It appears the market is hovering between sporadic good news (Dow Chemicals last week and IBM today) and constant bad news (subprime, weak dollar, inflation). Today, the market is up based on IBM’s good news. Mr. Market seems to have ignored the bad news from Sears–sales are disappointing and don’t bode well for continued consumer spending. The broad sentiment is that the economy has been propped up by consumers. About 2 years ago, the same was said about housing.
This shouldn’t matter to a value investor, but it does. Because we’re not machines, we care about the economy, our jobs, and our surroundings. While we might try to focus on balance sheet assets with underrepresented value, most of us are also worried about paying for our kids’ education, mortgages, etc.
Being comfortably away from Wall Street (almost 1,000 miles), I’m about 25% closer than Omaha, NE. With that being said, the goal is to keep a realistic perspective on things. Right now, I’m watching several interesting companies that seem to offer a reasonable value play. They’re in industries we all touch in one way or another. More on these in future posts.
3 comments:
I am new to investing in the stock market. Your advice is very helpful!
Anytime that you buy a stock like Wallmart Mcdonald's or Apple computer or Wallgreens you are buying very good well run companies. But because of the popularity of these stocks they are not great value investments. The vast majority of your gains when you buy these stocks comes from dividends not captial gains. In other words when you are investing in a very popular mature company most if not all of your gains comes from your dividends. To get lots of potential capital appreciation from your stocks you must look for companies that are out of favor and not as widely followed as these high profile blue chips.
Very good post on human side of investing
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