Investing Catechism

Look at this monthly chart of the SPX over several years.

count the number of up months before 2008 and after 2008. It is relentless mind-numbing buying fueled by funny money that eventually runs into a brick wall. All in the name of the 401K. What is worse, most of the gains are when our markets aren't even open, which means mutual funds are buying the high. They do this month after month, year after year, decade after decade. What a bunch of cretins.

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Quote from nitro:

Look at this monthly chart of the SPX over several years.

count the number of up months before 2008 and after 2008. It is relentless mind-numbing buying fueled by funny money that eventually runs into a brick wall. All in the name of the 401K. What is worse, most of the gains are when our markets aren't even open, which means mutual funds are buying the high. They do this month after month, year after year, decade after decade. What a bunch of cretins.
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I do not believe its funny money per se or mutual funds buying and pumping at relentlessly stupid amounts and stupid high prices its everyone..

Its all driven by human emotion

for example real estate -> people buy at high prices because they "assume" prices will continue in the same path without revaluing which will cause them to become inflated at such a rate the normal person will not be able to buy a home or property in the future... so they absorb the risk now instead of waiting for the proper value. L.A is an example of this the econ professor from yale uses the example "its a height of fashion and when prices rocketed up they did a survey to find out why they were buying and 80% said they were buying because they were scared they could not buy in the future and didnt want to miss out"... Its stupid human nature that forces these buying sprees...

when the bust occured the mortgage for the property mixed with property costs made it impossible to profit off commercial leases or residential renting

now im no rocket scientist but if revenues-expenses= not a profit its probably not a good investment... yet it was bought at obscene levels.

stupid people w/ stupid amount of money combined w/ stupid amount of leverage buying stupid investments = .......

also mutual funds dont quite operate like that.. when I visted american fund .. the tools and philosophy they used is quite interesting.. you can be assured that mutual funds do not spend money in stupid ways.. they all have a purpose and that purpose may not be inline with yours... but they are quite efficient.. and even during the "lost decade" that mutual fund used basic rebalancing procedures and dynamic sector rotation to position them best for future growth.. its easy to say they buy non sense because most people dont dig into how they work why they work the way they do .. lack of knowledge -> always breeds worry ->which causes us to question in debacles like we had.
 
Quote from alexandercho:

I've known this for a long time as well. I just kept my mouth shut about it, because I'd deal with a crowd of lemmings who hold religiously to a belief and not consider the counter argument. Long term subsidies work like this.

If I own shares in Annaly Capital Management with a dividend yield of 16.11% since it's a real estate investment trust It has to give 90% of what it earns to avoid paying taxes.

Sounds good to me, consistent dividends whether the company likes it or not.

Ok, if I were to reinvest all of my dividends that are paid out each quarter here are the results over a period of 10 years

$10,000 = $48,010.21

On the first year I would earn $1,600

On the 10th year I would earn $7,681 without including the dividend growth or the increase in share equity.

*income increase's each time I reinvest the subsidy* this is direct benefit. This is true investing. This is what Nitro was talking about

Not including the price appreciation on the stock itself. From earning a subsidy I get an added benefit of appreciation and a means to reinvest what I earn.

Blue chips hardly ever increase by 380% over 10 years. Not only that I didn't even include the 10% average appreciation the stock market gets which I could also apply and I can also add the dividend growth as well.

Hmm... get the picture? You have to keep flipping stocks but with a subsidy you can keep reinvesting your dividends while maintaining shareholder interest.

That's why I buy REITS safer long term benefits that increase in value intrinsically, higher dividend yields over a period of time, and also the ability to reinvest the subsidy I get inside of the company to earn a larger subsidy.

Wow, not rocket science is it? If I dollar cost average a REIT that pays a subsidy I still increase my asset base by 380% no matter what because it's a game based upon percent increase and average increase of the stock market. Even the DOW doesn't increase in value by 3 times in 10 years so why should I buy a major blue chip?
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wow u sound like my twin... how old r u ... and where you born on a naval base? because we may have been seperated at birth
 
didnt bother reading all the pages of this thread, so I'm not sure this has been mentioned but...

The price of a stock at any given time is supposed to reflect the intrinsic value of the stock (which is largely based on analysts estimates). When a company exceeds analysts expectations, it means the stock was underpriced by the market. So the market corrects for this by increasing the price of the stock.

Asking how this benefits the investor is pointless. The stock price is bid up from the current level, to the new equilibrium level by investors. There are many more investors who believe the stock is underpriced than overpriced when a stock beats analyst expectations. The stock price rises until there are an equal amount who believe the stock is over/underpriced (resulting in a new equilibrium price).
 
Companies are increasing their dividend in droves. And yet, they are not hiring.

Is hiring and dividends on two sides of the same coin?
 
I was listening to the BSC hearings yesterday. An intersting question was raised regarding capital requirements at the bank. I wish I had the transcript, but the answer deviated a little bit to how BSC investors were pressuring BSC to put the cash on hand to use, either to use more leverage, or to return it to the investors in the form of a dividend or stock buyback.

The CEO said they flatly refused to do so, since financial institutions need a certain discipline when it comes to keeping cash on hand. I sort of agreed with him, but this raises an interesting point: the lower the dividend of a financial company, the more leveraged they may be and perhaps the greater at risk they are to even minor runs on their bank.

Food for thought anyway.
 
I want to switch gears for a post.

In general, when a small amount of a volatile asset is added to a portfolio, and rebalanced regularly, its actual return is usually considerably higher than the stand alone return. This is because the interaction of asset volatility and policy rebalancing produces a natural "buy low/sell high" bias into the rebalancing transactions. In addition, rebalancing benefits most with risky assets with similar returns.

In previous work we have shown that this "rebalancing bonus" is approximated by

(1-r) x Var/2

where r is the correlation of the asset with the rest of the portfolio, and Var is its variance. Precious metals equity is a good case in point. The variance of a diversified portfolio metals equity is in the 0.1 range, and its correlation with most diversified portfolios is zero. Thus, an approximately 5% ((1 - 0) x 0.1 x 1/2) excess return on the asset is earned simply by rebalancing it
regularly!!! :eek:

http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/497.pdf

What if transactions costs are [near] zero, bid ask spreads are very tight. What then does this statement above about rebalancing frequency become in the limit as t->0 of continuous rebalancing? This may be much of what high frequency strategies do (you need probably one more insight).

This idea, coupled with my NFV and extremely negligible commissions, I think I can trade HF as well.
 
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