How many times have we heard the above advice? Usually, it gets people to burn through their savings by starting ill-fated businesses, but that is not the only thing to love. We Fructivores love buying and selling at the right price. The right price is when a security is fairly valued, since at that point […]
Event driven trading is never as simple as people think. The concept is simple enough: identify an event that is likely to change the price of a stock, determine the price of a stock after the event does or does not occur, determine the probability of the event occurring, and take a position accordingly. Of […]
Every financial panic needs a good person to blame. This one can be blamed on securitizers and financial derivatives engineers; the one before on deluded dot-com investors, the one before (the junk bond collapse) on frenzied, ill-advised mergers, and the one before that (the Latin American debt crisis) on the oil crisis. I’ve skipped the […]
Benjamin Graham wrote in Security Analysis that there are few tests of management competence and none of them scientific. This was in the 1951 edition of his book, and in almost 60 years there have been few improvements. One reasonable test, however, is management’s opportunism and understanding of the broad economic climate. Although “proactive” is […]
Shorting stocks is widely considered dangerous. The old adage is that “Stocks can only fall to zero, but they can rise to infinity.” I’ve always been unsatisfied with this explanation, because I’ve never seen a stock actually rise to infinity, and if I did see one I would short it. The problem with shorting is […]
On a forum I visit regularly there was a post when a novice investor asked if there was a good beginner stock that he could learn the ropes with. The general consensus was that there is no such thing as a beginner stock; all stocks were viewed as extremely complex generators of investment returns, full […]
A great deal of analysis is devoted to ferreting out a company’s true earnings. It may be necessary, for example, to adjust asset impairment costs if the reality is not that the assets suddenly became impaired but that the company overpaid for them to begin with. Benjamin Graham’s Security Analysis devoted a significant number of […]
Of course, the previous post is common knowledge. By way of example, and to illustrate a strategy that commonly arises from market misconception (I’m glad to say I thought of before I read an excellent out-of-print book, Margin of Safety by value investor Seth Klarman) is to buy the junk bonds of a company and […]