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Stock Buying Opportunities – New on Finance Gourmet

March 12, 2021 by Finance Gourmet

I’m going to be changing my long-standing policy on Finance Gourmet on not recommending specific investments. Stock buying opportunities require more knowledge than most would-be investors are willing to acquire, but for those willing to learn, there is gold in them thar stock markets. Instead of babying my readers, I’m going to go all out. I think we both can handle it. Investing Recommendations from Finance Gourmet For years, I’ve kept my mouth shut when I see good opportunities for a few reasons. Most people don’t properly understand how and when to invest in individual stocks. — This is still true, but this is my job. I’ll be cranking out investment articles as fast as I can to educate readers how and when buying stocks and other investments is appropriate. (I have sort-of, partially, noted here where I need future investing strategy and knowledge articles to fill in a smart investing opportunity curriculum, but there are many, many more. – I need to get my email list up and running so I can keep you notified when I get them written up. For now, keep checking back.) Until recently the costs associated with buying and selling small amounts of stock …

Uber Buys Drizly, Proves It Has No Real Value

February 17, 2021February 2, 2021 by Finance Gourmet

Uber Buys Drizly for $1.1 Billion Once upon a time, people believed that Uber had some form of value. Its app was revolutionary. Its concept of using ordinary people using their own cars to provide rides was revolutionary. But, it turns out that it wasn’t so much revolutionary, as just the first in an easily replicable line of use-your-own-car apps. Drizly Is Just GrubHub for Alcohol, Which Is Just Uber for Food Uber is paying Drizly $1.1 billion in a desperate grab for any shot at profitability and sustainability. Uber’s acquisition of Drizly proves that there is nothing special about Uber. A handful of engineers, a couple of months, and a few million of funding and anyone can copy Uber well enough. After that, the “special” comes from good old fashioned sales. Building Drizly was a lot less about building an app, and a lot more about signing up liquor stores, and then convincing people that it was worth shelling out $5 to stay on their couch instead of heading down to their favorite liquor store. This was a tough sale pre-Covid. Why pay $5 plus tip for a liquor delivery when you could just swing by your favorite liquor …

5 Keys to 2021 Stock Market Predictions

January 7, 2021January 7, 2021 by Finance Gourmet

The 2021 stock market predictions will start flowing from the pens of the financial media as the end of 2020 fades into the background. There can be no question that stocks are pricing in a very happy new year. Does that make it a bubble? I think the better question is to understand what is holding up the market. The following tenants are why this market keeps going higher. If any one of them falls apart, then the market gets on shakier ground, and investors will start looking for an exit, whether in a nice, methodical path, or a bubble-bursting flee for the exits based upon how quickly the pillars crumble. What’s Holding Up The Stock Market? 5 Keys to Stock Market Predictions Low Interest Rates – The irony is that the economy is very shaky, and everyone including the Fed knows it, that’s why interest rates are at zero. These low rates are a key to propping up the market. Coronavirus Improvement – Look, the U.S. can’t do any worse with Covid than it did in 2020. Between the federal government just ignoring the whole thing, and the states opening and closing randomly, the U.S. Covid response was about …

Tesla Stock Buy or Sell?

January 5, 2021 by Finance Gourmet

Wall Street gave up giving honest buy and sell rankings years ago. Everyone knows “Hold” is code for sell, without making the company you are covering too mad to use your bank for future deals. But, even that wasn’t enough, with most firms adding a slew of not-so-easy to decode terms like overweight, moderate buy, underperform, underweight. All of this is to obfuscate the actual track record of these analysts which is often abysmal. The less accountability on Wall Street, the better. Is Tesla Stock a Good Buy? Traditionally, I don’t do buy/sell on stocks. It’s a slippery area, but when folks show up in my comments and email asking over and over again for the same thing, I at least consider it. Tesla and Bitcoin I’m writing about Tesla stock today, because I wrote about Bitcoin 20,000 last week (or was it the week before? — Holidays are tricky). Bitcoin and Tesla might sound unrelated, but their performance and trajectory as late are very similar. Bitcoin is a revolutionary idea in currency that is so new there is no real way to know how it will react or behave in the long term. Recently, however, all the naysayers have …

DoorDash IPO Worse Than WeWork Disaster?

December 3, 2020 by Finance Gourmet

Yesterday in my December outlook for stocks, I alluded to the fact that the DoorDash IPO was perhaps overly optimistic about its profitability and the company’s ability to keep any semblance of that profitability in a post-pandemic world. MarketWatch Calls DoorDash IPO “Most Ridiculous” Someone over at MarketWatch isn’t waiting for investors to read between the lines with an opinion piece claiming that the DoorDash offering is the, “most ridiculous IPO of 2020.” The piece goes on to make the claim that the DoorDash IPO offering may even be worse than the WeWork IPO disaster that they previously proclaimed, the Most Ridiculous IPO of 2019. The article goes into the numbers in details, but the long and the short of it is this: DoorDash barely squeezed out a profit on $1.92 billion of revenue for the first nine months of 2020. That amount of revenue is 3x last year’s revenue due to a huge increase in the food delivery market thanks to the Covid pandemic. If you can’t squeeze out a profit in the very best possible market, how can you be profitable ever again. DoorDash can’t raise fees and expenses due to numerous competitors. In fact, its fees are …

7 Deeply Out of Favor Stocks?

November 5, 2020 by Finance Gourmet

Marketwatch is a finance website that survives by cranking out hundreds of articles per day. There isn’t hundreds of articles per day worth of actual financial news out there each day, so there is a bit of filler. Sometimes, I scroll right by. Sometimes, I wonder if a particular bit of financial analysis is legit. Analyzing Financial News Articles Check the person’s track record first Once you’ve been in the financial writing business for a while, you develop some contacts that you can go to for quotes and looks at finances and the stock market. If you have a big enough platform, financial gurus and analysts will come to you for some publicity. All you have to do is fill in the words around their quotes and fire up some graphs. Ironically, what is NOT part of the job is seeing how and when a particular analysts has fared in the past with their predictions. Accountability is not part of the finance writing world. A smart investor starts by seeing what, if anything the finance person has said in the past, and how right, or wrong they were, beyond the flattering, “He picked the last run up in technology stocks!” …

Everyone Who Called a Downturn in the First Half of 2019 Is Officially WRONG

October 8, 2019 by Finance Gourmet

It is now October. That is the third quarter of 2019. By any, and all, definitions the first half of 2019 is officially over. That means all of those analysts, pundits, economists, and big Wall Street talking heads who predicted a recession or stock market downturn in the first half of 2019 are officially wrong. They were also wrong about the first three-quarters of 2019, but that headline isn’t as catchy. 🙂 There is nothing wrong with that on the surface. Predictions of any kind are risky business. However, a great many of these same people trade on a weird blindness in the financial industry. No one keeps any real track of these predictions. As a result, if these same people go out and make the exact same prediction for next year, they get full credit in the media for “calling” the next downturn without any acknowledgement that they were wrong this year (and maybe several of the previous years.) Investing By Predictions is Dumb Past performance is not an indicator of future results. This statement is mandated to show up on all kinds of investing materials by regulators. It is a hopeless cry to the masses to not invest …

Is Southwest Airlines Risking the Company?

March 12, 2019 by Finance Gourmet

Is Southwest Airlines risking the entire company with its decision to keep flying the Boeing 737 MAX airplanes? Consider this: Countries around the world are grounding the Boeing 737 MAX after a second crash soon after take off killed all people aboard an Ethiopian Airlines flight. This includes the European Union, Australia, China and others. Several airlines have similarly grounded their airplanes until all the data is in. Reports today conclude that the CEO of Boeing essentially talked Donald Trump out of grounding the airplanes, action that comes on the heels of large donations to Trump, and corporate visits to Mar Largo. Add this all up, and if a Boeing 737 MAX crashes in the U.S., the world’s most incompetent lawyer will be able to paint a picture of an airline that couldn’t see what numerous other countries and airlines could see. An airline that cared more about profits and using its new airplanes than it did about passenger safety. If that weren’t enough, comments that the airline is “confident” in the safety of the airlines could be considered false statements. False statements that led to deaths. This scenario couldn’t possibly be worse, and the jury verdict would undoubtably and …

Wrong Stock Market Predictions

February 22, 2019 by Finance Gourmet

I read a lot of finance stuff. Most of the time, it’s a lot of the usual advice and tips wrapped up in new clothing. Finance and investing don’t really change that much. The exception is taxes, which change at least a little bit every year due to new tax court decisions, and the adjustments made to many tax numbers automatically each year due inflation. I keep reading about finance and investing both to keep my skills and knowledge sharp, and unfortunately, also to have some knowledge of whatever the latest finance and investing fads are. Investing for the long-term with a well diversified portfolio is the “eat less calories, burn more calories,” of finance. Everything else is a gimmick to achieve the same, while making is sound better (and easier). Tony Robbins Merchants of Doom I’m currently reading Tony Robbins’ Unshakeable. I like Robbins’ finance books. They repeat a lot of the sound financial advice that has been around for a while, often with a little more flair, and a lot more Tony. That is, Tony likes to name drop, which is fine, because he interviews some of the great minds for his books, but it’s always funny just …

Financial Planning 2019

January 10, 2019 by Finance Gourmet

Stock Market 2019 Look Ahead 2019 is here, and it’s time for Finance Gourmet to take a look forward at what is going to happen with the market in 2019, the economy in 2019, and how you and your personal finances should be setup to weather the storm, and take advantage of the opportunities. 2019 Economy Let’s start with an easy one (Hah!). The 2019 economy looks to be a transition year. This is either the year, that the the economy and the markets consolidate their success and move forward into another expansionary period, or the year that the recession starts. Under normal circumstances we might have a pretty good idea of where things were heading, but these are not normal circumstances. The Trump Presidency alone adds a measure of volatility and uncertainty that just can’t be predicted. That being said, we do have several things to look at to help get an idea of where the economy is heading in 2019. First up is the Federal Reserve, which, at long last, appears to have finally noticed that the economy is slowing and shaking, and that inflation is nowhere to be found other than the always volatile fuel prices. That …