July 1, 2009

Joel Greenblatt Q&A

(GuruFocus, June 30, 2009) Back in early June, when we became aware of Investment Guru, Joel Greenblatt became the strategist for the money management firm FormulaTrading.com, we reached out and requested an opportunity for our users to ask Joel questions. To our delight, the good professor (Joel is also an Adjunct Professor with Columbia University) agreed. Read the rest.

March 27, 2009

Hong Kong Billionaire Says It’s Time to Buy

The oracle of Hong Kong has spoken. And his message: it’s time to consider buying stocks and real estate. Read the rest here.

February 19, 2009

Munger: How We Can Restore Confidence

Our situation is dire. Moderate booms and busts are inevitable in free-market capitalism. But a boom-bust cycle as gross as the one that caused our present misery is dangerous, and recurrences should be prevented. Read the full article here.

February 18, 2009

A Golden Age for Activist Investing

A distressed stock market and a new focus on shareholder rights could mean fresh success for activist investors, even reluctant rabble-rousers. Read more.

February 18, 2009

America´s Finest Companies Keep Raising their Dividends

Dividends have historically provided 40% of average annual total return performance to investors. Some researchers have found that it was re-invested dividends that contribute to the majority of total long-term returns for investors. Jeremy Siegel is one of those researchers who has found that the compounding effect of re-investing dividends has accounted for 97% of total returns in the US stock market since 1871. Add in dividend growth as an additional compounding component, and investors could achieve very decent total returns over time. Read more here.

February 17, 2009

Soros: We Can Do Better Than a ‘Bad Bank’

The Obama administration should come out of the gate with a comprehensive economic program that has two pillars in addition to a fiscal stimulus package. One would prevent housing prices from overshooting on the downside by making mortgages cheaper and more available and reducing foreclosures to a minimum; the other would enable banks to resume lending by adequately recapitalizing them. It would take several months to implement the program and a further period before it impacts the economy. But in the meantime, people could see that there is a way out, and that would help mitigate the severity of the downturn. Read the rest here.

January 11, 2009

Ron Muhlenkamp Talks

We think in terms of investing in companies as opposed to buying and selling stocks. Now, we’re small enough that we can’t really buy companies like Warren Buffet might. But that’s the philosophy we come with. So we always want to own good companies. And we start with our definition as return on shareholder equity.

Actually, if you made a column and sorted companies by return on equity and sort them by reputation, you’d find that they pretty much marked with each other. Read the rest here.

November 28, 2008

Reinsurer Stocks: A Fear-Driven Market Creates Opportunity

Catastrophes both natural and man-made have been hitting reinsurance companies, but the outlook is good.  Shares of all the reinsurance companies were pummeled in October, with the combination of Hurricanes Ike and Gustav hitting underwriting profits while the capital markets carved a mark-to-market chunk out of investment portfolios.  Things seemed to improve around Halloween and into November, as signs of “hardening” premium rates began to emerge.  But shares have recently retested their lows as the dysfunctional capital markets – especially for mortgage- and asset-backed securities – overshadow improving fundamentals for the group.  This has created opportunity for the intrepid value investor. Read more here.

November 3, 2008

What Are They Waiting For?

“We’re going to have one great [buying] opportunity, but we’re not there yet,” says 87-year-old money manager Charles Allmon, whose Charles Allmon Trust (which he sold to Liberty Financial in 1996) was the only mutual fund to rise on Black Monday in October 1987.

Not just pros are holding off. Federal Reserve statisticians calculate that U.S. households, as of June, were sitting on $7.8 trillion in Treasury securities, bank deposits and money market accounts. Read the rest here.

November 3, 2008

Share Buybacks – Pros and Cons

Share buybacks may not be all good news. There are three motives we need to watch for when evaluating management’s decision of buying back shares with our money. Read the rest here.