Recently the rumor mill has been quite unkind to Yellow Media (YLO.TO / YLWPF.PK). For some reason, rumors have sparked that a deal announced a few months ago where the company will sell off its Trader.com operations, might be in some rough waters. Where the rumor came from, I am unable to find out, but it is being held as one of the explanations as to why the stock has been rocked lately. Besides all
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For nearly a year and half now many foreign countries (mainly developing countries, but Australia is in the mix) have been increasing interest rates and increasing reserve requirements. This summer the Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing II will be ending. A national election is upcoming in 2012. As usual, a number of events are happening and are upcoming that can impact the performance of your portfolio. I’m not much for big predictions, but I think it’s
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Hype surrounds a hot offering, such as LinkedIn, and the details of the ensuing months are covered more episodically. Folks move on to the next hot IPO — last week, a Russian Internet company, Yandex (“The Russian Google“), grabbed headlines with a hot offering. Its shares soared 40% on opening day…READ MORE. My Take: The linked article does a great job of giving a brief real world example of market hype and what happens when
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Low Initial Investment + Frequent Trading = A Disaster As you might be aware, I’m not a high frequency trader. I have my positions. I try to stay in the positions for at least a year. I’ll take a profit (or take a loss) if appreciation and circumstance seems right. Trading with little money is destined to lead to failure. I don’t need experience to teach me this lesson, just a simple understanding of trading
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One of the more difficult tasks when investing is determining an entry point. You don’t want to buy a stock when it’s near its all time high, yet you don’t want to miss a solid run up in the stock’s price. If you have a list of potential buys, then you can probably reduce the chances of you either making a bad decision or being stuck in investor paralysis. Having a list of stocks you’d
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I’d like to say that “We live in interesting times,” but I’m pretty sure almost everyone throughout history has made such a statement. Either way, the strength of investor sentiment towards anything tied into social media is an interesting phenomena. Is the social/mobile revolution going to live up to the hype? Based on LinkedIn’s valuation, it appears that many in the market believe that we are yet to grasp the full implications of social media.
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To some degree, technological innovation has penalized patience, limited the emphasis on wisdom and has even de-emphasized intimacy. We may be at risk of losing our souls, and, in the long run, our relationships are worse off….READ MORE. My Take: The article above is spot-on in a host of ways. I think a lesson can be taken from the general message expressed in the article for investors. If you’re an investor that relies heavily on
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In my last post I briefly discussed Jensen’s Alpha and used a real world example to examine if an investment was actually outperforming the market. The key in model was not only looking at stock return vs market return, but considering how much additional or less risk was taken on to achieve the stock’s return. This is a VERY important factor that most individual investors overlook. Risk matters. I’m stressing that risk matters because I
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I’m a big fan of actually taking a look at a stock or portfolio of stocks and seeing how they’ve performed against a model that takes into account risk and expected return. Jensen’s Alpha is a tool that will do that for us (one of many). It will enable us to see if our portfolio has outperformed the market by specifically gauging the amount of risk we took on to get the return we’ve received.
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For some reason, and maybe it’s just me, I’m hearing the saying “Sell in May and go away” a lot this month. It’s not that people don’t repeat the saying in May, it’s just that I’ve heard it a lot lately. The saying refers to investors that drop their positions for the summer and then return sometime in the fall (or late summer). As an investor it’s good to have some general knowledge about season
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