Blogvesting

For the first time in the current crisis, the US government has managed to rescue a financial institution without severely diluting the common shareholders. In this case, the shareholders of Citigroup were luckier that those of Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and AIG. Perhaps the government finally realized that short sellers are going to [...]

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Value investors take it for granted that a company’s stock price does not necessarily reflect or impact the underlying business. Of course, declining stock prices often reflect fundamental problems in the business, but in times of crisis, stocks may sink for no reason whatsoever, frequently overshooting even the most pessimistic economic scenario. While a declining [...]

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After reading about Rogers Communications from TMWTFS, I decided to evaluate if RCI is a possible defensive portfolio holding in these turbulent times. Rogers Communications (RCI) is an integrated telecommunications company based in Canada, and has 3 operating segments, wireless, cable and media. Their wireless segment makes up 50% of revenue, and 70% of operating [...]

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TIPS, short for Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, are bonds which provide a degree of inflation-protection and are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. The principal of a TIPS increases with inflation (as tracked by the CPI-U published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and decreases with deflation, and interest [...]

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The finance literature is littered with examples of many calendar effects in the stock market; the following is a partial list :

The weekend effect : The mean return from buying stocks on Friday and selling them on Monday is larger than buying stocks on Monday and selling on Friday. This is especially unusual since the [...]

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I have liquidated SEB from my portfolio at $1365 a share, which is a 6% gain from my entry price. In the end, I felt that this company has too many cash flow streams which is beyond my circle of competence to analyze, and the fact that management is so uncommunicative is starting to worry [...]

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Since my last review of ZINC, zinc commodity price has sunk rapidly from $0.70 per lb to $0.50 today. Even with half of 2008 and 2009’s production capacity hedged at $0.90 per lb, Horsehead probably requires a zinc price of $0.70-$0.80 per lb to break even. With zinc prices at $0.50 and many major zinc [...]

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I have recently sold put options for WMT at a strike price of $45 expiring in November 2008 (WMTWI) and January 2009 (WMTMI) at $0.80 and $2.25 per contract respectively. This is in keeping with my new strategy of writing options on stocks that I would like to acquire at strike prices that I [...]

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