Exploring for Value and Yield: Neubert Discovers America and Its Big Caps Written By: David Neubert 2007-03-12 14:53:45 Yield Hungry I'm hungry. I've been overweight in cash for the majority of the last ten years. My active trading has helped me maintain respectable returns but I want to start putting more money to work. After all, I want to live off my dividends and income. I've been running value screens on assets all over the world. With a few exceptions, the same assets class keeps coming up cheap:
"Sent you a message on your Facebook acct...you adding to Merrill Lynch (MER - $42.97)? Can't get a read on the big pullback..do the institutional traders know something we dont?"
I'm not adding to MER and I'm actually out of it for a while. My stop loss rule got me out just after I wrote about Thain. (Sadly, I did not apply that same stop loss rule to some other stocks recently).
The institutional traders are selling everything financial. There is nothing special happening with MER that isn't happening with Lehman (LEH - $42.03 ), Goldman (GS - $160.92), Citigroup (C - 20.16), Morgan Stanley (MS - $40.62) and the rest. And if there is I'm not sure what it is. Unless you have really done a lot of research and figured out something special about specific financial companies, I'd rather play the financials using the financials iShare (XLF -23.66) at this point. I'd rather not take the specific risk of any one company at this point. If you believe financials are cheap you might as well buy them all. The fund provides diversification and thus is much less risky. I don't know if any of these firms are going under but I'm sure they are all not. And when they bounce back up they will NEARLY all bounce together.
How to Turn the Polysilicon Supply Problem Into a Profitable Solution (Part 2) Written By: Eben Esterhuizen 2007-10-22 22:54:26 As an alcoholic, the first step to recovery is to admit that you are an alcoholic. The same principle applies to Wall Street banks in the aftermath of the recent credit crunch: the first step to recovery is to disclose the size of losses during the recent market turmoil. At the start of October, several banks disclosed their losses, with the Citigroup CFO saying that they were returning to a “normal earnings environment”. These confessions sparked a rally in global stock markets as investors decided that Wall Street banks were on their way to recovery. But we, at The Panelist, are not popping the champagne just yet – it seems likely that solar companies will suffer from a nasty hangover when the dust settles.
Microfinance: Helping Yourself by Helping the Less Fortunate Written By: Mark Bershatsky 2007-07-15 16:40:13 Microfinance is the business of providing very small loans, or "microloans", to poor communities around the world in an effort to spur local entrepreneurship and community development. With most loans valued at less than $100, this is oftentimes all that is needed to jumpstart economic growth in impoverished areas. Given the World Bank estimates of 1.2 billion people living on less than $1/day, a collateral-free loan of $100 is a pot of gold to a large chunk of the global population. And with an estimated 50% of the population living in communities with no financial services, having a three billion person (or $300 billion) target market translates into quite an extensive market opportunity.
