My stoogy, old-man, portfolio has been performing like 2018 for the last 6 weeks. Tiny gains every week. It started from a low spot but the graph has taken an aesthetically pleasing turn, the last bit. Like everyone, I have zero idea if this trend will hold but it's nice to see steady gains again. The earnings bloodbath did not happen, although many of my holdings missed their estimates by tiny margins. As we move further into plain old VOO (and VFV on the Canadian side), things have stabilized. VOO distributes nothing so we love our companies but I'm getting to the age (57) I can't take the chance on leaving my wife with a complex portfolio. I wish everyone well on the markets as well as in life.
That is a good point TomB16....thinking of your heirs. Most people should also consider heirs and their ability to manage a portfolio in their planing. I think my wife would be ok since she and I talk investing every day. BUT...every once in a while.....she says some comment that makes me wonder. At least both my kids and their spouses are investors. My one kids spouse is also a financial advisor and in the process of buying out here company owner. My wife's mom was a real challenge when she got older. It was lucky that we lived in the same place and I had total control of her portfolio. I understand very well the mental and physical challenges of "old People" since we took care of parents for 16 years....total. We went through the experiences of Independent Senior Living, Assisted Living, Nursing Home, and memory Care. We also went through Hospice care twice. In our family both our fathers died before their wives. My father from an accident at age 86 and my wife's father from a form of mental decline at age 86. Their wives lived to age 90 and age 97.
This is a crazy story....but the main thing that interests me is.....how do you get away with something like this at TWO major companies for a total of.....SEVEN YEARS? Like government it makes you realize that these companies are not too competent. Former Facebook and Nike diversity manager gets 5 years in prison for $5 million fraud https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/16/facebook-nike-furlow-smile-prison-fraud.html "Key Points A former diversity manager at Facebook and Nike was sentenced to five years.......for stealing......more than $5 million from those companies. Barbara Furlow-Smiles,.......stole more than $4.9 million from Facebook “utilizing a scheme involving fraudulent vendors, fake invoices, and cash kickbacks,”........ She used the money she stole “to fund a luxury lifestyle in California, Georgia and Oregon,....."
The *two* companies and *seven* years is amazing. But the more things change the more they stay the same. My dad started as a CPA and ended up as the CFO of a public company (for several decades) and I remember him telling me the same thing happening at a company he audited way back. Someone in the accounting department would create a fake invoice for a fake vendor, mail payment to an address they could receive it . . . wipe the fake vendor's name, insert their name, cash the check, take the returned check at the company and rewrite/replace the fake vendor's name and then file it away. At least that's how I understood it. Of course back in the day it was paper checks and the bank returned the cashed paper checks, seems like it would be harder with electronic copies these days. My understanding (from him) is a lot of companies *require* accounting employees to take vacations so their replacements have a chance to catch onto such shenanigans. Or for another one, do you remember the great salad oil scandal? Anyway, hello WXYZ, I joined the forum a couple weeks ago. My regular forum went down a month ago and I didn't think it was ever coming back up (it did thankfully!) so I was searching for other places to talk investing and I came across this thread which was interesting to me because I am a long-time, long-term investor with similar philosophies as you. I'm still a bit more stuck in the past than you (don't own a lot of tech, still own a lot of the old consumer product companies you said you used to like . . . but I understand your reasons for moving on from them). Anyway, I like chatting about investing so I figured I'd go ahead and post and say hi.
Welcome goldendad. Please feel free to post and discuss anything. Yes.....the fact that I do not need my stock market money allows me to always be long term and to be more aggressive in many of my stocks.....all my tech holdings. But at the same time.....they are ALL ICONIC COMPANIES. I still LOVE those old BIG CAP CONSUMER companies...I just dont own them. I think it is partly because I have now gotten adjusted (addicted) to the BIG CAP TECH gains. Some of those old CONSUMER CONGLOMERATES are STILL great companies.
Is everyone else here a trader? Or what? lol ;-) Hi, Trader here or better said, wanna be, because I still need to prove to myself that I can do it. After jumping from system to system for years with pocket money I needed a long pause to rethink and find what and how I wanted to trade. I finally found the Darvas book and system, fall in love with it, and decided to dive in seriously and allocate a substantial (for me) 100K account for it and try. Some say that Darvas worked nice in the sixties but not anymore today but I still find a lot of good examples that could have been traded by the rules and make enormous profits (ask me and I will post charts), now, the game is to find them just at the start of a new trend and that's what I try. Main goals: 1. Trade seriously by the rules 2. Grow the account the best I can but at least beating the S&P500 Compared to you I think I'm a short term trader, my trades should last from 1 week or month as losses need to be cut short to 1 year or more as profits should be allowed to run longer unless I need to compound them. Currently in BAND, SMTC, VIRT, ST and HG plus two speculative trades outside Darvas CADL and EBS Thanks for your posts, even if I don't share your style, it's always interesting to have another perspective...
Welcome almx. There are lots of traders on this board....I believe. This thread is open to anyone...any style...including trading. It would be interesting if you wanted to post your trading as it happens on here with your reasoning. Also your results. It would be interesting for us to follow your journey. I have done a few MOMENTUM TRADES at times over my 50+ years of investing. BUT....my core portfolio is always the same as now.....BIG CAP GROWTH stocks for the long term. My view of short term trading......if it can be done successfully..... is that there is a very serious drag on the returns with short term gains being taxed as regular income....plus...the fees. Fortunately many sites have very low or no fees these days. I always say....find what works for you and do it over, and over, and over...till it does not work anymore. If that is trading for a particular person.....that is GREAT.
Goldendad.....I will edit my post above.....I DO.......still own all those old time big cap consumer companies and conglomerates. Since I own two funds in my account with a big chunk of money.....SP500 Index Fund and Fidelity Contra Fund....I own ALL those companies in those two funds.
Today is as FLAT of an open as I have seen in a long time.....for the markets in general. I have not looked at any specific stocks yet today.
I like this little article. The DOW is the last of the big Indexes that I would use as any sort of market measure. 40,000 Points Later, the Dow Is Still Broken A properly constructed index would have gotten here a long time ago. https://www.fisherinvestments.com/e...ry/40000-points-later-the-dow-is-still-broken (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content) "Editors’ Note: MarketMinder doesn’t make individual security recommendations. The below are incidental to the broader theme we wish to highlight. Yippeeeeeee! The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 40,000 for the first time Thursday! Many likely anticipated confetti, poppers popping, kazoos and cake, perhaps maybe hunting for new ballcaps with “DOW 40K” stitched on the front. Then the index pulled back to close down, at 39,869. But whether you consider today’s intraday 40K the official one or want to call off the round-number party, consider: The Dow is still a broken index, and this fun milestone is meaningless. Everyone knows the Dow, of course. It sits atop the ticker on the big financial news stations. It gets top billing at all the news outlets owned by its parent company. And it is the grandparent of all stock indexes, giving it that special place in everyone’s heart. So its round-number milestones are bigtime headline fodder. But they don’t say much. Not only are they arbitrary and backward-looking, but the Dow doesn’t even represent the US stock market. It holds 30 stocks. The Wilshire 5000, which more or less covers the entire investible US stock market, includes 3,381 as of Q1’s end.[ii] An index that holds only 0.9% of America’s stocks is nowhere close to the stock market. It is a collection, chosen on arbitrary criteria, perhaps with the occasional help of a dartboard (we don’t know, we weren’t there). Companies gain entry once they achieve the mystical status of prominent and get dumped when they no longer fit the bill. The stock market contains 11 sectors. The Dow? It covers just nine of them, omitting Utilities and Real Estate. Its only Materials company is its no-relation namesake—a Chemicals firm—meaning it excludes the universe of natural resources that comprise the sector globally. Its Communication Services holdings exclude the Tech-like companies that drive the sector’s returns in broad indexes. It holds a single Energy company and a single Bank. If it were a portfolio, it would get an “F” grade in diversification. And the biggest sin? The Dow is price-weighted. Each company is weighted according to its stock price. Not the company’s actual size in dollars. Its largest constituent, UnitedHealth Group, is over 8% of the index.[iii] In the S&P 500, which is market cap-weighted, UnitedHealth is only about 1.0%.[iv] Number two in the Dow is Goldman Sachs, at over 7.5%.[v] In the S&P 500, Goldman is only about 0.3%.[vi] Apple’s Dow weighting, around 3%, is about half its weighting in the S&P 500. There are oddities like this up and down the list. Price-weighting an index is useless. A stock’s price means nothing in terms of company size and clout. It is an after-effect of share count. A big company might have a mega-high number of shares to make its stock accessible to the broadest universe of investors possible, giving it a low share price. A tiny company may have few shares outstanding, giving it a higher price. You might as well weight an index by the number of corporate jets each company owns. Or the number of donuts served every Friday. Or or or. All kidding aside, there is a logical reason for the Dow’s construction. Back in the 19th century, when Charles Dow calculated it with a pen and paper at the end of each trading day, stock price was the most readily available information about a company. (There were also far fewer companies then, hence the 30.) It was easy to write ‘em down, add ‘em up, spit out a number and move on. But to paraphrase Colonel Sandurz from Spaceballs, we are at now now, in data-rich 2024, when it is also really easy to round up a company’s outstanding market value at the end of the day and crunch several hundred or thousand of them into an index level. Total market value is the true indicator of a company’s scale and clout. When computing power makes it easy-peasy to compute market cap-weighted indexes that cover a much bigger swath of the market, those indexes are the best to use. They are the ones that tell us how the market is really doing. Case in point: The Dow hit 30,000 for the first time on November 24, 2020.[vii] Crossing 40,000 today, May 16, 2024, gives it a 33.333333333333% return in a little under three and a half years. In that same period, through yesterday’s close, the S&P 500 returned 54.1%.[viii] Part of the gap comes from correctly including reinvested dividends in the S&P 500 return. These are a key part of an investor’s total return, but the Dow excludes them. Yet even when you level the playing field, the S&P 500’s price return in this stretch is 46.0%.[ix] The Dow’s tiny size and flawed construction lagged the broader market considerably. We will throw the Dow a tiny bone, though: The history of its milestones shows stock returns are exponential, illustrating how investors capture the power of compound growth. Its first round number—1,000—came in 1972, about three quarters of a century into its life.[x] The next came much faster, hitting 2,000 in 1987—it took only a 100% return, rather than the nearly 1,500% return necessary to get it from birth to 1,000 points.[xi] 3,000 arrived in 1991.[xii] By the time 10,000 arrived in 1999, people were getting bored with the thousands, and the 5- and 10 thousand numbers became the milestones.[xiii] When the Dow had its worst day ever in points, on March 16, 2020, the nearly 3,000 point drop would have wiped it out in the late 1980s. But thanks to the mountain of compound growth since then, it was only a -12.9% drop.[xiv] And the 2,112-point snap back eight calendar days later was an 11.4% jump.[xv] So thanks, Dow, for showing compound growth’s magic. And thanks, we guess, for being so broken and giving us a lesson to teach. Enjoy your big day. But you still aren’t the stock market." MY COMMENT Agree completely. BUT...it is the historic grandfather of the indexes and should be reported every day. As to using it as any sort of measure of performance....no....I much prefer the SP500....as either a market measure or as a basic Index investment vehicle for any long term investor.
NVDA EARNINGS......a big event next week. I also have earnings coming from COST. A surging stock market may not need a catalyst — but it's getting one https://finance.yahoo.com/news/a-su...-catalyst--but-its-getting-one-100459469.html (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content) "With the Dow (^DJI) touching 40,000 and the S&P 500 (^GSPC) and Nasdaq (^IXIC) near new records as well, investors might be looking for the next catalyst to continue to juice the rally. Just in time, chipmaking juggernaut Nvidia comes a-calling. The company’s report is way at the end of the regular earnings season — nearly a month after Meta’s. And Nvidia’s results have only grown in importance as the company’s value has ballooned. Its market cap is $2.3 trillion, and it’s now the third-weightiest stock in the S&P 500 behind Microsoft and Apple. In what might be termed the Nvidia-verse, a whole host of semiconductor companies that either compete with or service Nvidia rise or fall with its shares. Speaking of its shares, their performance has left the other so-called Magnificent Seven stocks in the dust this year. (I know, I know, we’re not even calling them that anymore.) But after climbing an eye-watering 240% last year, Nvidia is on its way to doubling again thus far in 2024, making it the third-best gainer in the S&P 500. (It’s behind Super Micro, another AI play, and Vistra, a power provider also riding the AI demand wave.) So the pressure, once again, is on. While another big beat might push stocks up, a miss could do the opposite. And analysts, by and large, think Nvidia can meet or beat those lofty expectations. Revenue is forecast to have grown by 242% last quarter— and that follows three quarters of triple-digit percentage year-over-year sales increases. Taking a step back, Piper Sandler’s Harsh Kumar pointed out in an earnings preview note that data center chips and software — largely fueled by the demand for AI training — accounted for 83% of revenues last quarter. Five years ago, Nvidia’s market cap was under $100 billion and it was primarily known for making video game chips before catching the crypto-mining wave (a walk down memory lane prompted by my co-anchor Josh Lipton). The transformation has been extraordinary. And it was even our Company of the Year in 2016. This quarter may not blow expectations out of the water, especially considering how much the stock has rallied. Kumar writes that even if the company’s revenue beats by $1.9 billion — following the trend of recent quarters — the stock will be “flat to up.” Citi’s Atif Malik writes, “We expect smaller beats vs. the prior few quarters on larger numbers.” But it’s John Vinh of KeyBanc who really got my attention with yet another huge number. He expects data center revenue to climb to $200 billion in calendar 2025. That would represent a 321% increase over 2023. Let’s put in perspective how unusual it is for a company this large to grow by that much. Tesla sales rose by 387% in 2013 — to just over $2 billion. Amazon hasn’t seen triple-digit growth since 1998, when revenue grew by 313% to $610 million. In other words, Nvidia’s size relative to growth is nearly without precedent. That’s why, as the stock keeps climbing, investors keep asking, “How long can this last?” MY COMMENT At some point NVDA is going to hit the wall on earning power. The quarter to quarter and year to year comparisons will get very difficult to beat. BUT...that is not necessarily bad news......it just means the company will be humming along at an extremely high level....having captured and fulfilled their entire market. At that point the question will be how long can they maintain their nearly total market share.
For those that like to follow the trends in collecting and art, cars, antiques, etc, etc, etc. I really dont see much new here....private sales have always been a BIG factor in these markets. Owners of these categories of items...even at much lower income and wealth levels.....often network and belong to groups....and this leads to much private buying and selling. ‘Quiet wealth’ takes on new meaning with super-private deals for mansions, art and classic cars https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/17/private-deals-mansions-art-cars.html
The markets are very slowly....moving up today. I have not looked at my account but know I have seven of ten stocks UP at this moment. Those in the RED.....NVDA, HD, and MSFT. BUT....the current results...totally meaningless. We have a long way to go before we see how the day ends up.
My latest trade (today) was in HG (Hamilton Insurance Group) at 16.80, the only rule it fulfills is that it crossed the EMA200 with good volume. The 2 main reasons I wanted to be in are, first, regarding it's prospects and recent earnings it's greatly undervalued, and second, I wanted to experience being in an IPO since (almost) day one, since I think it could be a great play. To do things correctly, normally I should have let it create a base (Darvas box) and then wait for the breakout to enter so if that happens it would confirm my earlier entry, will see... But to show you an entry that completely follow my rules, here is BAND Rule 1. Cross EMA200 with great volume Rule 2. Enter long when the first box above EMA200 is broken to the upside. Initial Stop Loss is set at 10% of the cost of the trade, Target is 50% (in this case 28) Stop loss is raised to the low of a box when that one is broken to the upside (this is Darvas theory) That's all I do, I try to keep it as simple as possible not having more rules than that. Here is the chart, And as confirmation reasons I enter once that I screen the stock, I'm a subscriber of Investors Business Daily so I check the group rank and composite rating and try to enter only stocks in the first 3 strongest sectors with a decent composite rating, then as Darvas said: "The only sound reason to buy a stock is that it's raising in price. If that's happening, no other reason is required, if not, no other reason is worth considering." The stocks I'm currently in: STOCK.. | Entry date | Entry price | Stop P/L | Current P/L SMTC... | 29-APR-24. | 36.62...... | - 10%... | + 10 % VIRT... | 01-MAY-24. | 21.84...... | - 10%... | + 8 % ST..... | 01-MAY-24. | 38.24...... | - 10%... | + 11 % BAND... | 01-MAY-24. | 18.99...... | - 10%... | + 16 % CADL... | 04-APR-24. | 7.05....... | ........ | + 76 % (speculative) EBS.... | 07-MAY-24. | 4.38....... | ........ | + 28 % (speculative) HG..... | 17-MAY-24. | 16.80...... | - 10%... | + 0 % This list will always contain only winners as I get rid of my losers at 10% or less if I judge the trade is not satisfactory, we all know that stocks don't always behave like we would like... That's all!
The markets are really flailing around today. A very directionless day so far. The markets are just...lingering....and doing nothing. A totally ZERO energy day.
OK upcoming earnings for me.......yes.....it is ALL about "me". NVDA May 22 after hours. COST May 30 after hours.
Yes, I quit "caring" about the Dow when I learned this decades ago. Because of this I personally would like to see BRK-A added to the Dow Jones.
MORE of the same today from.....you guessed it......the FED IDIOTS. Fed's Bowman sees inflation remaining higher for longer, won't rule out a rate hike https://finance.yahoo.com/news/feds...nger-wont-rule-out-a-rate-hike-171657551.html They are out there EVERY single day...stalking the markets, harassing investors with their comments, and generally talking trash. It would be nice if for once they had some answer to how...."THEY"....intend to do anything about anything. BUT no....it is all just commentary about events and data that they dont have any control over. It might mean something, if they had any record of successfully predicting anything.....or....actually fixing anything. The solution....IGNORE THEM.....they only have power because everyone hangs on their every word.
OK....I ended with a mid level loss today....mostly due to NVDA being down by 1.99%. My winner of the day....CMG, up by 2.15%. I also lost out to the SP500 today by 0.64%.
