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The investment condition

Banks may be as loaded with toxic oil debt now as they were with toxic sub-prime debt back in 2008.

The human investment condition is to find a good thing, and beat it to death — on the assumption that the good times will roll on forever.

Which they don’t.

Banks, high-tech, organic food, oil fracking, biotech, bricks and mortar retail, have all lost their day in the sun.

I don’t know what will replace them. Drones? Marijuana? (I don’t make this stuff up. People are pouring zillions into drones and dope.) What are they smoking?

My saving grace has been my biases against banks, biotech and retailing and, of course, my inviolate stop loss rule.

All that has saved me a fortune. But how much? Here’s a snapshot of price moves in the past two years. Glance over it and be horrified. This is not pretty.

Banks:

BAC2yr GS2yr C2yr MS2yr CS2

FANG:

Google2yr NFLIX2yr AMZN2yr FB2yr

Twitter and Yahoo:

Yahoo2yr TWTR2yr

Biotechs:

Gild2yr REGN2yr

Oil:

XOM2yr HAL2yr

 Solar:

SCTY2yr SUNE2yr

Organic food:

WWAV2yr WFW2yr

Bricks and mortar retailing:

Macys2yr

And, of course Apple: Not a pretty chart, either.

Apple2yr

What price oil? Oil has dropped. Half the world thinks lower oil — now heading to $1 a gallon — is great for the consumer, who’ll spend it faster than a 100 yard dash.

The other half thinks the consumer is wary, and is hanging on, saving his shekels, doing nothing to boost the economy. Thank God economists have two arms. They can argue, “on the one hand… on the other.”

Here are a couple of interactive charts. Roll your cursor over them.

Verizon is actually doing well. 

VZ2yr

It’s my largest remaining holding. It has benefits. It’s managing its telecom business well. It’s yielding 4.5%, and sporting a P/E of a low 11.4. What could be holding it back is that Fidelity reports its P/E ratio is 20.55. But that wrong number is based on 2014 earnings, not 2015. Fidelity analysts mess up regularly. Yahoo Finance has it right.

There’s a moral here: Don’t trust what these ostensibly “professional” services tell you. And CHECK. CHECK. CHECK.

Carly’s at it again

Carly

NEW HAMPSHIRE (The Borowitz Report)-After suffering a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday night, the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O. Carly Fiorina cheered herself up by firing her entire campaign staff, fired staffers confirm.

Minutes after the returns started coming in, revealing that Fiorina had no chance of making a respectable showing, the former business executive acknowledged that she was “sad at first-but then I realized that every failure is an opportunity, and in this case I had an opportunity to give some people the axe.”

After delivering pink slips to her entire campaign staff, Fiorina said, “I started feeling better already.”

“That’s the one thing you have to understand about Carly Fiorina-she doesn’t stay down for long,” she said.

Fiorina said that she had “no regrets” about running for President, despite her dismal showing in New Hampshire. “I got to downsize a lot of people tonight, and that makes me a winner,” she said.

HarryNewton
Harry Newton, who may have finally found a booming industry — Aleve. The pill is a Godsend for aches and pains — like the infection in my tooth which came with my latest implant, now a week old and still hurting. Oih veh.

Sorry about not posting my blog for a couple of days. I ran out of brilliances — until I thought… I need to demonstrate to myself and my readers just how bad it’s been — and how good it’s been that we’ve been out of it – – especially of the stocks which BubbleVision and their talking heads have been pounding the table for, for so long. See charts above. Remember Regeneron? Gilead?

Friends tell me there are ways to make money in this dismal market — like day trading liquid stocks with a predictable sine wave movement during the day. But every time I mention “day trading,” everyone comes down on me like a ton of bricks.

One of my friends who has a huge 30-year position in XOM tells me, “The market is horrible, we just gotta sit tight and let the fallout occur.”

Maybe.

Personally, I’d rather be in cash, playing tennis and searching for the next hot thing.

I found this in our local Palm Desert supermarket:

Bagels

I wonder what the story is? Is this an investment gone awry. And the bagel is a metaphor for the hole in that investment?

 

One Comment

  1. pahowley says:

    Delighted to know you’re OK, Harry. Worried when you missed 2 days. If you’re back east, get out your icy weather cloths. It’s about to get really cold. So much for global warming, huh?