To All, Barron's review. Good issue this time around. 1. A great chart in Abelson's column showing how lousy the breadth of this bull market is. It has not been this bad since 1027-1928, two very good years for the stock market. The folks who piled on the "good cos. whose stocks always go up" only lost 89% of their money by 1932. Similar deal 1969-1973, but less of a hit, only 80% of spending power was lost in the nifty fifty. Abelson also makes a bullish comment about Summit bank, which has a dividend yield of 4%. That is no big deal. The good part is when he says, in parenthesis, a dividend is...oh, go look it up. <g>
2. A sad, short piece on CEOs scamming shareholders and exploiting the working class. From 1990-1998, worker pay is up 28%, profits (yes, they are fake, but let's play along with the reported #s for now) up 108%, the S&P 500 up 224%, and CEO salaries up 481%. Any wonder why workers are in short supply while CEOs are a billion dimes a dozen? <g>
3. Ed Yardeni has a very interesting article about valuation. Though he makes a few mistakes and ends up with a fair price of 8000 on the Dow, his methodology is fun. His semantics game, the market is not overvalued, it is overpriced, is as silly as they come, but the rest of the article is good reading.
4. Sy Harding, a technical analyst, has a timing article post-tested for nearly four years. Interesting, but wasn't this something of an "unusual" market environment?
5. Harold Sharon of Warburg Pincus Intl. makes a good case for non-domestic funds. Though I disagree with some of his conclusions, he at least notes that overvalued, sorry, Mr. Yardeni, overpriced U.S. stocks are the greatest risk to European and Asian recoveries.
6. In the Market Watch segment, Will Lyons makes his usual astute analysis, this time of internet stocks. I agree that we should let them bounce and then put them again, harder, harder.
7. A review of a book where some goof of a smoker says that there is a witch hunt against obnoxious folks who enjoy stinking up a room and endangering others' health. What a maroon!
8. The Current Yield and Trading Points columns are outstanding this time around. And that from a guy who has considered them irrelevant far too often. One notes that the Fed may not be done, duh, but the Street is voting that they are done. The other mentions that the easy credit days appear to be in the past. She says that it isn't bad enough to cause a recession, but, au contraire, a market as wildly overvalued as ours needs ever more cash to keep up its head of steam. The reason for wider spreads and tighter credit: lower credit quality and, somehow, cash flow has declined during this great economy. |
