| Parkland |
| 11/03/24 | | Stocks |
"Parkland is a value play. And maybe a special situation play down the road." Disclosure: I have a few shares.
|
| Fairfax shares merit consideration |
| 10/11/22 | | Stocks |
"Even better, the massive decline in long-term bond values is constraining competitors' capacity to write new policies, allowing Fairfax to aggressively capitalize on this opportunity."
|
| Cement, concrete, and gravel |
| 05/01/22 | | Stocks |
"I have always found it interesting how some great watchlist companies can trade at very high valuations for long periods of time. In some cases, their valuations just get higher and higher, especially during bull markets."
|
| A victory for shareholders |
| 08/14/20 | | Stocks |
"a key highlight is the decision that shareholders in Delaware have an absolute right to know about management compensation and related party transactions"
|
| Hertz donut |
| 06/20/20 | | Stocks |
"The stock of Hertz will, with high likelihood, go out at zero. Start with this: the firm has filed for bankruptcy. Stockholders mostly get nothing in bankruptcy. Sometimes they might get a little new stock or some warrants to help them save face, because they are delaying the reorganization, but this is usually a trivial amount of money, and implies a big loss to the stockholders."
|
| Micro machine |
| 06/20/20 | | Stocks |
"Maj Soueidan on nano cap investing with Tobias Carlisle" [video]
|
| The horse story |
| 09/06/19 | | Stocks |
"I admit, FFH is not exciting. It's not fake meat or pot or sending billionaires into space. But it shouldn't hurt you and has potential to deliver a very nice return. The current disappointing share performance could be, in the spirit of the horse story, a gift."
|
| The Costco cult |
| 07/07/19 | | Stocks |
"Since the day Costco went public in December of 1985, investors have complained that the company has been 'too generous' with its customers and employees. They've called for higher markups on goods, steeper prices, and reduced benefits for workers. But Costco has always insisted that their policies aren't just altruistic - they're good for business"
|
| Most Amazon brands are duds |
| 03/18/19 | | Stocks |
"Turns out most Amazon-branded goods are flops that don't threaten other businesses at all, according to Marketplace Pulse."
|
| Getting high on their own supply |
| 03/18/19 | | Stocks |
"The industry will surely grow on a macro level, but whether the stocks are investable is a different story. Incorporating even the most optimistic assumptions about future growth, the industry is trading at nosebleed valuations. The total market cap of all marijuana stocks in the US and Canada is about $50 billion, despite sales of only $580 million. That translates to a price/sales multiple of 85x."
|
| Absolute joy and relative misery |
| 09/10/18 | | Stocks |
"Facebook is currently in its deepest drawdown of the last five years. Misery loves company, and right now with the S&P 500 near all-time highs, Facebook investors have little company."
|
| Auto parts retailers hit the skids |
| 08/20/17 | | Stocks |
"Within a few years buying auto parts on the internet became capitalism incarnate with junkyards (car-part.com) and parts specialists (1-800-Radiator.com, LKQ Online) offering easy interfaces that let every consumer have same day service for a long list of parts. My waits became shorter, my parts bills became far cheaper, and my business with the auto parts retailers went down by nearly 80%."
|
| Mayday at Home Capital |
| 05/14/17 | | Stocks |
"In the early hours of Monday, May 1, exhausted representatives for Home Capital and a group of lenders hung up the phone in frustration. A deal to give the company an emergency $2-billion loan appeared to be falling apart. Directors at the mortgage firm felt that without the money, they wouldn't be able to open for business a few hours later." [$]
|
| Einhorn rediscovers preferred stock |
| 04/02/17 | | Stocks |
"Every four years or so, David Einhorn, the founder of Greenlight Capital LLC, rediscovers the concept of preferred stock and publishes a big presentation about it. I think it is about the most moving and beautiful recurring event in finance, like the migration of the Demoiselle cranes over the Himalayas, but for preferred stock."
|
| Looking for the next Amazon |
| 01/06/17 | | Stocks |
"This massive outperformance has led to an explosion in hindsight bias, with investors fooling themselves into believing Amazon's ascent was somehow obvious or inevitable. But the truth is this 38,000% return was handed to nobody, it was earned through enormous dedication. Actually, lunacy might be a better way to describe it, being that you had to be some sort of sociopath - void of any human emotions, to earn these monstrous gains."
|
| A severed horse's head |
| 09/17/16 | | Stocks |
"Tonight, I am talking about a different sort of scam that sucked in a different class of people. This scam was a corporation where the management took a firm into bankruptcy that could easily pay its debts, at least in the short-run. The management likely conspired with the bondholders against its shareholders, seemingly in an effort to gain a greater reward from the bondholders who would own the firm post-bankruptcy than they could from operating the firm outside of bankruptcy."
|
| Canadian banks to face headwinds |
| 03/26/16 | | Stocks |
"Canadian bank stocks provide a generous current yield of 4 per cent or better and trade at about 11 times earnings, so they are not in danger of imminent collapse. Part of their attraction to investors has been the robust growth in dividends over the past few years. The recent trend in marginal return on equity may not erode all the way to 11 per cent, but we should look for lower dividend growth in the future."
|
| A select group |
| 02/07/16 | | Stocks |
"Tech-boosters would doubtless love to see a prolonged bout of jostling for top spot between Alphabet and Apple (which before this week had held on to its crown for 653 consecutive days). But an obvious threat to both comes from a company that isn't even listed yet: Aramco, Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil giant, which is almost certainly the world's most valuable firm and is toying with an initial public offering."
|
| Bank of Nova Scotia is sector buy |
| 01/02/16 | | Stocks |
"Instead, Scotiabank gets this stamp of approval because its stock was a dud in 2015. It fell 15.6 per cent and lagged all of its big bank peers, which is good news for 2016: Buying last year's underperforming bank stock, and holding it for a year, is a remarkably simple and effective stock-picking strategy." [$] Lehman Bro
|
| Life of the McDonald's franchisee |
| 09/20/15 | | Stocks |
"His final day as a franchisee was a Tuesday last November. He went to the Hastings restaurant that evening to meet Berg. They counted uniforms and emptied the safe of Jarvis's cash. Berg wrote Jarvis a check for the inventory; Jarvis posed for a farewell photo with Snyder. He didn't leave till after midnight. His eyes well up at the memory. 'It's like I sold my family,' he says."
|
| Back to basics |
| 05/03/15 | | Stocks |
"The business, which had lost its triple-A rating, was designated a 'systemically important financial institution,' and that limits the amount of leverage it can use and subjects it to tougher regulations."
|
| How much does it really cost to mine gold? |
| 09/26/14 | | Stocks |
"A scan of major gold producers' earnings suggests the cost of mining gold has risen dramatically over the past few years. Part of that is a true increase, owing to inflation and the expense of digging out tough-to-reach grades. But most of it is due to a change in the cost metric that gold miners emphasize in their reports to the investing community."
|
| Y So Cheap? |
| 08/10/14 | | Stocks |
"I think Y is a solid investment. It may not trade much above BPS in the near term; their stated goal is to increase BPS 7-10%/year over time, and I think it's great if they can achieve that and worth BPS if that is the case."
|
| A Different Look at Neglect |
| 08/02/14 | | Stocks |
"It's good to look at stocks that not everyone else is looking at. A little neglect can be a good thing."
|
| Professor Damodaran's updated stock data |
| 01/12/14 | | Stocks |
"In 1992, I had just finished a spreadsheet that contained the average PE ratios for companies in different sectors in the United States. There was little of substance in it, but I decided that since I had it, I might as well share it. I posted that spreadsheet for students in my class to download and made it available to others who visited my website (more hopeful thinking than an actual plan, since there were relatively few people looking for data online). Each year since, I have added to the data collection, initially expanding my list of data items for US companies, and in the last decade, adding to the collection by looking at non-US companies. It is my first task each year and it takes up the first week of the year, and I just uploaded the data today for the 2014 update."
|
| Cohen hauls fortune in unmarked trucks |
| 08/10/13 | | Stocks |
"There's a reason why Richard B. Cohen escapes attention. The chairman of C&S Wholesale Grocers Inc. works out of a nondescript office park once slated to house a county jail in Keene, New Hampshire, a leafy mountain hamlet 90 miles northwest of Boston. The truckers who deliver goods from the company's 54 distribution centers drive unmarked tractor-trailers. Cohen's last interview was published a decade ago. Even the Keene Chamber of Commerce overlooked C&S as one of the town's largest employers."
|
| Markel thrives on buy and hold |
| 06/09/13 | | Stocks |
"Piece by tiny piece, Thomas Gayner is building the next Berkshire Hathaway."
|
| Aswath Damodaran compiles global stock data |
| 01/20/13 | | Stocks |
"For the last two decades, I have dedicated the first two weeks of each new year to a ritual. I obtain/collect/download data on all publicly traded companies listed globally, using a variety of data sources, and then analyze and present the data, aggregated at a number of different levels: by country, by region (US, Europe, Emerging Markets, Japan, Australia and Canada) and by industry. I report on measures of operations (profit margins, turnover ratios, working capital), measures of leverage (debt ratios), measures of risk (beta, standard deviation, equity risk premiums, country risk premiums) and pricing measures (earnings multiples, book value multiples, revenue multiples). I just completed my 2013 update and you can find it by clicking here."
|
| Acquisitions: Winners and Losers |
| 12/08/12 | | Stocks |
"The winner in public company acquisitions is easy to spot and it is the target company stockholders, who gain about 18% over the 41 days. On average, bidding company stockholders have little to show in terms of price gains - the stock price for acquiring firms drops about 2% during the announcement period and about 55% of all acquiring firms see their stock prices go down. Note that while the percentage price drop is small (relative to the price increase for the target firm), acquiring firms are typically much larger than target firms and the absolute value that is lost by acquiring firm stockholders from acquisitions can be staggering. A study of 12,023 acquisitions by large market cap firms from 1980 to 2001 estimated that their stockholders lost $218 billion in market value because of these acquisitions. While this number was inflated by some especially bad deals done between 1998 and 2000, they illustrate the potential for massive value losses from acquisitions and the reality that one big, bad deal can undo decades of careful value creation in a company."
|
| Big Insurance worries about the future |
| 07/01/12 | | Stocks |
"Life insurance used to be the quintessential safe and boring business in Canada. No more."
|
| Mauboussin on buybacks |
| 06/23/12 | | Stocks |
"This report looks at buybacks from four distinct points of view: companies, shareholders, prospective shareholders, and the media. Naturally, the issues are intertwined."
|
| Housing market jitters keep lid on Genworth |
| 06/07/12 | | Stocks |
"Mortgage insurer Genworth MI Canada Inc has a perception problem and its bargain-basement valuation tells the tale."
|
| RIM's stock falls below book value |
| 11/02/11 | | Stocks |
"Research In Motion's stock fell below its book value for the first time in nine years, a signal investors consider the BlackBerry maker to be worth less than the net value of its property, patents and other assets."
|
| Most S&P 500 stocks yield more than bonds |
| 09/29/11 | | Stocks |
"With the 10-year US Treasury yield now down to a record low level of 1.77% and equities getting crushed, the number of stocks yielding more than Treasuries continues to expand. As of this morning, 52.6% of stocks in the S&P 500 have a higher yield than the 10-year US Treasury. While equity dividends are by no means guaranteed, it seems that with each week that passes more companies are raising dividends than cutting them. This week, Microsoft (MSFT) became the latest mega-cap company to raise its dividend with a 25% hike in its annual payout bringing the yield above 3%."
|
| Mega Brands merits attention |
| 09/08/11 | | Stocks |
"To its great credit, management somehow kept the company going while negotiating a recapitalization in 2010, issuing an enormous amount of stock to get rid of most of its debt. Fairfax, Invesco Trimark and the founding Bertrand family participated in the new financing, as did other strong hands, who now own about half the stock."
|
| Bank of America |
| 08/25/11 | | Stocks |
"Still I am bullish on BofA at these prices. Very bullish. I think the politically driven finance bloggers (Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism) should be seen for their (I think justified) anti-bank agenda. Most of the rest are fitting their analysis around the stock price. There is an awful lot of stock-price doing the analysis here."
|
| A little yellow |
| 08/02/11 | | Stocks |
"I will also note that eMails such as the one I received are how the retail perspective transmits to institutional portfolios: I can assure you that in this kind of situation, with dramatic market movements and heavy media coverage, a lot of Portfolio Managers sell (sometimes against their better judgement, if they have any) simply so they won't have to explain their holdings to their clients. The business is, in general, not about performance it's about story telling."
|
| Mining the portfolio |
| 07/22/11 | | Stocks |
"Mining the portfolio, in essence, is taking information and news from current portfolio holdings, and using it, and the second order effects stemming from that information, to allocate capital in other investments."
|
| Swinging for the fence not a sustainable strategy |
| 06/22/11 | | Stocks |
"There are many investors who roll the dice on just a one or two stocks. Some people choose well and hit the jackpot - again through varying proportions of luck and skill. These are the investors that often visit firms like ours for advice. We just don't see the other investors that saw their concentrated bets work against them. In other words, while hearing many of the strike-it-rich stories can give the impression that this is the path to prosperity, believe me when I tell you that far greater numbers of investors have permanently destroyed wealth using this approach. This is not a high probability way of building wealth."
|
| Partner casts doubt on Sino-Forest |
| 06/19/11 | | Stocks |
"Embattled Sino-Forest Corp. , once Canada's biggest publicly-traded timber company, appears to have substantially overstated the size and value of its forestry holdings in China's Yunnan province, according to figures provided by senior forestry officials and a key business partner there."
|
| Why Groupon not as rosy as it appears |
| 06/13/11 | | Stocks |
"It would seem Mr. Lefkofsky has an extensive history of taking investors' money for himself, then bankrupting the businesses invested in."
|
| All revenue is not created equal |
| 05/28/11 | | Stocks |
"With the IPO market now blown wide-open, and the media completely infatuated with frothy trades in the bubbly late stage private market, it is common to see articles that reference both "valuation" and "revenue" and suggest that there is a correlation between the two. Calculating or qualifying potential valuation using the simplistic and crude tool of a revenue multiple (also known as the price/revenue or price/sales ratio) was quite trendy back during the Internet bubble of the late 1990s. Perhaps it is not peculiar that our good friend the price/revenue ratio is back in vogue. But investors and analysts beware this is a remarkably dangerous technique, because all revenues are not created equal."
|
| Groupon no bargain at even half the price |
| 03/23/11 | | Stocks |
"Let's look at a couple of pro-Groupon arguments designed to counter this whole barrier-to-entry argument. One is that Groupon has "first-mover advantage," which is said to be exceptionally important in the tech space. I was going to use my Netscape browser to access the Excite search engine to research this concept more, then share what I found on Friendster, but decided to move on to the next point instead."
|
| Sometimes a Great Notion |
| 02/27/11 | | Stocks |
"One common thought in the equity world has been that a rotation of investor dollars toward shares of 'high-quality' companies should be imminent. This is a sane and sober idea, and one that generally hasn't worked in the past couple of years, when markets have been lifted by improving credit conditions, a snap-back in corporate profits and surging risk appetites. These drivers of market action almost always favor smaller, more volatile, more cyclical and less well-capitalized stocks, which have led this bull market."
|
| Don't enter the dragon |
| 01/24/11 | | Stocks |
"Yet, because the railways offered - and sometimes delivered - the prospect of enormous wealth, the money kept flowing. Today, the same is true. China's boom is real enough, and so it's possible for investors in small Chinese stocks to believe that they're heeding Deng Xiaoping's famous admonition "To get rich is glorious." Unfortunately, many of them are just proving the truth of another famous adage: "There's a sucker born every minute." "
|
| The Groupon Bubble |
| 01/18/11 | | Stocks |
"The paper reports that Groupon, which turned down $6 billion from Google last month, is in talks with Wall Street for an IPO that Wall Street is pitching to investors valuing the company at between $15 billion and $20 billion. The NYT says the two-year-old Groupon "is pushing ahead with plans for its initial public offering," and I'm sure it is. I'd be pushing to cash in too before this bubble pops."
|
| Worthless Stocks from China |
| 01/16/11 | | Stocks |
"Bird's involvement would evolve from irritation that a company could get away with making a claim that so obviously defies basic business logic to the conviction that many pieces of the Chinese miracle that trade in the U.S. are, in his words, 'flat-ass' frauds. And what started as a retiree looking into a company has turned into a dispute that has drawn in other shorts, the Securities and Exchange Commission, auditors, and, according to recent reports, the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services. It has also revealed significant flaws in U.S. markets and how they are regulated. Although the stocks trade on U.S. exchanges, and thus project a sense of having to play by American rules, the assets and the principals of many of the companies reside in China. The companies operate on their terms, leaving injured parties and the SEC powerless. Bird says the carnage is just beginning. 'The whole thing has no place to go but to blow up,' he says. 'That's a rational position for an investor to start with, that every one of these Chinese reverse mergers is a fraud.'"
|
| How to Erase the Lost Decade? |
| 10/17/10 | | Stocks |
"Whatever figure turns out to be right, the bottom line is that "people should ratchet down their expectations for stocks," he said."There's no harm in hoping that things turn out better," Mr. Arnott added. "But the danger is assuming and planning for the best while saving as if the market can do your work for you.""
|
| Share buybacks put a shine on Danier |
| 10/09/10 | | Stocks |
"The market, in other words, appears to be assigning scant value to Danier's ongoing business - and that's hard to understand. In the year to June - certainly no boom time for the Canadian economy - it produced 7.2-million in earnings, or about 1.58 for each of the shares remaining at the end of the most recent quarter. If the market were willing to pay even 12 times those earnings, Danier would be a 19 stock."
|
| Travelling through Universal Travel Group |
| 09/16/10 | | Stocks |
"The company claims in its most recent quarterly balance sheet to be carrying 43 million in cash and accounts receivable of almost 20 million. If the airline and hotel business are dubious then the profits generated that cash are dubious. In that case the cash itself is dubious.I know people will buy this as Ben Graham net-net stock if it collapses. Unless this company can get a big four audit firm to sign-off for them I think you can - at least for the moment question the entire balance sheet. "
|
| Turning Japanese |
| 07/21/10 | | Stocks |
"I have maintained throughout this blog that I thought that zero interest rates in America would have a different outcome to zero interest rates in Japan because Japanese banks are predominantly deposit franchises and zero interest rates are very bad for them - but that American banks - especially larger American banks - are fundamentally lending franchises and zero interest rates would not impair their ability to make a spread on the loan book."
|
| A perfect predator |
| 07/21/10 | | Stocks |
"Flatt seems to go out of his way to paint Brookfield as boring. 'We own 129 office buildings. Some are a little taller, some are a bit shorter,' he says laconically. The strategy? 'We're in the business of buying assets of great quality at less than replacement cost.' The company's remarkably consistent objective over the years simply has been to earn a 12% to 15% compound annual return per share. 'We have no goal to be large or significant,' says Flatt. 'If [reaching our objective] meant we should shrink in size, we'd do that.' Even Brookfield's logo is understated, and its 2009 annual report looks like something thrown together at Kinko's. Move along, everyone, nothing to see here. The reality is that this slender 45-year-old executive runs a conglomerate that manages $108-billion worth of real estate, utilities and infrastructure across the planet."
|
| Bank of America comes clean |
| 07/14/10 | | Stocks |
"Bank of America has finally admitted that it understated the quarter end assets and liabilities for the years 2007 to 2009. It does not (yet) admit that similar transactions took place in many other years and it does not spell out the effect of these transactions on BofA.s need to carry capital."
|
| Short First Solar |
| 04/09/10 | | Stocks |
"A technology, to be a really great investment, must do two things. It must change part of the world in a useful way - a big part of the world is better of course - but you can be surprisingly profitable in small niches. And it must keep the competition out. "
|
| Selling puts naked |
| 01/30/10 | | Stocks |
"Like other Canadian insurers, Manulife was sideswiped during the financial crisis due to its exposure to guaranteed annuity products it had sold to clients across North America and Asia. Most have issued significant amounts of new shares to raise their capital levels since stock markets plunged in the fall of 2008. A major player in the business, Manulife hadn't hedged its segregated funds. That exposure created a capital risk that attracted the attention -- and intervention -- of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI), Canada's financial services regulator."
|
| The restaurant-failure myth |
| 01/27/10 | | Stocks |
"His research - consistent with similar studies - found that about one in four restaurants close or change ownership within their first year of business. Over three years, that number rises to three in five."
|
| How Visa dominates a market |
| 01/11/10 | | Stocks |
"Every day, millions of Americans stand at store checkout counters and make a seemingly random decision: after swiping their debit card, they choose whether to punch in a code, or to sign their name. It is a pointless distinction to most consumers, since the price is the same either way. But behind the scenes, billions of dollars are at stake."
|
| 'D' is for death |
| 12/29/09 | | Stocks |
"One day you will die. This is sad. It is also an investment opportunity. Funeral homes are one of the few businesses that are guaranteed a growing audience for their services, not only over the next decade, but over the next several decades. As Boomers age, the industry made famous in the television series Six Feet Under is emerging from the low-mortality period that a funeral home expert calls "death valley" and entering a period in which customers will become more and more common."
|
| When an annual report speaks volumes |
| 12/20/09 | | Stocks |
"Want to find a great long-term investment? Look for an annual report that treats you like a human being. Most don't. The standard-issue annual report features heroic photos of the CEO, staged snapshots of maniacally grinning workers, and vague assurances that, despite enormous challenges being faced by the stalwart management team, the future looks just fine. Only a handful of annual reports talk to you like a partner. These reports don't spend a fortune on glamour shots of smokestacks basking in the sunset. They avoid canned promises to "respect all our stakeholders." Instead, they deliver a blunt assessment of both the firm's successes and its failures. In a high proportion of cases, these exceptionally honest reports come from companies that are also exceptionally good at making you money."
|
| Ten years after |
| 12/20/09 | | Stocks |
"I've been working on a year-end piece - this is my last day at the office in 2009 - and I came across an article from Feb. 20, 2000, in which 10 money managers each chose one stock to buy then and hold until 2010. It's almost 2010, so I checked to see how they had done. For most, not well." and yet "Here is more good news. Thanks largely to Henry Schlein, an investor who bought $1,000 of each of those 10 companies, and held on, would now have more than $13,000, even with losses on eight of the holdings. That performance is much better than that of the overall market."
|
| Murdoch to Google: search this |
| 11/10/09 | | Stocks |
"As unlikely as it sounds, Rupert Murdoch may end up being our last best hope for a peaceful solution to the Internet's war on professional journalism. A man who many blame for commodifying, globalizing, sensationalizing, and cheapening news is considering taking a stand against a force even bigger than himself: the Web link."
|
| Why banks stay big |
| 10/26/09 | | Stocks |
"Maybe megabanks are what we need. Certainly most developed nations have banking systems even more concentrated than ours. The trouble is that the 'market' for banking is so distorted - by switching costs, by government subsidies and guarantees, and by the banks' market power - that it's hard to know whether big banks are adding value or are simply exploiting their oligopolistic positions."
|
| The return of the Why-P.O. |
| 10/23/09 | | Stocks |
"What in tarnation is a Why-P.O. you ask? It's an IPO so pointless for investors to be involved with that you can only scratch your head after reading the prospectus and ask 'Why?'."
|
| The pyramid principle |
| 10/22/09 | | Stocks |
"Right now America.s banking system resembles a pyramid. At the top, two or three firms are doing well. But beneath them are a handful of giant conglomerates that are struggling towards profits, a tier of middling banks with overexposure to risky assets, and a vast base of small banks in deep, deep trouble."
|
| Toxic loans topping 5% |
| 08/16/09 | | Stocks |
"More than 150 publicly traded U.S. lenders own nonperforming loans that equal 5 percent or more of their holdings, a level that former regulators say can wipe out a bank.s equity and threaten its survival."
|
| Amazon's troubling reach |
| 07/29/09 | | Stocks |
"Last week, in a stunning display of public irony, Amazon.com remotely deleted digital copies of George Orwell's novels "1984" and "Animal Farm" from customers' Kindles after learning that the electronic publisher of these works, MobileReference, did not have the rights to them. For a couple of days, observers in print and on the Web outdid themselves, noting that in "1984," government censors rewrite history by consigning offending news items to an incinerator chute known as the memory hole. Orwell's technological vision might have been primitive, but he seems to have predicted something fundamental about the dangers of information systems."
|
| Philip Morris gets its tobacco bill |
| 06/15/09 | | Stocks |
"The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act is revealed as yet another Beltway deal for Big Government and Big Business. Those who proclaim it a victory for public health and the public good are blowing smoke."
|
| Why you should be long the NYT |
| 06/14/09 | | Stocks |
"The Times is the greatest journalism brand in the world. Journalism is going through a period of intense, painful consolidation, at the end of which there will be many fewer competitors, leaving the ones who survive with extraordinary market power and more cultural influence than they have today. The Times will unquestionably survive because it is the best, which will make it an incredibly profitable enterprise. In fact, I'd wager to say that the worse things get for the media industry generally, the better things get for the Times."
|
| Investor exits and leaves puzzlement |
| 06/01/09 | | Stocks |
"I've seen my share of odd moments during annual meetings, but until Thursday I'd never seen a grown man cry during one. O.K., maybe 'cry' is a bit of an overstatement for what happened. Still, it was pretty startling when, in the middle of his speech to Target Corporation shareholders, William A. Ackman, the hedge fund manager who had waged an expensive, high-profile proxy fight against the company, suddenly choked up and stopped speaking. He wiped away a tear."
|
| Chrysler's sorry state revealed |
| 05/11/09 | | Stocks |
"Among the thousands of pages of documents filed in connection with Chrysler's Chapter 11 bankruptcy are affidavits from Chrysler executives that open up a window on the auto business previously closed to outsiders in this intensely competitive business. They reveal an almost unimaginable complexity in the design, manufacturing, and distribution of new cars. But what's more revealing is that the affidavits expose Chrysler's inability to successfully compete and the dangers facing the company in a prolonged bankruptcy."
|
| Why capital structure matters |
| 04/21/09 | | Stocks |
"My belief -- first stated 40 years ago in a graduate thesis and later confirmed by experience -- is that capital structure significantly affects both value and risk. The optimal capital structure evolves constantly, and successful corporate leaders must constantly consider six factors -- the company and its management, industry dynamics, the state of capital markets, the economy, government regulation and social trends. When these six factors indicate rising business risk, even a dollar of debt may be too much for some companies."
|
| Paper money |
| 04/02/09 | | Stocks |
"In other words, the newspaper companies that have failed wholesale were essentially set up to fail by inexperienced managers who believed piling huge amounts of debt on businesses whose revenues were shrinking even when the economy was growing was a shrewd means of value creation."
|
| Cash-rich firms |
| 04/02/09 | | Stocks |
"One way to look at stocks is to view each share as a claim on a company's future earnings. But another way is to view each share as a claim on a company's assets. During times like these where markets for many assets are either frozen or slow-moving, liquid assets deserve a premium. So companies with high levels of cash and little or no long-term debt are well worth a look."
|
| The next AIG scandal? |
| 03/19/09 | | Stocks |
"Thomas Gober, a former Mississippi state insurance examiner who has tracked fraud in the industry for 23 years and served previously as a consultant to the FBI and the Department of Justice, says he believes AIG's supposedly solvent insurance business may be at least as troubled as its reckless financial-products unit. Far from being "healthy," as state insurance regulators, ratings agencies and other experts have repeatedly described the insurance side, Gober calls it "a house of cards." Citing numerous documents he has obtained from state insurance regulators and obscure data buried in AIG's own 300-page annual reports, Gober argues that AIG's 71 interlocking domestic U.S. insurance subsidiaries are in hock to each other to an astonishing degree."
|
| Content, once king, becomes a pauper |
| 02/11/09 | | Stocks |
"The value of content has never been ethereal. It has always been directly tied to what owners could "get" for it, either through advertisers or subscribers. For content to have a value, it could never be free. Its position as royalty depended on that. Content is rapidly being devalued."
|
| Life at Wal-Mart |
| 02/03/09 | | Stocks |
"The picture above is of me, finishing my shift at the world.s largest retailer. How did I move from being a senior writer at Wired magazine to an entry-level position in a company that is reviled by almost all living journalists? It started when I read Nickel and Dimed, in which Atlantic contributor Barbara Ehrenreich denounces the exploitation of minimum-wage workers in America. Somehow her book didn.t ring true to me, and I wondered to what extent a preconceived agenda might have biased her reporting. Hence my application for a job at the nearest Wal-Mart."
|
| I see dead bankers! |
| 01/29/09 | | Stocks |
"In The Sixth Sense, Haley Joel Osment's character is terrified because he sees dead people walking the streets, working, going to school, playing, seeing patients, oblivious to the fact that they are no longer alive. I get the same feeling today watching CNBC, reading the newspapers, walking through midtown Manhattan and counting the Town Cars idling outside the headquarters of investment banks. Like John Thain, there are lots of people who continue to act as if they are living, breathing, Wall Street players, oblivious to the fact they've been reduced to nicely dressed corpses."
|
| Will Exxon Get Googled? |
| 01/14/09 | | Stocks |
"And while nothing in our current energy infrastructure operates at the theoretical limits, pretty much everything is within spitting distance of Mother Nature's hard stop in terms of energy density and efficiency. Of course, there's room for progress. A 20 to 30 percent gain in efficiency in our national energy bill translates into serious money. Airlines, as well as most businesses, do back handsprings for such efficiency gains. But compared to the efficiency-created disruptions in the digital-info world, 30 percent is chump change. The reality is that we are stuck with limitations imposed by things like, well, Earth's rotation and distance from the sun, which determine the maximum energy possible from solar power. Or the biochemistry of photosynthesis, which ultimately determines biofuel economics, or the physical chemistry that dictates potential energy per pound of oil, ethanol, or lithium. "
|
| Too big to succeed |
| 01/14/09 | | Stocks |
"Indeed, when it comes to conglomerates, we tend to see a two-part cycle. During the first part, acquisitions, mergers, big combinations are all the rage. Its a giant ego stroke for the CEOs, and it generates lots of fees for the iBankers. The second half of the equation comes when the awful handiwork of the M&A binge needs to be unassembled. That generates criticism of the CEOs, and lots of fees for the iBankers."
|
| What's in a name? |
| 12/24/08 | | Stocks |
"Underlying the best brands are usually sales pitches of great stuff. Macs don't crash. The iPhone 3G is fast. FedEx gets there every time. The Lexus parks itself. Canon is the professional's camera. Even Pepsi - the company that more or less created modern branding with the slogan "The Taste of a New Generation" - decided in the end that, actually, it was easier to sell soda with the Pepsi Challenge taste test. At the very top of the Interbrand list you will find Coca-Cola, the great outlier of the brand world. Far from the model of how brands work, Coke is the great exception. The vast majority of great brandmakers knows that you cannot sell products by telling people about your brand - you can sell your brand only by telling them about the product."
|
| News you can lose |
| 12/21/08 | | Stocks |
"The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they've arguably become more popular. The blogosphere, much of which piggybacks on traditional journalism's content, has magnified the reach of newspapers, and although papers now face far more scrutiny, this is a kind of backhanded compliment to their continued relevance. Usually, when an industry runs into the kind of trouble that Levitt was talking about, it's because people are abandoning its products. But people don't use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don't have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn't the Internet; it's us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That's a consumer's dream, but eventually it's going to collide with reality: if newspapers. profits vanish, so will their product."
|
| 'Already bankrupt' GM won't be rescued by loan |
| 12/13/08 | | Stocks |
"For General Motors Corp., the question is no longer whether it will get a government loan or if Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner will be replaced. It's whether anything can prevent the largest U.S. automaker from sliding into bankruptcy. "
|
| $73 an hour: adding it up |
| 12/11/08 | | Stocks |
"That figure - repeated on television and in newspapers as the average pay of a Big Three autoworker - has become a big symbol in the fight over what should happen to Detroit. To critics, it is a neat encapsulation of everything that's wrong with bloated car companies and their entitled workers. To the Big Three's defenders, meanwhile, the number has become proof positive that autoworkers are being unfairly blamed for Detroit's decline."
|
| BCE fails key test |
| 11/27/08 | | Stocks |
"Shortly after markets closed on Tuesday, a team of auditors in KPMG's Toronto offices ushered a trio of BCE Inc. executives into a meeting room to advise them that the world's largest leveraged takeover had effectively been killed. The culprit? A five-line clause that virtually no one had noticed in the company's much-scrutinized $35-billion sale agreement. Over the course of more than two hours, the solemn auditors explained to BCE's stunned chief executive officer George Cope and two of his senior executives that the communications company had not passed a so-called solvency test, one of the last hurdles standing in the way of a Dec. 11 deadline to close the sale of the company to a group lead by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Fund. Now, baring a financial miracle, there is little hope that the deal will survive."
|
| Landmark BCE takeover in doubt |
| 11/26/08 | | Stocks |
"The massive planned privatization of telecommunications giant BCE Inc. is in jeopardy after the company failed a preliminary solvency test conducted for the would-be purchasers, led by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board. BCE said Wednesday it received a 'preliminary view' from auditing firm KPMG that 'based on current market conditions, its analysis to date and the amount of indebtedness involved,' it does not expect to be able to deliver an opinion on the closing date of Dec. 11 that BCE 'would meet the solvency tests as defined in the definitive agreement.'"
|
| How AIG got Uncle Sam over a barrel |
| 11/14/08 | | Stocks |
"The Treasury has secured crowd-pleasing concessions; for example limits on executives. bonus payments. But the real question is whether the preference shares are safe. AIG has a trillion-dollar balance-sheet. There is now a thin buffer of core equity between the taxpayer.s preference shares and any further losses. The hope is still that as markets recover, AIG can sell the crown jewels of its insurance business at a premium to book value. That may well take years. Plenty of time to reflect on how an offer of a temporary loan, to a company that barely made the list of systemically vital firms, spiralled into one of the biggest corporate bail-outs ever."
|
| How AIG failed |
| 11/03/08 | | Stocks |
"The lesson, of course, is simple, but hard to learn: it's not the risks you measure which bring you down, it's the risks you don't measure. But protecting against those risks is very, very hard."
|
| Next likely bank failures |
| 10/20/08 | | Stocks |
"U.S. banks large and small are buckling under the pressure of the credit crisis. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has seized 13 institutions this year, most recently Washington Mutual. The regulator, which maintains a list of "problem" banks, doesn't disclose which others raise red flags. But one measure, the so-called Texas Ratio, may offer a clue."
|
| Profit from panic |
| 10/09/08 | | Stocks |
"The "other Berkshire" is Fairfax Financial a P&C insurer headed by brilliant capital allocator Prem Watsa. Fairfax is about as close as you can get to investing in a company that does great in good markets and exceptionally well in disastrous ones."
|
| Lehman bankruptcy gets ugly |
| 10/02/08 | | Stocks |
"It's looking like Lehman, contrary to the conventional wisdom, may have been too big to fail after all. And the fallout from the bankruptcy may further undermine investors. confidence in the financial system."
|
| Citigroup to buy Wachovia banking assets |
| 09/29/08 | | Stocks |
"Citigroup will acquire Wachovia's massive deposit network, as well as over $300 billion worth of Wachovia's loan portfolio and the company's debt. Citigroup said it will absorb up to $42 billion of losses on those loans, while the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will be on the hook for anything beyond that."
|
| JPMorgan buys WaMu's deposits as thrift is seized |
| 09/25/08 | | Stocks |
"The U.S. government closed Seattle-based Washington Mutual amid customer withdrawals of $16.7 billion since Sept. 15, the Office of Thrift Supervision said in a statement. WaMu had 'insufficient liquidity' and was in an 'unsound' condition, the OTS said."
|
| AIG gets up to $85 Billion Fed loan |
| 09/16/08 | | Stocks |
"The U.S. government agreed to lend as much as $85 billion to American International Group Inc. in exchange for a 79.9 percent stake to save the country's biggest insurer from collapse."
|
| AIG falls |
| 09/15/08 | | Stocks |
"AIG, seeking to raise $20 billion in capital and sell $20 billion of assets, rejected investments from buyout firms KKR & Co., TPG Inc. and J.C. Flowers & Co., people familiar with the talks said. AIG instead sought a $40 billion bridge loan from the Federal Reserve, the New York Times reported, citing an unnamed person. The shares plunged $6.25 to $5.89 at 9:42 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Warrren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., 'is thought to be in talks' with AIG about a possible investment, the Insurance Insider reported today, citing unidentified sources." [It seems likely that Buffett would take a pass on the firm but be willing to buy some of its assets at fire-sale prices.]
|
| Lehman files biggest bankruptcy case |
| 09/15/08 | | Stocks |
"Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, succumbed to the subprime mortgage crisis it helped create in the biggest bankruptcy filing in history. The 158-year-old firm, which survived railroad bankruptcies of the 1800s, the Great Depression in the 1930s and the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management a decade ago, filed a Chapter 11 petition with U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan today. The collapse of Lehman, which listed more than $613 billion of debt, dwarfs WorldCom Inc.'s insolvency in 2002 and Drexel Burnham Lambert's failure in 1990." [So much for the too big to fail idea]
|
| Wall Street banks teeter |
| 09/15/08 | | Stocks |
"In one of the most dramatic days in Wall Street.s history, Merrill Lynch agreed to sell itself to Bank of America for roughly $50 billion to avert a deepening financial crisis, while another prominent securities firm, Lehman Brothers, hurtled toward liquidation after it failed to find a buyer. The humbling moves, which reshape the landscape of American finance, mark the latest chapter in a tumultuous year in which once-proud financial institutions have been brought to their knees as a result of hundreds of billions of dollars in losses because of bad mortgage finance and real estate investments. But even as the fates of Lehman and Merrill hung in the balance Sunday night, another crisis loomed as the insurance giant American International Group appeared to teeter. A.I.G. sought a $40 billion lifeline from the Federal Reserve, without which the company may have only days to survive."
|
| Bank of America said to buy Merrill |
| 09/14/08 | | Stocks |
"Bank of America Corp. reached a deal to acquire Merrill Lynch & Co. for about $44 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported, after shares of the third-biggest U.S. securities firm fell by more than 35 percent last week and smaller rival Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. neared bankruptcy."
|
| Lehman said to prepare bankruptcy filing |
| 09/14/08 | | Stocks |
"Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. prepared to file for bankruptcy after Barclays Plc and Bank of America Corp. abandoned talks to buy the U.S. securities firm and Wall Street prepared for its possible liquidation. Lehman and its lawyers are getting ready to file the documents for bankruptcy protection tonight, said a person with direct knowledge of the firm's plans. A final decision still wasn't made, though none of the other options being considered appeared to have much standing, the person said, declining to be identified because the discussions haven't been made public."
|
| How can the New York Times be worth so little? |
| 07/30/08 | | Stocks |
"At its current $12.48 stock price - down 46.3% from a year ago - Times Co. has a $1.79 billion market cap. To put this in perspective, CBS recently acquired tech publisher CNET, a much weaker media brand, for $1.8 billion. Add in the company's $1.1 billion of debt, subtract $42 million for its cash on hand, and the company's total enterprise value - a valuation measure that totals up those items in such a fashion - is just $2.85 billion."
|
| Selling the family jewels |
| 07/30/08 | | Stocks |
| IndyMac seized by U.S. regulators |
| 07/12/08 | | Stocks |
| Bank failures to surge in coming years |
| 06/23/08 | | Stocks |
| The Texas ratio and Canada's big banks |
| 06/23/08 | | Stocks |
| Is Royal getting risky? |
| 05/26/08 | | Stocks |
| Bear Stearns second brush with bankruptcy |
| 05/05/08 | | Stocks |
| New Bear Stearns bid |
| 03/24/08 | | Stocks |
| JPMorgan buys Bear Stearns for $2 a share |
| 03/16/08 | | Stocks |
| What Citigroup says isn't what it does |
| 03/15/08 | | Stocks |
| F.D.R.'s safety net gets a big stretch |
| 03/15/08 | | Stocks |
| Bear Stearns gets emergency funds |
| 03/14/08 | | Stocks |
| The complete guide to free stock screen tools |
| 02/21/08 | | Stocks |
| Wall Street losses partners never imagined |
| 02/12/08 | | Stocks |
| Ever more fleeting? |
| 12/03/07 | | Stocks |
| Freddie and Fannie's Achilles' heel |
| 11/26/07 | | Stocks |
| Citigroup: 'Gimme shelter' |
| 10/29/07 | | Stocks |
| A beautiful mind |
| 10/26/07 | | Stocks |
| Bear Stearns' bad bet |
| 10/14/07 | | Stocks |
| Crisis at Northern Rock |
| 09/14/07 | | Stocks |
| Coal? Yes, Coal |
| 06/15/07 | | Stocks |
| The darker side of shareholder democracy |
| 05/19/07 | | Stocks |
| Feds investigating homebuilder Beazer |
| 03/27/07 | | Stocks |
| Five breakup possibilities |
| 03/26/07 | | Stocks |
| Every bite you take |
| 02/22/07 | | Stocks |
| Now that's rich |
| 02/21/07 | | Stocks |
| Costco: The 'anti-Wal-Mart' |
| 02/16/07 | | Stocks |
| The number of free stock screeners is dwindling |
| 02/04/07 | | Stocks |
| Top NYSE stocks under $5 |
| 01/16/07 | | Stocks |
| Bad for GM, bad for America |
| 04/11/06 | | Stocks |
| Last tango in Detroit? |
| 04/07/06 | | Stocks |
| Chicken Run: Value manager's dream? |
| 03/22/06 | | Stocks |
| A sleeping giant |
| 03/15/06 | | Stocks |
| Was death of newspapers greatly exaggerated? |
| 03/15/06 | | Stocks |
| The tragedy of General Motors |
| 02/07/06 | | Stocks |
| The dirty little secret about buybacks |
| 01/13/06 | | Stocks |
| The wit and wisdom of Peter Lynch |
| 01/05/06 | | Stocks |
| Bargain-hunting time |
| 01/03/06 | | Stocks |
| Newspapers: buys among the battered |
| 12/16/05 | | Stocks |
| Philip Morris wins |
| 12/16/05 | | Stocks |
| 10 rock-solid stocks |
| 12/16/05 | | Stocks |
| Clicks, bricks and bargains |
| 12/02/05 | | Stocks |
| Ben Bernanke's favorite stock |
| 11/23/05 | | Stocks |
| Value investors value newspapers |
| 11/03/05 | | Stocks |
| Six feet under |
| 10/21/05 | | Stocks |
| Now for the reckoning |
| 10/14/05 | | Stocks |
| Which side are you on? |
| 10/14/05 | | Stocks |
| Beyond bling |
| 09/25/05 | | Stocks |
| The taming of the screw |
| 09/15/05 | | Stocks |
| America's airlines, flying on empty |
| 09/15/05 | | Stocks |
| When to sell a stock? |
| 09/14/05 | | Stocks |
| Extinction of the predator |
| 09/11/05 | | Stocks |
| Bic sells 100 billionth pen |
| 09/08/05 | | Stocks |
| Wal-Mart becomes a lifeline |
| 09/07/05 | | Stocks |
| Google's stock sale mystery is simply solved |
| 08/26/05 | | Stocks |
| Beat the S&P with strong consumer brands |
| 08/25/05 | | Stocks |
| Google's new shares: are they worth the price? |
| 08/18/05 | | Stocks |
| Six 5-star stock ideas from master investors |
| 08/18/05 | | Stocks |
| Harry Potter and the all-too-rare windfall |
| 07/18/05 | | Stocks |
| Something wicker this way comes? |
| 03/14/05 | | Stocks |
| AGF investors have reasons to hang in there |
| 03/03/05 | | Stocks |
| How to recognize wide-moat firms |
| 02/19/05 | | Stocks |
| Is Wal-Mart good for America? |
| 11/20/04 | | Stocks |
| What's going on behind Nortel's closed doors? |
| 11/12/04 | | Stocks |
| Some shoppers find fewer happy returns |
| 11/10/04 | | Stocks |
| Best Buy hopes to exorcize devil patrons |
| 11/10/04 | | Stocks |
| Customer service saved Xerox |
| 10/29/04 | | Stocks |
| Market realities can't sustain TransAlta's dividend |
| 10/21/04 | | Stocks |
| Big Mac's makeover |
| 10/16/04 | | Stocks |
| Taking advantage of the terminally stupid |
| 10/04/04 | | Stocks |
| Costco has its own formula for success |
| 09/26/04 | | Stocks |
| Buffett of the North |
| 09/16/04 | | Stocks |
| Flight into the red |
| 08/30/04 | | Stocks |
| The sorry saga of KHI |
| 08/15/04 | | Stocks |
| The benefits trap |
| 07/12/04 | | Stocks |
| Biggest leveraged buyout ending as a costly fizzle |
| 07/10/04 | | Stocks |
| Super-duper shares yield super-duper pay |
| 05/16/04 | | Stocks |
| Take lid off inside sales before IPOs |
| 05/14/04 | | Stocks |
| Presto stays its course |
| 05/12/04 | | Stocks |
| How big can it grow? |
| 04/15/04 | | Stocks |
| Hopping |
| 04/04/04 | | Stocks |
| Size still doesn't matter |
| 03/31/04 | | Stocks |
| Self-delusion down in Charlotte |
| 03/30/04 | | Stocks |
| Banks' use of client cash probed |
| 03/26/04 | | Stocks |
| I'd like to buy the world a Coke |
| 03/20/04 | | Stocks |
| Once again, Nortel is covered in question marks |
| 03/12/04 | | Stocks |
| Power to the shareholder? |
| 03/09/04 | | Stocks |
| Requiem for the record store |
| 02/07/04 | | Stocks |
| Finding money in banks |
| 01/31/04 | | Stocks |
| Out of control |
| 01/29/04 | | Stocks |
| Black crossed the line and now he will pay |
| 01/19/04 | | Stocks |
| Liquidator: 6,500 tech firms among 'walking dead' |
| 01/08/04 | | Stocks |
| Apple debuts lower-priced iPod |
| 01/06/04 | | Stocks |
| Layoffs coming at Kraft? |
| 01/06/04 | | Stocks |
| The year of the car |
| 01/04/04 | | Stocks |
| Banks feel the heat in Parmalat scandal |
| 01/03/04 | | Stocks |
| Milking lessons |
| 12/29/03 | | Stocks |
| Self-Destruction, mother of invention |
| 12/24/03 | | Stocks |
| Corporate scandals |
| 12/23/03 | | Stocks |
| Parmalat admits $5bn black hole |
| 12/22/03 | | Stocks |
| Big trouble for Big Pharma |
| 12/05/03 | | Stocks |
| Trustmark, Walgreens join 'clean stocks' list |
| 11/30/03 | | Stocks |
| The big candyman |
| 10/31/03 | | Stocks |
| Haggling |
| 09/06/03 | | Stocks |
| Whistleblower says he just wanted Coke to listen |
| 08/30/03 | | Stocks |
| Apple picking |
| 08/29/03 | | Stocks |
| Five undiscovered picks from small-cap managers |
| 08/26/03 | | Stocks |
| Don't buy these 10 stocks! |
| 08/13/03 | | Stocks |
| Gillette nicked by Schick |
| 08/09/03 | | Stocks |
| Tough sell for Noranda |
| 08/09/03 | | Stocks |
| Pension plans face $225-billion shortfall |
| 05/24/03 | | Stocks |
| It pays to inspect annual reports |
| 05/23/03 | | Stocks |
| Tobacco stocks live to fight again |
| 05/21/03 | | Stocks |
| Insurance sector should emulate Fairfax |
| 04/15/03 | | Stocks |
| From scrap to Slinky |
| 04/09/03 | | Stocks |
| The limits of bankruptcy |
| 04/02/03 | | Stocks |
| McDonald's: Back to basics? |
| 03/28/03 | | Stocks |
| It's time to shed light on insider equity monetization |
| 03/13/03 | | Stocks |
| Don't shoot the messenger |
| 03/02/03 | | Stocks |
| When you can't sell the goods, sell the shop |
| 01/18/03 | | Stocks |
| The bear facts about pensions |
| 01/17/03 | | Stocks |
| Buy, Sell and Hold On! |
| 01/15/03 | | Stocks |
| The paradox of corporate democracy |
| 11/08/02 | | Stocks |
| The long shadow of Big Blue |
| 11/08/02 | | Stocks |
| The stupid loan bubble |
| 10/22/02 | | Stocks |
| Lights out for Lucent |
| 10/21/02 | | Stocks |
| Pay up! |
| 10/10/02 | | Stocks |
| Flood warning |
| 10/05/02 | | Stocks |
| Rising empire |
| 09/18/02 | | Stocks |
| An immigrant's tale |
| 09/17/02 | | Stocks |
| Are Value Stocks Riskier than Growth Stocks? |
| 09/13/02 | | Stocks |
| Home wrecker |
| 09/05/02 | | Stocks |
| Lights, camera, cash burn |
| 08/31/02 | | Stocks |
| The power of WorldCom's puff |
| 07/24/02 | | Stocks |
| Revisiting Graham and Dodd |
| 06/07/02 | | Stocks |
| Putting "dis" in full disclosure |
| 06/06/02 | | Stocks |
| The AOL TW black hole |
| 04/30/02 | | Stocks |
| The blue-chip penny stocks |
| 04/15/02 | | Stocks |
| Tech stocks: keep your shirt on |
| 04/06/02 | | Stocks |
| Efficient Frontier Spring 2002 |
| 04/04/02 | | Stocks |
| Shares do not a shelter make |
| 03/25/02 | | Stocks |
| Fool me twice, shame on me |
| 03/13/02 | | Stocks |
| Confidence lost |
| 02/20/02 | | Stocks |
| Enron losses 'off the scale' |
| 01/31/02 | | Stocks |
| Pricey stocks risk a fall into the GAAP |
| 01/29/02 | | Stocks |
| Shakespeare's preferreds |
| 01/19/02 | | Stocks |
| Show me the earnings! |
| 01/14/02 | | Stocks |
| Of risk and myopia |
| 01/12/02 | | Stocks |
| Bubbles, Human Judgment, and Expert Opinion |
| 12/22/01 | | Stocks |
| The stock market level in historical perspective |
| 12/04/01 | | Stocks |
| Risk and expected return |
| 11/21/01 | | Stocks |
| Don't sell 'em short |
| 11/12/01 | | Stocks |
