matjone

Thanks, I just saw the replies to this. I spoke to IB and they said it is illegal to sell shares to yourself. So everyone can rest easy now knowing they have rules in place to keep whales like me from manipulating 300 B market cap stocks. I figure even if the rule is good for nothing else I got a good laugh out of it in this instance. You are right boilermaker, I could have done what you said and it wouldn't have made a lot of difference in this case, but you are going to lose the spread between the bid & ask which can be big in some cases. I can see other ways you could get screwed. Say for example you've got a sell order for stock A at .99 and a buy at 1.00. Sell order goes through but for some reason the buy doesn't, then the company announces they've beat estimates or something, stock goes up 20%, and you are stuck. If you use market orders you could also end up in trouble if there is another flash crash. What ended up happening in this case was I sold and then bought back a tad cheaper, so it worked out in my favor.

where do you go to get quotes for these? The only quote I found was on morningstar and it's a 4.5% preferred quoted at 105. Thanks

St. Louis, MO. Sure are a lot of you from PA and VA. It must be a conspiracy.

I am not familiar with how brokerages operate and I thought maybe someone here could help me. Say I have a non dividend paying stock like berkshire in a tax deferred account like a roth ira, and some cash in a taxable account. I've also got some dividend paying stock that I'm thinking about buying, so I figure I'll sell berkshire in my roth, buy it in the taxable account, and use the cash from the sale to buy the dividend payer in the roth. Is there a way to do this and ensure that the trade goes through, and I don't lose any money other than the commissions?

I remembered seeing it mentioned somewhere that he had underperformed the index since inception. I just looked his returns up here: http://www.tilsonmutualfunds.com/. His dividend fund has outperformed and his focus fund has underperformed. I am not really sure what is going on with his calculations though, the inception date for both funds is the same, but he has two different numbers for the benchmark return since the inception date.

The question is, what is an individual supposed to do?

Maybe he should just continue to be the face of the firm and get someone else to do the stock picking. I think value investing the graham and dodd way and selling are activities that require personalities that are opposite each other. The good salesman I've known loved being around people, loved being the center of attention, and a lot of times were a little overconfident, while a lot of good investors that I know are more reclusive and cautious types. On the other hand, maybe if he keeps at it he'll improve and eventually get better returns.

Since the u.s. market is kind of high right now, I was looking around at other countries. I ran a screen for each country on ft.com's screener and looked at the % of stocks selling below book. I think that in slovenia something like 3/4 of them were below book, so I started looking through them. If you go to this page you can get an idea of the valuations http://www.ljse.si/cgi-bin/jve.cgi?doc=1520&sid= Also, after re-reading this I realized that calling investing in slovenia "crazy" could be seen as an insult and I didn't mean it to be, hopefully no one was offended.

This may sound crazy, but I was just looking at some Slovenian stocks that look cheap. I am wondering if anyone has any experience investing there, and if so, what broker they used. TIA

I don't have a taxable account with them, and from the sounds of it I don't want one. I'll probably end up transferring this one to IB. Good luck with tax forms and getting them in a timely manner. One yer they left my ass high and dry in Sept with a letter saying they would no longer be fixing any tax forms due to high demand and gave out a nice letter for the IRS in case it causes a problem. Also, I was audited b/c of their record keeping on the backed to the IRS. The $5 trades are not woth it with all the crap I had to go through.

Are you just wanting to invest in the U.S.? Did you ever look into tradeking? They are good for u.s. equities, 5 dollars a trade for most of them, 10 bucks if they are below a certain amount, can't remember the amount, no monthly or quarterly fees. I've never invested in options so I couldn't tell you what they charge for that. But they don't have access to foreign markets. For that it seems like the choice is between IB and fidelity. IB has lower commissions, but fidelity has lower fixed fees and access to more markets

I'd like to get a regular report of how much these price alerts are being revised upwards or downwards, might be a good indicator of psychology. What types of securities can you put into these alerts? Do any of these allow you to do so with foreign securities?

I asked this question, supposedly scottrade offers this service. I use google docs, but I have to enter a lot of things manually.

Yeah, I actually look more at the p/b than anything. I more or less run my 401k according to the old ben graham rules for defensive investors, or at least as close as I can come to it given the restrictions. I am really limited on what I can do in the plan, and I could complain about 401k plans and tax rules for several paragraphs, but that is a whole other thread. Thanks for the link to that site, stahleyp. I don't know if it will have what I am looking for but it looks like it will be a useful resource nonetheless.

Thanks for the replies. The fund I am looking at now is RERFX. I usually look at morningstar for this kind of thing, but their valuation ratios are based on forward looking estimates.

I sometimes make switches in my retirement accounts based on valuation mutliples for the different fund options. So far all I've been able to find is multiples based on forward looking data. Is there any resource out there that provides this info using current data? Another related question - how do they even compute these ratios, given that most of the reports I've seen for mutual funds don't even list all their holdings? The ones I am looking at list about half of their holdings by name, with the rest listed under "other".

I am currently using interactive brokers for my foreign stock purchases, but they don't have access to some markets that I'm interested in, such as portugal and greece. So I'm looking for one that does have access, and naturally I want to pay as little as possible for it. Any recommendations? I have looked at fidelity, but they are a little bit on the expensive side compared to what I am used to. 19 euro for trades on the lisbon exchange, for example. Has anyone found anything that beats them? Thanks in advance

You could look through your holdings to see if they should be sold. You could just keep looking like Nate says. I still see people coming up with ideas that seem cheap on some of the blogs I follow. Or you could look for arbitrage opportunities, opportunities to invest in private businesses, opportunities to start your own business, and so on. Or you could just do like other have suggested and go have a good time doing anything you enjoy. I look at that as the lowest risk thing you can do. There's no money to be made but there is no way anyone can take away a good time you've already had.

There's a blog called "distressed debt investing" that you could try reading as well. I can't understand a single post on the whole blog but maybe you'll have better luck.

Kraven, first of all nice Arsenio reference, I am showing my approval by doing the old circular fist/"whoot" chant thing. I may have misread but it seems like you are making a distinction between Schloss' and Tweedy's approach. What is the distinction? And what is the distinction between what tweedy was doing buying net nets and simply buying off a screen?

I wonder what the pe of the dow or s&p is if you strip out excess cash? That could be part of the reason why a businessman might pay more than what he should according to shiller. Also, Hussman keeps saying profit margins are abnormally high, but people on the other side of the argument have countered that that is sustainable because the mix of industries has shifted to more high margin stuff. I haven't seen anyone refute that - not saying they haven't because I don't follow that kind of thing too much.

I'm sorry but this reminds me of the South Park episode where Stan's dad tells him "son, I have SARS. There is only a 99% chance that I will survive." Sugar shouldn't be a staple food, but to call it poison seems like hyperbole.

It's funny in the past year or so I have seen a lot of articles saying that sugar is poison. Sure seems to be a slow acting one on some of these people. Sad thing is people like Bloomberg are actually listening to these experts and trying to legislate how much sugar people can consume based on their research.

Sometimes I'll look at something at think "it looks like a solid company, but not quite cheap enough." A year or two later I'll see the same thing mentioned somewhere and find that it declined to 1/5 of what I thought was almost cheap enough, but has since rebounded. What do you use to keep track of things like this? I started keeping a google docs spreadsheet that I can look over and compare the quote to what I thought might be a good price. Problem is google doesn't recognize a lot of stock tickers, so I have to enter them manually. Do any of you have a better way of doing this? Thanks,

I can see how you can look around and see prices are high, but I don't know how you can have any idea where it ends. Of course he knows far more than I probably ever will about this. The people I think are really getting screwed in all this are older people. People who are in their saving years can buy stocks, and they may get hammered in the near term, but they'll end up with a decent return on it years down the road.