investing help

You have apparently never done this since your only advice is to keep repeating past performance as a guide, then run to insults when questioned. You can pat yourself on the back, but that is irrelevant. Ben Graham & Warren Buffet are irrelevant as guides to what to do in the future. Buffet has lost a great deal of money in the last 5 years which proves my point.

This entire topic has seen a litany of posts from you where you have been constantly been proved wrong and shown that you don't even understand the attempts at logic that you try to put forth since you constantly contradict yourself. My advice to you is to clean up your side of the street before telling everyone else why they are doing it wrong.

Ben Graham & Warren Buffet. Case Closed. LOL

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

And then there was that company called Bre-X that "found" a "huge" deposit of "gold" in Indonesia, and its chief geologist fell out of a helicopter before it was disclosed that the gold samples had been "salted". Bre-X stock created several "paper millionaires" for a short time before it crashed and burned.

 

Just remember, they get paid whether you make money or not.

 

your being WAY to sensitive to cloudsweeper...if you think he's just trying to insult you or trying to prove you specifically as completely wrong ...you might want to take a walk and calm down some...I don't see him throwing out insults...just a few analysis here and there...

 

You can just repeat this all you want, but you can't change the facts for anyone here who looks into it. The stock market works because the underlying economics of investing in businesses that are profitable, pay dividends and grow through the retention of earnings mathematically works. It worked 200 years ago and will work 200 years from now despite your assertions that it has not and will not.

Value investing has worked, continues to work and will work in the future because the underlying facts and reasoning behind it are correct. For you and others, lets look again at the facts compared to your assertions. Warren Buffett has not lost money over the past 5 years. The stock is about 10% higher now than it was then. Berkshire Hathaway is profitable 4 out of the 5 past years. The book value per share has grown at a compound annual rate of 10% over the past 5 years. Pretax earnings have grown at a compound annual rate of 20% since the year 2000. All of this can be checked out in the BRK annual and quarterly reports, and proves you statements {AGAIN] to be factually incorrect.

So no matter how many times you claim to be correct, once again the FACTS prove you to be wrong.

I encourage everyone to just check out whatever fatima posts for yourself. It's an education to find out first hand how wrong the anti-business, anti-stock market crowd really is.

 

On this I completely agree with you. If anyone wishes to checkup on what I posted I will be glad to have a discussion. However don't follow Cloud's examples and use insults, web link wars, giving opinion as facts, mistaking opinions for facts, and use personal anecdotes as proof.

 

I absolutely agree. Fact check everything before you accept Fatima's opinions.

 

I remember the Bre-X story. It was pretty big news as well, but I think more people were left poor by the greed of Nortel than Bre-x, although the Bre-x story was much more interesting.
And about the geologist who supposedly fell out of a helicopter, some say he may have faked his own death. They did find a badly decomposed body but the fingerprints never matched up. Many believe he is alive and well living off the money he made selling his stock went it was at an all time high.
Bre-x went from $280.00 in May 1996 to Being unlisted in May 1997.
Some Canadian pension funds lost tens of millions of dollars.
The scam was operated from a promoters basement in Calgary.

 

What is consensus, think there is chance the markets will reverse course and go down presenting another buying opportunity?

 

One thing to remember is that Nortel was in a business in competition with the likes of Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Cisco, and Huawei [super low cost Chinese competitor]. Operating in the super-regulated and high tax jurisdiction in Canada was a crushing burden that Nortel could not overcome even if the CEO worked for free.

 

Yes there is a chance. Markets fluctuate and seldom go in a straight line up or down for long periods of time.

 

Thats the biggest load I've heard on here yet.

The past is EXACTLY what you should base futures on. If I didn't study past trends, I wouldn't have a clue as to determine a company's future prospects. People who don't look at the past are simply throwing money down the drain. The market isn't running on "now", it's running on tomorrow, based on yesterday. Any broker will tell you the same.
Guy

 

Nortel failed due to very bad management decisions. It had nothing to do with the fact they were based in Canada.

 

In hindsight it looks that way but it seems doubtful that they could have survived as the 5th or 6th ranked company in an industry that can't support that many large suppliers. My response was directed toward the comment that management greed was the cause.

 

I never heard the rumor that the geologist had faked his own death, although with Bre-X, I guess anything was possible.

 

And sometimes the people who believe a company like that is a "value investment" ignore the warning bells. A company that is supposedly growing but seeing its stock price crash in all likelihood has some underlying problem. Been there, done that, lost big bucks. Value investing, my eye. If I had taken that money I squandered on stocks and put it in precious metals, I would have been a LOT better off financially today.

 

Can't support many suppliers?!....... This is a huge market. We are talking about last mile Internet infrastructure which has few suppliers and explosive growth. This is Nortel's market. What is the worldwide demand for high speed internet? I'd say there is room for plenty of suppliers here. Verizon has barely made a dent in FIOS, AT&T is just getting started with Uverse, and it's the same elsewhere.

Nortel's bread and butter was in switched connection networks. (i.e. land line telephones) In the USA if you see a post war subdivision built in the sunbelt, you will also find at least one Nortel multiplexer enabling local phone service. These are not cheap consumer electronics that can be easily cloned by China. They are hugely complex devices that sit outside, resist all the elements and provide land line service reliability. Very few companies in the world have the resources to develop such machines. However,

The world moved to switch packet networks (Internet) and Nortel missed that boat because the management ignored the engineers because the bean counters nixed the development. Everything since then has been a litany of bad business decisions driven from a financial standpoint rather than a technical one (and this is the fundamental problem of many companies). Phone companies are no longer installing new switched connection equipment. All these subdivision cabinets which formerlly held Nortel equipment are now getting upgrades to provide high speed internet and TV, with devices made my other suppliers.

It should be noted that while they are Canadian, they also received millions in bailouts from the Canadian taxpayers all while the executives of this burning ship were being paid off with huge bonuses. As usual the employees got nothing and their earned retirements have been destroyed. All in all, Nortel is a prototype example of a company with once excellent products that was destroyed by self serving and clueless (about their business) management. They join a long list of similar companies such as Adelphia and Enron and I'm sure they won't be the last.

 

Most of the stock market failure examples that people have presented have two traits in common: (1) a large amount of debt, and (2) negative free cash flow. These are important factors in value investing, so the failures are not in the technique but in the quality of the analysis.

 

I don't disagree that Nortel management was not up to the task. Most of the large companies that supply the last mile of service like AT&T and Verizon, etc... have one primary network equipment supplier. Nortel was unable to fill that role for many of the reasons you cite, and was left with the table scraps. I believe that is why they failed and not due to the size of management paychecks.

 

Funny thing, some of my grandfather's stocks, like Munsingwear, have gone out of existence in the past 30 years, yet if I had left that British sovereign that I bought for $12 in 1967 in a drawer, I could sell it for close to $400 today. And in the meantime, I would not have had to worry about dubious earnings, crappy management, or failed business models.