November has been a wild ride. After 3.4% personal gains yesterday (still well below February peak), it is crystal clear that anyone who claims to know what the market is going to do for the rest of the year is either deluded or lying. I'm going to close my eyes and wait for this carnival ride to finish.
Speaking of market timing... If ever I felt like playing a spread, this would be the time. The markets are flailing around so there is an active spread. Our cash requirement is not specific. It would be easy to place a small sell order at 10.60 and a buy order at 10.10. From there, we would either have a bit of extra stock or a bit of extra cash. If it works, we could repeat. It would be a 1 strike at bat. A free swing, essentially. I won't do this, of course. Lol.
I wish to officially express my support for protesters in China. No one deserves to be locked in their house and slowly starved. Stay strong, my friends.
Its nice to see the pentagon outsourcing $4B worth of IT to the cloud. Cloud providers will move this business to the lowest cost data centres. Nothing bad can possibly happen. Lol!
BTW, my Jan/Feb crash scenario is looking more likely by the day. I have no idea of the wbi and I haven't quoted my companies in days. I'm riding this train to the last stop.
For what its worth, I think the american response has gone off course badly. I was initially thinking it was the best we could do, considering all forces, but has been clear for the last year that Pfizer is in charge of lock down policy. The people making decisions on public health are not physicians. So, our point of view on this topic could well be similar.
That is for sure Tom. In addition the FDA is totally out of control. Many drugs have been approved in the past few years that are either not safe or not effective or both. We have seen many physicians resign from their safety panels and we have seen drugs approved where the panel recommends NOT approving them. I have never seen the FDA acting like this in my lifetime. A symptom of the times we now live in.
I didn't like the way it was fast tracked without going thru the full trials. People fear the unknown and sheep get slaughtered. Control the narrative is a powerful tool used against the feeble minded. If your following the tweetergate files it's starting to surface. Glad I'm old and out of the rat race, simply taking a trip on the couch and enjoying the show.
We are on vacation and one of our core companies dropped 10% in the last week. No relevant news on the net or the companies web site. It is not really a high profile company. Very strange. If I was at home, I would consider buying the dip but the plan was to keep our powder dry until the end of January so we shall stay the course. One of the things about owning low trade volume companies is they do some weird stuff. This could be some insider trading by someone who knows something bad is going to happen or it could be someone selling a substantial stake for non-performance reasons.
Trading verus investing... revisited... again Some friends on another site have declared themselves investors, not traders. They are adamant. The thing is, they are talking about stock they sold because the price was high and they are looking at entry points now the market caps have rolled back. It is clear they consider themselves investors because they have a long investing horizon. Look... Investing is owning one or more companies. It is not manipulating stock. A company is a group of people. An investor analyzes those people. Are they: honest, hard working, smart? If yes, and if you can understand the business enough to follow it, you buy a piece of the company. Buying a company is the same as if you went to your local auto parts store and said, "I'd like to buy half of your business. Let's be 50/50 partners." From there, you become partners and you watch what happens. You don't sell when you think you can get top dollar for the business. If your partner knew you would do that, he wouldn't sell you the shares in the first place. You sell when your partner starts operating the business in a way that is disrespectful of you. Investing is a long term commitment. I am a partner to businesses which do not know I exist. I own them and hold them until I discover my partner is not honest. Once I discover that, I sell out. This is exactly how I would operate any partnership, including the auto parts store. I owned a pulp and paper products company through the bark beetle crisis. Suffice to say, the stock did not perform well for a few years. The thing is, management continued to be good. I believed in their ability to manage their way out of the crisis and they did exactly this. I have owned a couple of oil industry service companies through WTI slumps. During one such period, there was absolutely no new drilling in the North American oil sector. These guys had zero debt and were barn storming business animals. I knew they would be fine. They ended up switching their operation from Western Canadian oil/gas to running an LNG operation in Papua New Guinea. They didn't get rich in New Guinea but they did fine and had the staff and healthy finances necessary to triple the size of their operation when Canadian oil resumed operation. This is Buffett 101. This mode of operation makes perfect sense to me.
It's been a brutal year for the longtermers. I'm sure your cost average is low enough that your not upside down in any of your positions, nonetheless it's no fun watching unrealized gains dwindle. I've always been a believer in having cash on the side to work with. May your investments compound and your days be many. For now I'm taking a trip on the couch and waiting for the fire sale, why pay retail when I can buy it wholesale.
Thanks, Spud. I look forward to the new year and what it might bring, be it carnage or prosperity. Best wishes to you in 2023.
It's been a strange three week period for us. Our largest holding took a 23% hit in early December. It happened in a single day. The stock was holding it's own all year, just slightly down, and then shazam... no longer our largest holding. This morning, in early trading, this stock returned exactly to early December levels. It's our largest holding again. I don't understand what happened. When it took the big hit, I thought it possible someone with inside knowledge dumped a lot of stock. There were no inside trader filings, though. It was a bit scary. Now that it has restored, my confidence has not restored. It's a REIT with a strong dividend. The dividend is not in jeapordy, based on the numbers from previous quarters. It's a late reporter so I won't know what 22Q4 is going to look like until late February. We will see. I didn't buy heavily during the down period. I purchased a very small amount, mostly to round two accounts to even board lot quantities. We continue to sit on a bunch of cash. Of course, we also are not selling. BTW, we are still down from the February 2022 ATH by 4.7%.
Noticed that on some the unknown lower floats, kinda weird to me. Almost like they had to liquidate. Some of them were big sales. I missed out on 1 I had been watching, it's up around 12%. My failed attempt of catching the bottom.
We are having a big day, so far. While we still haven't reached our Feb 22 peak but not all that far. I'm reading that we are out of the recession. While possible, we are several months early for that declaration.
The WHO will consider the emergency status of COVID on January 27. If they lift the emergency status, it should boost the markets a bit. I'm no trader but this seems like an event that would be of interest to traders
