This is a ChatGPT-free Zone
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…
The market seems to go up and down these days depending on who said what, or what the latest development in Europe is. No confidence vote? Referendum? It is really silly. Someone said to me the other day that it must be hard to deal with markets like this. I said, “What are you talking…
The title is meant to be sung in the melody of the Sound of Music song, “Maria”. Nomura just announced a loss for the first half of fiscal 2012 and a major restructuring. I guess the Lehman purchase isn’t really working out. I have to say that this was actually not a bad idea, to buy a…
Having browsed some of the conference presentations from the Value Investor Congress, I noticed that Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors likes KKR at 5x p/e ratio. That’s interesting because I too happen to be looking at some of the private equity houses (I recently posted about Blackstone). I did spend some time with the financials…
The Value Investors Congress was held in Mid-October. This is a conference run by Whitney Tilson of Value Investor Insight and it features some of the best value investors as speakers. After the conference, notes and presentations float around the internet and they make very interesting reading. Anyway, I was browsing through some of these…