This is a ChatGPT-free Zone
I know, this is a broken record blog. We all know financials are cheap and we all know there are plenty of reasons why they are cheap and why they might be right to be priced cheap. However, I tend to still like the well-managed financials. This is laughable and I don’t mean to suggest…
So the story continues to unfold and it doens’t sound too good. In my earlier post, I said that on the face of it there might be 459 billion yen or 1,700/yen per share in value at Olympus just by valuing the medical equipment business at 8.0x EBITDA, adding up the cash and securities and…
That’s the hint Warren Buffett offered to CNBC Monday morning when he said he will tell viewers which stock he has been buying this year. None of the CNBC folks were able to guess (I had no idea) what stock it was. Harold’s short name is Hal, of course, and Hal is the computer in…
OK, so Kraft announced that it will split into two; a slow growing U.S. grocery business and a fast growth global snack company. First of all, let me just say that Kraft is a decent looking company trading at a decent valuation so it’s not a bad stock to own by itself. Warren Buffett owns…
Olympus was down again the limit and I don’t think any shares traded, having been offered down the limit all day at 484 yen/share. Olympus, on it’s own is not a big problem. These things do happen. The U.S. had it’s Enron, Worldcom and others. But the problem is that Olympus is an old, stodgy…
Moody’s announced that they may downgrade the long term credit rating of Nomura Holdings one notch to one notch above junk level. This really could be lights out for Nomura (as an independent entity, at least). I don’t know if this means Nomura will end up bankrupt, but this is really bad news if the…
What is happening at Olympus is really sad. The worst part of it is that I’m not even that surprised. I have been looking to invest in Japan for a long, long time and have only found ‘trades’ to do there; buying stocks when they are very cheap due to short term worries about this…
There is some talk that to prevent further financial meltdowns and taxpayer bailouts, we should simply eliminate or ban bonuses at banks. Whenever someone says “ban” something to solve a problem, warning bells go off in my head. For example, people say that the Fed is the cause of all financial crises in the past…
I am now reading a book by Jerry Yang called “All In”. Jerry Yang is an Hmong immigrant from Laos who came to the U.S. and in a very short period of time won the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. It is a very interesting book for many reasons, one of which is that…
I can’t believe how sloppy and bad some of these credit rating agencies are, and it’s really obvious how dangerous they are. We saw how sloppy and bad they were when things melted down in 2008/2009, but this came as a surprise because the perp is Egan-Jones, a small rating agency that wants to compete…