My Recommendation: Look To Berkshire Hathaway
Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on an overwhelming amount of cash. It overshadows just about every other company I study in terms of raw, untapped earnings power. As of last quarter, Warren Buffett had...
View ArticleSome Stocks Are Ticking Time Bombs
There is a reason why debt matters. There is a reason why you have to dig in and study balance sheets instead of making investment decisions based on what you see pop up in a stock screener. For...
View ArticleBlue-Chip Stocks With Low Dividend Yields
Hershey stock has come down 15% since the Christmastime period when I wrote about it being overvalued. The price currently sits at $93 per share (down from the January high of $111). I would classify...
View ArticleFidelity’s Best Investors Are Dead
A news item that has gotten a lot of attention recently concerned an internal performance review of Fidelity accounts to determine which type of investors received the best returns between 2003 and...
View ArticleInvesting On The Eve Of Crisis
Lately, I’ve been doing some back-testing to try and find good answers to the following: (1) What if someone invested a lump sum in 2007 right before the financial crisis, and (2) what if that investor...
View ArticleNo, You Don’t Sell Stocks During the Coronavirus Pandemic
I just finished reading a post, linked here, about an individual that entered the coronavirus pandemic with 50% of his wealth invested in stocks and 50% in bonds, sold a large chunk of it during the...
View ArticleThe S&P 500 Has Been Draining Investors Since 2005
When people buy shares in an Index Fund, they assume that they are buying shares in the largest companies available in the United States. You look at Apple, see its $700 billion market capitalization,...
View ArticleClorox Stock Will Underperform The Market
Clorox stock has a distinguished history. Since 1920, it has compounded at a rate of 14.5% annualized (including the period when it was acquired and spun-off from Procter & Gamble). It is one of...
View ArticleCorona Investing: What Happened To Investors That Sold Stocks During The...
It has often been said that seeing your net worth fall by 30-60% on several instances over the course of an investing lifetime and that is the price that must be paid in order to receive the benefit of...
View ArticlePeter Lynch On Stock Market Volatility
In one of Peter Lynch’s old interviews, he remarked that he loved volatility but he estimated that volatile markets were probably a disservice to the average investor. Specifically, he purchased shares...
View ArticleMore Spanish Flu Stock Market Investing Anecdotes
We are going to hop on the anecdote train and take a spin back to 1917 during the, yep, you guessed, Spanish Flu. I don’t know if many of you are familiar with the career of Phil Carret, but he was a...
View ArticleThe Kraft-Heinz Deal Through The Lens Of Anheuser Busch
From an owner’s perspective, the advantage of having 3G operate your business is that a higher percentage of revenues become net profits that can be paid out to shareholders as dividends free and...
View ArticleAmericans Aren’t Taught About Cash Liquidity Anymore
When I was kid growing up in the Midwest, I remember the 4th of July parades that would feature World War II veterans throwing out candy and waiving with banners at the crowd. At some point in the...
View ArticleThe 1987 Crash: The Historical Memory and Quiet Buying
For most of 2019 and early 2020, I didn’t have much to say about the stock market in general because most of the stocks worth buying and holding for a lifetime were trading between 20x earnings and 30x...
View ArticleMy Big Investing Mistake of Omission
One of my favorite speeches of Charlie Munger, which Warren Buffett co-opted when he spoke at Florida University, was the story of how to turn $40 into $5 million. It was a story about Coca-Cola stock,...
View ArticleRoyal Dutch Shell For IRA Income Investors
It is historically unusual for Royal Dutch Shell to yield over 6%. This is a company with a very long history of having a fair value that also corresponds to a dividend yield between 5% and 6%. Given...
View ArticleAn Introduction To Canadian Dividend Investors
Somehow, this site developed a strong Canadian audience. There are as many Canadian readers here as readers from the state of Georgia, which is a little perplexing to me because I can at least...
View ArticleWhy Visa Stock Rises Faster Than American Express
Visa and Mastercard are distinctly different from other credit card companies like American Express and Discover Card. When you swipe something on your Visa or Mastercard, you are not actually using...
View ArticleBefore You Write Wal-Mart Stock’s Obituary
In the 1990s, no stock contributed more to the earnings per share growth rate of the S&P 500 than Wal-Mart stock. It had been an elevator upward delivering 16% annual earnings per share growth...
View ArticleYoung Investor’s Wealth Destruction During The Financial Crisis
One thing the financial media gets right (surprisingly) when discussing the behavioral economics of households during recessions is that younger American households “sell low” during periods of...
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