	0.57 	 	
    T 	30.44 	8.68 	5.50 	1.62 	1.46 	 	
    JPM 	39.49 	8.77 	2.40 	0.92 	1.78 	 	
    CVX 	97.90  	9.50 	3.10 	1.81 	0.99 	 	
    MSFT 	24.30 	9.65 	2.60 	3.88 	3.03 	 	
    INTC 	21.20  	9.91 	3.30 	2.45 	2.49 	 	
    

  2. While it's great to make money, investors have to be able to sleep well at night.  Everyone should invest based on their temperament, not on what books suggest.  So if you feel comfortable keeping cash, keep cash.  If you are able to tolerate wide swings, stay invested.  Cheers!

     

    As a corollary, your tolerance to swings is likely less than you think it is - particularly if it's determined during good times.

     

  3. Hahahaha. Yes, there is nothing good about Xbox/Kinect. It is only winning by default since AAPL isn't in the game. HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! That's a perfect example of the bias out there.

     

    :o  AAPL is, at very best, ok for casual gamers (a growing and big market to be sure).  Been that way for, well, probably a couple of decades.  I don't see it changing much soon. 

     

    I find the AAPL worship thing a little odd.  It wasn't that long ago that the stock was trading at cash and they could do nothing right.  (I made good money on it too. :) )  Speaking of which, why the frack does AAPL need $30B of cash?  It's dividend time ... 

     

    To the point of the thread, I use both bing & google.  Google more often tho.  Bing has improved, from a low level, and google seems to have declined a bit.  I do notice that google is trying really hard to drum up business.  It seems that I get a gazzilion offers to advertise via google in the mail/magazines/etc.  It's almost as bad as the old AOL days with their CDs.  Not a good sign. 

  4. Rose is better that most shows.  A bit of a soft interview but usually interesting.

     

    However, Krugman is definitely a pundit with the column / regular Sunday morning appearances.  I gave up on him when his views shifted with changes in government.  Same with a bunch of jokers on all sides.

     

    When testing predictive ability, it's best not to look for confirmatory evidence but instead look for the opposite. 

     

    Read Tetlock's book, it'll help you free up your Sunday mornings.  :)

     

     

  5. Sorry, Krugman is a ideological pundit.  Good on the entertainment side, but that's about it.  He's one of Tetlock's hedgehogs.  You basically have to be one to get a seat on the Sunday morning gab shows ...

  6. Norm  --  looks like you took the lead this year.

     

    Oh no, Packer gets the credit.   :)

     

    Another pre-pre-meeting sounds good at C'est What this time.

    How about 5:30pm.

     

    Ah, you'll notice that the doors open at Joe Bs at 5:30 this year.  So,  I'd expect that we'll be headed there for 5:30.  This is for even earlier arrivals.  :)  

     

    To fix a time, I'll wander down to C'est What for ~3:00 PM for the early arrivals.  :)

  7. Does anyone else want to meet up before the dinner?  I should arrive in Toronto a little after noon.

     

    The tradition continues.  I'm in.  :)

     

    Only real fans go to the pre-pre-meeting.   ;D

     

    I suggest C'est What which is a 10 min walk from Joe B's.

     

    URL http://www.cestwhat.com/

     

    Map http://maps.google.ca/maps?oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&q=C%27est+What&fb=1&gl=ca&hq=C%27est+What&hnear=Toronto,+ON&cid=0,0,10028530785494359943&z=16&iwloc=A

     

     

    Added: Starting at ~3:00 PM and ending ~5:20 PM to allow for the shamble over to Joe B's

     

     

  8. It's going to be a tight squeeze for the presentation part this year as well folks!  I'll be exploring other venues on this trip, and we'll arrange something that can comfortably accommodate a larger crowd for next year.  

     

    Although, we've enjoyed Joe Badali's hospitality for the last six years!  When we started we only had nine attendees.  Now we have ten times as many, and I'm guessing that will increase at least two-fold over the next 5-6 years.  Cheers!

     

    Watch out, soon it might be bigger than the actual meeting itself  8)

  9. Does anyone care to argue against greenblatts formula and back it up with any substance?  I'm ok with criticism and critique, but i've yet to hear a valid counterpoint to greenblatts thesis that his formula will beat the market.  It seems more that we have a bunch of people who can't accept any other way to beat the market, besides doing extensive bottom up analysis

     

    Haugen (?) took a swipe at Greenblatt when the book first came out.  Basically going after the database he used and suggesting the 30% would only be ~20% or so if better data were used.  Oh, and that other formulas were better.  Mind you, don't know many that would complain about 20%. 

  10. Generally though anyone trying to predict a stock's behaviour is more often wrong than right.  Too many variables in the human world.  That is the beauty of what we do.  We (Grahamites) make no attempt to predict where a company may end up.  We look at existing information and identify what is undervalued at the present time.

     

    And we're still wrong ~40% of the time ...

  11. Was asked whether an individual CDN investor pays taxes on realized and unrealized gains on an annual basis when invested in non CDN fund?

    Anyone wants to take a stab?

     

    I'm going to assume that the Canadian investor is a resident of Canada and a non-Canadian fund is a fund sold outside Canada rather than a fund in Canada that holds non-Canadian securities.  In which case, it's an event that shouldn't happen because the non-Canadian fund isn't licensed to do business in Canada.  (Welcome to the dumb world of securities law.)

  12.  

     

    I am blown away by the difference in housing sentiment between the US and Canda. Literally it is

    night and day and Canda does not have 30 year mortgages. we are taking a look...

     

    Dazel.

    Canada has had 30 year mortgages. Some of the majors are just now restricting the 35 yr amorts.

     

    They're effectively ARMs.  The amortization period may max out at 30+ years (40 years only a few years ago) but the rate is often floating or locked in for << 10 years.

     

  13. Humm, I think that benchmarking Tim to the S&P/TSX Composite is likely a mistake.  Why?  Tim holds non-Canadian stocks.  Oh, and the S&P/TSX Composite is a crazily lopsided index anyway.   

     

    (As a supplementary consideration, one might also want to remove the cash position to get a better sense of his stock picking ability.)

     

    Mind you, I'm slowly coming to the view that benchmarking is largely a toxic mental model that seems to lead to silliness like style boxes and trailing four year itch where anything that has underperformed over the last four years should be ditched.  Problem is, nearly any good method will suffer from multi-year periods of underperformance.

     

     

  14. It's rather frustrating that honest discussions of power options don't seem to be possible.  All energy sources have their upsides and downsides.  But the money involved is huge which seems to spawn various nutbar groups to argue for anything but energy source X and for source Y.

     

    My personal preference is for cheap, clean, and diversified where practical.

  15. Oh gosh, and with all sympathy and respect to those who lost family/etc., the nuke stuff isn't apocalyptic.  Remember, the country survived 2 real nukes in WW2 and the firebombing of many other cities.  It may take a little while, but a recovery will happen.  The TV news people are sounding like 'panicky idiots' from a disaster flick these days...

  16. First FFH has to win.  Then they have to defend the thousand appeals that the hedgies will try to launch, and then FFH has to actually collect from the deadbeats.

     

    If they win the first round, the hedgies will likely want to settle.  After all, try raising money with such a knock against you.  Imagine the hypothetical conversation with a pension fund.  "Sure we're underhanded liars but we'll look after your money real good...."  Humm, second thought, Madoff seemed to do well with a similar pitch ;)

     

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