I suppose the ideal solution for me would be to align this blog with a subscription newsletter. Telling you what to buy would be free, but telling you when to sell would cost you. Since that strikes me as a little mercenary, I’m telling you all that I’m out of CMO. If you’ll recall, I […]
Benjamin Graham wrote in Security Analysis that a great deal of financial analysis involves recasting financial reports to get a full sense of a firm’s baseline ability to produce earnings. A lot of the process involves removing nonrecurring or irrelevant events from a single year’s results, as we did with LINE’s profits on its derivatives. […]
A stock screener is a useful toy for an investor. In most markets bargains cannot be found by checking stocks at random, and a good screen is a good way to narrow the field. However, a screen is only a first step; a poster at a forum I visit (the same one who referred me […]
John Maynard Keynes described speculation as essentially trying to guess what other people are going to guess, and doing it better than they guess how you’re going to guess. I think this also describes macro-level investing, i.e. allocating capital based on economic data. As I stated in my last article, focusing on a decent cash […]
If you have been reading the financial news since about last May, journalists have been disturbingly preoccupied with the level of the indexes, and have been calling for, say, the S & P to correct from 900, as it sailed merrily past 1000 just to spite them. One imagines that they’ve been going for the […]
I was on vacation last week, but I’m back and I brought Compass Minerals (CMP) with me. Compass Minerals operates a number of salt mines, and sells rock salt for road de-icing and more refined salt for industrial purposes and consumption by humans and animals. They also produce potash fertilizers. Compass claims to be one […]
My good friend Mike (here and here) recently left a comment about copper mines, which got me thinking about copper pennies. In 1982, the US Mint stopped making pennies out of 95% copper, and started making them out of copper-plated zinc. Even now that the price of copper dropped back down, copper pennies presently contain […]
It now appears that the Department of Energy has agreed to defer a ruling on USEC’s loan guarantee application until “specific technological and financial goals have been met. The general consensus before the announcement of the pending denial a week ago was that the legislation for the loan guarantee program was tailor-made to allow USEC […]
With $787 billion in stimulus, $700 billion in TARP money, deficits projected to hit $1.8 trillion, the Federal Reserve cutting rates to effectively nothing, and Neil Barofsky, the government’s inspector general of TARP estimating a $23.7 trillion total risk exposure to the financial crisis, it is only natural to worry about inflation. Of course, that […]
Remember what I said about the dangers of event-driven trading? USEC has been denied the loan guarantee for their centrifuge enrichment plant construction, for reasons of concerns about commercial viability (which is unusual because the technology is already in use by other uranium enrichers) . As a result, the company seems to be making good […]