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| finance (investments, etc.) | ||||
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What stocks will be beat the market?
Comment: Use this forum especially to share you knowledge about relatively small, well-managed companies that serve niche markets who give priority to the long run. That is, they do not feel pressure to "show" short run profits by otherwise unjustified acquisitions, debt leverage, and cutting the quality of product and customer service. enter this discussion 6 messages |
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Discuss the stock market mania or bubble of 1997-2000?
Comment: Who do you know or read who predicted it? Did they give any specific reasons that now seem especially insightful? Is the "landing" we have had still "soft"? Will things get worse before they get better? To stimulate further your thoughts on this subject I recommend that you read some contrarian writings that predicted the bursting of the bubble. They include: 1. Writing by Hoagland and Tice on the Web Site of the Prudent Bear Fund ca 1999-2000 at www.prudentbear.com. Unfortunately, the archives at this site do not now include their writing. One of Tice's best was Jan. 7, 2000, on "Derivative Leverage." But ironically, derivatives have not yet (8-02) cause the problems that Tice and others predicted. Tice no longer writes the essays. But he still helps run the www.prudentbear.com site and the bear funds it promotes. Also, see a link on the home page to a recent interview with him that is the the Business Week magazine website. 2. Bill Fleckenstein's "Contrarian" column now (8-02) at www.RealMoney.com: This is a 5 per week column. The links to Bill's best 1999-2000 work appear now (8-02) to be "dead". The work includes his October, 1999, speech on "Spinning Financial Illusions: The Story of Bubblenomics." It was available in "Contrarian Archive" at www.siliconinvestor.com . It was a link in the 12/16/99 issue. Bill's column has moved twice since then. I also recommend Bill's 4-10-00 column the link therein to Jim Grant's contrarian article on the issue of what are the real changes in productivity. Grant refers to both Robert Gordon's year-old work and more recent work by a Harvard economist that show that we are in for a "downer" when the 1Q 2000 productivity data are released in May, 2000. (Bill's column next was hosted by Jim Grant's budget priced investment site at www.grantinvestor.com . That site is now terminated. But Jim Grant's contrarian views are still available for a higher price at www.grantspub.com . 4. Book: "Valuing Wall Street," by Andrew Smithers, 1999. 5. Book: "Irrational Exhuberance," by Robert Shiller, 2000. In David Tice's 1-7-00 essay, look midway into the essay for his remarks about the signficance of the huge increase in debt that is driving and allowing the huge increase in derivatives -- all a massive speculation that the U.S. market boom will continue. He indicates that the same speculators who were making the Asian markets boom until Fall '98 are now focusing on the U. S. markets. Here are my additional understandings and inferences from this Tice article in particular and others I have read. I rely not just on "bear" opinion but also main stream experts like Mark Hulbert, Burton Malkiel and Warren Buffet. Tice indicates that at this stage Greenspan really has no way without great damage to stop this mania. Among the problems of this advanced stage is high volatility (reflecting great sensitivity of valuations to relatively trivial information), as well as high leverage and high valuations. Geenspan can only stop the mania by using methods that will cause the same kind of crash that is going to occur anyway. The Fed evidently has none of the kind of control over the creation of additional leverage and new derivatives that is needed to orchestrate a soft landing. So, this kind of process can now only end the way it ended in Asia. We have evidently been mislead all these years since 1929. Now even more than in 1929 no government can prevent a crash when the mania is this far advanced. It is too late to just slow down the runaway and accelerating "train" of leverage and derivatives excerbated mania. The beginning of the mania may depend on a combination of chance factors. But growth, peaking and crash involve complex processes like the weather that we actually have little or no control over. Even margin limits today appear to make little difference, because money can be borrowed from so many other sources than from brokers. What do you think? enter this discussion 3 messages |
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How technology has improved your productivity in your:
enter this discussion 11 messages |
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Just what is new about the Internet revolution?
How is the expansion of the use of Internet different than previous technological revolutions like railroads, cars, telephone, mail order, radio, and television? More global? Faster? More destructive of existing businesses? enter this discussion 1 message |
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Stories about your experiences with portable computing: successes, problems, your wish list for features & functions, etc. enter this discussion 4 messages |
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