Skip to main content

Always Do Your Own Analysis

I would like to share a great article that I had just read with all investors. Many gurus, seasoned investors always warn new investors to do their own analysis and research. Reading and referencing other people's work is fine, but, one must always know his own position and do complete analysis. As in the case of people who blindly follow Warren Buffett into Goldman Sachs and General Electrics in the 2008 crisis.

Taken to Task: The Cult of Warren Buffett

By Aaron Task | Daily Ticker – 9 hours ago

Bank of America stock jumped over 9% Thursday on news that Warren Buffett is making a $5 billion investment in the bank. But, at $7.65, the stock closed more than a $1 below its high of the session and BofA shares were falling anew Friday morning, trading as low as $7.45 before stabilizing...
.......
.......
.......

Moreover, investors who've followed Buffett into investments like Goldman Sachs and GE got burned, assuming they adhered to Buffett's dictum about "forever" being the best holding period. The rest of us didn't get the big dividends Buffett earned and both stocks are currently trading below the levels when Buffett made his "confidence-boosting" investments in 2008, Goldman by 12% and GE by 37%.

Read more here:
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/taken-task-cult-warren-buffett-163825709.html

What the followers (those who followed WB into GS and GE deals in 2008 crisis) failed to do was to consider everything. WB has a extremely good cushion of 10% per annum return on his capital with and option to purchase shares at certain price. If condition is no good, he is still profitable. Those followers would never get such deals. In reality, small money cannot follow big money. You need to play at different playing fields.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More about Market Timing

There has been talks about end year rally during the earlier parts of this year. Particularly in February to March period when the market was suffering from 'temporary' set back. During that time, even though the European Debt crisis were looming, the Asian economy was still booming. However, as the time passes, the European Debt crisis becomes more apparent. Countries were finding it more and more difficult to cover up. More facts emerge and picture became clearer. The earlier investor pull back and market began the down trend again. In such time, we will invariably turn to tools that we think will help us to foresee such events. This is where macro economic theory comes in. However, for traders who are not well read on such topics, they want to use some thing faster and easier. Then, Technical Analysis comes into play. Using technology, TA can be very fast and handy. Here is a classic example of using TA: http://www.etfguide.com/research/705/8/The-Chart-That-Trumps-Anal...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is Silver Price Lagging Behind Gold Price?

You probably had been hearing a lot about this. I kept hearing this from seminars and some investment gurus. So, I decided to do a simple research and analysis. Here is what I had come up with: The table below shows the Price Ratio of Gold/Silver and the 5-YR Simple Moving Average. To see better, plot a chart to see how the ratios moves over the years. I'd plotted using annual and its 5 period simple moving average. This chart showed that the average price ratio advanced over the years. However, recent 10 years, there seems to be some fluctuations. In fact, it seems that silver price had advanced more aggressively than gold price resulting in a drop of the price ratio. I don't know what the experts based on. If silver price were to advance more than gold, it will bring the ratio even lower near to the ratio 20 years ago. However, if you based on recent 10 years, silver price has to retreat or gold price has to advance in order to go back to the average. Even though the current ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Investing requires a lot of patience

Have you experienced buying stocks when the market has just made major advances or the counter has just moved up higher? Only to face the selling down the next couple of days? Well that must be a lot of of regrets there. Well, the consolation is that you are not alone. I frequently made the same mistake - huh, talking about not making the same mistake twice. This is one monster inside of me that is so difficult to kill. So often, I had forgotten about the commonsense of waiting for market to pull back before entering. This kind of emotion arose from a mixture of fear and greed. Greed in wanting to chase the profit and fear is worrying that the price may go beyond comfortable purchase level. On the hindsight, this is so silly. Pure silliness and nothing else. How many times you have read in the book about where to enter and when to exit. All the theory sounded so simple and logical. But, when at the thick of things, the price movement in the market can be so powerful and dominating ov...
Post a Comment
Read more