Below is our list of the top 10 ‘interesting’ insider trades for the week of 08/10/2009. These are companies that have been selected by the buyingvalue filter application. Read more about our value filters here. The companies selected are those that have cleared the first filter in the last 7 days and are the highest ranked filter 2. See here for more about the current selection criteria.
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I very much dislike intangible assets, the growth or continued presence of them on a balance sheet always throws up a red flag for me. Maybe it is due to my value investor perspective but giving financial credence to a resource that I can’t see, can’t touch and can’t prove generated a cent of revenue in a business is something I just don’t like.
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I had an interesting email conversation with a reader named Bill that I wanted to share. Bill is a stock broker in Oregon and has been working with the same brokerage firm for over 10 years. As I have taken several opportunities to slag their profession I was interested to hear more about his experiences. In the back and forth chat he said something that I think epitomizes my real issue with brokers.
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Below is our list of the top 10 ‘interesting’ insider trades for the week of 28/09/2009. These are companies that have been selected by the buyingvalue filter application. Read more about our value filters here. The companies selected are those that have cleared the first filter in the last 7 days and are the highest ranked filter 2. See here for more about the current selection criteria.
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While I have often been impressed with both President Obama’s speeches and candor I honestly was not a big fan of the President’s speech to Wall Street this last week. His comments, in my interpretation, amount to nothing short of bad news for all long term investors.
Obama, in his speech, said:
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Investing is done successfully by understanding direction, and velocity, not by looking at velocity alone. Velocity (in this simplified context) is the speed and distance a company achieves over time, this may be earnings, profit, sales or margin. Direction is which way the company is pointing, up or down, this speaks to a deep value assessment, or an understanding of the health of the overall business.
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I usually get very excited when I see a stock that is incorrectly priced, this usually indicates a good buying opportunity. Every once in a while a stock comes along that is incorrectly priced the wrong way- namely massively overpriced. So overpriced are these stocks that I am at a complete loss to explain why any investor would buy them. Yahoo in its current state falls firmly in this bucket. In reviewing some of the company’s key stats I was shocked to see the poor condition of the business. Lets look at a few key statistics:
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Anyone who wants to understand how our current economic condition came to be a reality need only watch this movie to appreciate how things came to be such a mess. The pervasive overuse of debt nearly brought the western world to its knees. The question we have to ask is have we learned anything?
Benjamin Graham is known as the father of value investing and is probably one of the most well read and studied investor of the 20th century. While his most famous work The Intelligent Investor is read in business schools around the word, not much is known about the man behind the writing. Much of this is due to the quite reserved life that Graham lead and some also to the fact that he existed before the era of the celebrity investor to understand any author’s great works requires some back ground so I present to you these 5 facts about Benjamin Graham:
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Below is our list of the top 10 ‘interesting’ insider trades for the week of 02/09/2009. These are companies that have been selected by the buyingvalue filter application. Read more about our value filters here. The companies selected are those that have cleared the first filter in the last 7 days and are the highest ranked filter 2. See here for more about the current selection criteria.
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How good are Presidents at predicting the future of the market? Often times they are down right terrible, the spin in speeches is often more prevalent than the truth. With President Obama’s comments about sunshine being the best disinfectant I thought it would be interested to see how his comments match up to reality.
The following collection represents many of the quotes Obama has made related to the US economy. Green arrows mark those days in the market where President Obama has made a positive comment about the future of the United States, red deltas indicate a day where President Obama has made a negative comment on the future of the economy. Click on the red and green arrows to read the exact quote.
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Below is our list of the top 10 ‘interesting’ insider trades for the week of 26/08/2009. These are companies that have been selected by the buyingvalue filter application. Read more about our value filters here. The companies selected are those that have cleared the first filter in the last 7 days and are the highest ranked filter 2. See here for more about the current selection criteria.
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Executive Compensation is a touchy subject. Some believe executives should be compensated in relation to share price. Others feel that an executive should derive their satisfaction from the growth of their business and not from pulling down a massive salary. Buffett for one is a huge proponent of this approach. He pays himself a comparably paltry $100K salary per year and several of the businesses owned by Berkshire have CEOs who share this same compensation package.
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Below is our list of the top 10 ‘interesting’ insider trades for the week of 15/08/2009. These are companies that have been selected by the buyingvalue filter application. Read more about our value filters here. The companies selected are those that have cleared the first filter in the last 7 days and are the highest ranked filter 2. See here for more about the current selection criteria.
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The following are a compilation of interesting US recession facts I have collected by examining the DOW indicies between 1929 and now. All facts are compiled as a result of data drawn from yahoo finance and the use of the wikipedia page List of Recessions in the United States.
Don’t get me wrong I am a huge fan of Warren Buffett and both his personal and Berkshire Hathaway investing track records speak for themselves as one of the most solid and consistent in recent investing history. I can’t help but wonder though if Buffett’s rising celebrity status doesn’t have a negative effect for true long term Berkshire Hathaway investors. Hardly a day goes by without some sighting, comment, or mention of Buffett in the news. Over the past year I have seen:
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I am willing to concede that company insiders know more about their businesses than I could ever learn about it by reading financial statements. This is why I use insider trading as part of my assessment critieria. The fact that all company insiders are not created equal should come as no surprise- who would you trust to know more about a business, the chief accountant or the janitor?
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Below is our list of the top 10 ‘interesting’ insider trades for the week of 07/08/2009. These are companies that have been selected by my filter application. Read more about our value filters here. The companies selected are those that have cleared the first filter in the last 7 days and are the highest ranked filter 2.
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As a new service for readers we are now offering free stock analysis. None of that automated technical analysis you see on other sites, and no one is going to contact you about purchasing services after you submit, I am talking about straight forward free fundamental analysis.
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Benjamin Graham often wrote of distinguishing the difference between investing and speculating. Fannie Mae, in its current state, sits in the speculating bucket. Investing has to fun though, sometimes it is interesting to window shop, so lets look.
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In the previous article we started a discussion on boring companies. I argued that the reason so many elite investors like boring companies is due to the consistent and sustained profits these businesses often have. I then went on to detail how boring companies have deep moats that keep competition at bay, produce limited time use products that force the customer to be repeat customers, and always produce staple products that are consistently required by consumers regardless of any current economic conditions.
To remind us again of the definition provided from our first article on boring companies:
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“The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator. This means.. that he should be able to justify every purchase he makes and each price he pays by impersonal, objective reasoning that satisfies him that he is getting more than his money's worth for his purchase.”
Benjamin Graham
Questrade
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