Stocks

Share Buyback Myths

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Share Buyback Myths 1

Arrgghhh! Share buybacks, or stock repurchases, are a tool that publicly traded companies use to manipulate their shareholders into making them think that they are working for them. Unfortunately, with big business schools still teaching a curriculum that starts with The Wealth of Nations and doesn’t much update from there, there are all too many stock analysts and pundits out there pushing share buybacks as good corporate governance. Returning Capital to Shareholders The gold standard of returning capital to shareholders is paying cash dividends. There is a catch though. You can’t use accounting to create cash that you pay out. The other catch is that shareholders don’t like it when you cut a cash dividend once you start paying it. In other words, if you are going to pay a cash dividend, you better really be in a good position. Share Buybacks Wasting Money Enter share buybacks. A share buyback is where a company takes the extra cash it has and instead of paying a cash dividend, which it can’t play around with, it buys back its own shares. A share buyback is supposed to happen when a company feels its shares are undervalued. That isn’t what really happens anymore. …

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Russia Invades Ukraine

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Thinking about your investments as war starts is kind of cold and calculating, but also perfectly natural. What should I do when Russia invades Ukraine? First, remember, investors do not like uncertainty. Nothing is more uncertain than the course of war. Expect a market downturn with every new development that isn’t the war ending. Second, remember that the markets tend to overreact to initial news because everyone is both reacting, and trying to predict how others will react. Third, remember if you have a well-diversified portfolio, this sort of thing should not affect your investing strategy. Markets go up and markets go down. As far as your long-term investments are concerned it doesn’t matter whether the markets went down because of war, or just a cyclical phase of the market cycle. Do not panic. Do not sell unless you were already planning it. Fourth, if you are actively investing for the long-term in your 401k, IRA, 529 plan, or whatever else, KEEP GOING. This is exactly how dollar cost averaging works for you. Your investments when the markets are down become your buying at the bottom in the future. Do not miss the opportunity. Dollar cost averaging does the work …

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Market Correction… Barely

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Market Correction... Barely 3

So, the S&P 500 closed low enough on Tuesday to make it 10% lower than its closing high on January 3rd marking, officially at least, a correction in the stock market. If you aren’t seeing a lot of fuss, that’s because it really isn’t that big of a deal. Back on January 3rd, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone who thought the market was overvalued, that it had run up too high for too long. So, when the market began a slow sideways, sloping down, trend over a two-month period, nobody really worried about it. It’s as if those prices on January 3rd weren’t real and the market was getting back to reality. Even now, there are plenty of people out there saying that the market is still too high. They might be right, and frankly another two-month long drop down another 10 percent probably won’t be much of a fuss either. After all, while this correction is a market down 10 percent from its peak, it’s a market that is zero percent down from last October, and zero percent down since last July, and still very much up from before that. In other words, unless you …

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Is Draft Kings Stock a Buy?

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draft kings

Draft Kings stock got hammered on Friday (2/18/22). Why? Well, there are plenty of self-important, chest-puffing, stock analysts’ pieces out there for you to read up about if Draft Kings is a sell, a buy, or hold, but you don’t have to read them. The promise of far too many recent IPO stocks, stocks heading for IPO, and plain old venture capital backed unicorns is “unlimited growth potential.” This is the key to big venture capital raises, and huge IPO numbers. Profits? Nope. Stable customers? Puh-lease. Silicon Valley tech bros and their Wall Street counterparts don’t like being shackled down by old world metrics like GAAP and reality. They prefer knowing exactly how much potentially unlimited limitless is out there. Everything else is for brick and mortar stocks. How Draft Kings Got Unlimited Potential Once upon a time almost no states allowed online gambling and betting. In fact, it was just over two decades ago that the Feds got mad at all the online gambling websites out there pretending they weren’t violating U.S. law by having some part of their operation outside the United States. It took the Feds about a year to scare the banks into cutting off the …

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Is Ark Innovation a Scam?

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ark innovation

Sometimes, a fast rise comes with expectations that are difficult to live up to. Sometimes the person rising fast doesn’t really help matters. Cathie Wood came into the “mainstream” of financial news with a prediction of a huge rise for Tesla. She was “right,” at least over that sample period, and then some guy anointed her best stock picker of 2020. That will attract some eyeballs. But, just like Abby Joseph Cohen rose to fame by always being more optimistic than the next stock market analyst who said, “Are we really sure all of these no-earnings, no-profit, internet stocks should be pulling everything this high?” while the market rose and rose during the internet bubble, being right isn’t always so much being right, as being the last one to ignore the iceberg. Cohen told investors to “buy the dip” as the internet bubble popped, and the market crashed. I hope everyone who thought she was amazing just didn’t listen to her that time… Wood’s problem is that when you become famous for catching unicorn, people only think you’re amazing while you still have one. Since finding another one is almost impossible, there is a tendency to hold on too long, …

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AT&T Slashes Dividend

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AT&T is making big moves, are they good for AT&T, or bad for AT&T. As everyone knows, I’m a dividend guy. I believe in buying the stocks of good companies and then treating them like bonds, collecting interest payments while ignoring price movements. Usually, when you buy a solid, US company stock with a dividend, that dividend is yours more or less forever. If you buy Apple today (2/4/22) you’ll get about a 0.50% dividend yield. If you like, you can choose to think of it as buying an Apple CD that pays 0.50% with a five-year (or 10, or 3, or whatever) maturity date. When you do that, the daily price movements of Apple stock are irrelevant to your financial plans which count on nothing more than receiving 0.50% interest, and some day getting your principal back (with some risk). AT&T Dividend Cut But, sometimes, a company can cut its dividend. Usually that isn’t a huge surprise. In the case of AT&T, there has been talk of changing (cutting) the dividend for some time now. That being said, a 50% cut is a big deal. As of yesterday, the annual dividend yield for AT&T stock was over 8%. As …

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Blaming the Fed

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Selective amnesia and analysts dying to be “right” is contributing to a flood of inaccurate articles seeking to blame the Fed. I saw this in my Twitter feed this morning and I just couldn’t let it go by. It’s filled with the kind of half-truths and misinformation that builds an analyst’s career, unfortunately, but that doesn’t make it true. Here we go. According to this tweet, The Fed spent 12 years creating an “everything bubble,” a term so bizarre that it requires quotes. Oh, and the Fed didn’t spend 12 years creating this so-called everything bubble. Oh, and before we start pointing fingers, until THIS YEAR neither this analyst, nor almost any other was asking for the Fed to tighten monetary policy because the economy was teetering on a cliff and every bit of the stimulus was required to prevent the Great Recession II, or worse. Yep. For exactly, ONE MONTH, inflation has been a bit crazy. Too bad the graph they posted as “evidence” is so far zoomed out that you can’t see what really happened. Maybe they couldn’t find one that showed more recent events. Oh, wait! Here’s one. The crazy, reckless Fed that has been pumping up …

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Market Monday 1-24-2022

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negative interest rates

Hey, Boys and Girls, here comes an interesting week for investors. The following article is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. This is not a recommendation to buy or sell securities. As always, the best investment strategy for long-term investing is building a well-diversified portfolio based upon your time frame and risk tolerance and then leaving it alone except for annual or semi-annual rebalancing. But… Short-Term Investing January 2022 The week of January 24, 2022 looks fun. And by fun, I mean interesting. The Fed meets on Wednesday. Everyone expects it to raise interest rates to help tame inflation, while also reducing its bond buying to do the same thing. If that weren’t enough, a bunch of big companies are set to report their earnings this week including Apple, Microsoft, and McDonalds. At least we don’t have to worry about options expiring, that was last week. As I write this, the S&P 500 hit the 10% down mark necessary to call the move from January 3 to now a correction. Remember a correction is a 10% reduction, although most people will require the market to close beneath that level to call it a recession. A 20% reduction …

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Jeremy Grantham Calls Stock Market Crash…

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Jeremy Grantham Calls Stock Market Crash... 6

Jeremy Grantham crash call I don’t mean to pick on Jeremy Grantham, I just seem to see his stuff come across more than others. Maybe that is because he is so influential, or maybe he just generates headlines that financial journalists love like calling crashes and calling things super bubbles. What is he saying this time? Jeremy Grantham Calls Bubble Popping and Stock Market Crash Again… So, Grantham is back with another stock market crash call, or he is still calling a stock market crash that already started, or he is really super serious about it this time, depending upon how you want to spin it. Grantham spins it like this: “I wasn’t quite as certain about this bubble a year ago as I had been about the tech bubble of 2000, or as I had been in Japan, or as I had been in the housing bubble of 2007.” Bloomberg That’s weird. I don’t remember any “I’m not as sure,” talk the last time Grantham called a bubble popping stock market crash. I wrote about Grantham accuracy right here in March of 2019 when he was already calling a crash (oops). I wrote about him again in January of …

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Dogs of the Dow 2022

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. I first heard of the Dogs of the Dow strategy back when Motley Fool was just becoming famous, largely based on the out-sized success of their investment in AOL as the Internet Bubble continued to swell. (Whew! There’s a lot of investing history, and investing lessons in that one sentence.) The Foolish Four was a supposed improvement on the Dogs of the Dow strategy. I never invested that way, and it turns out to have been a good move. As the year rolls over to 2022, there come the obligatory articles about which stocks are the 2022 Dogs of the Dow, and whether the Dogs of the Dow is a good investment strategy. So, I thought we’d take a quick look. What Is the Dogs of the Dow Strategy? The Dogs of the Dow is an investment strategy where an investor invests in the 10 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average that have the highest dividend yield as of 12/31 on the first trading day of the year in equal amounts and then holds the stocks for the full year before repeating the process. The idea (which used to be true, but is less so these days) is …

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