Barron's mini review. A so-so issue. Some good stuff, but a lot of carp, too. 1. Abelson is out this week and Randall Forsyth pens the Up and Down Wall Street column. He does work some nice numbers. Over the past 22 years, the returns on T-Bonds and the Stumped and Punky 500 are just about equal. Over 34 years, when inflation destroyed bond values and the buck, the 500 outperformed the Treasuries by a whopping 1%. Definitely worth the much higher risk. <g>
Forsyth also mentions that Fannie and Freddie are far too important to America to be allowed to fail. One stat knocked my socks off: foreign investors have purchased 3 times the amount of Agency debt as Treasury debt. Whoa, doggies! So, if the "implicit guarantee" disappears, so does the buckaroo and the economy of the US of A. We require foreigners to place 80% of their savings in our economy to save us from our debt and deficits. Agencies seem to be their drug of choice.
2. Spiegel having a few credit card problems. When I was a kid, the 3 stalwarts of my dreams were catalogues from Sears, Monkey Ward's and Spiegel. Bankruptcy looms at Spiegel. The Monkey has already had his head adjusted for a hot oil brain dish in Bangkok. And Sears looks like he's got that new pneumonia nobody knows how to cure.
3. A truly dingbat article about a psychoanalysis of the market. Miss Cleo next week.
4. A strange article on Bill Gross. Well, not so surprisingly strange when we notice the author is Jon Jon Laing. Laing has a way of writing a positive article on a fella and sliming him with a few choice sentences. But, I suppose, only journalists are perfect. <g>
Anyhoo, Gross thinks he's brilliant and everybody else is stoopit, and has the numbers to make a decent case. As a veteran who's been under fire, his anti-war stance is more serious than, say, a Dixie Chick's (do they hold their noses while they sing to get that whang? I ask because I hold my nose when I hear them singing. I like their politics better than their music. <g>)
Gross basically thinks stocks are doomed and Treasuries suck, too. He likes corporate and emerging market bonds. No mention of intl. stocks, gold, oil, commodities, in general, options, futures, intl. bonds (in already above ground markets), or much of interest. Too bad. He's an interesting guy who has a hot enough temper to be goaded into making outrageous comments on all kinds of stuff. That's entertainment. <g>
4. A fluff piece on Sun. Yawn!
5. Interview with a small cap value manager. His pans include Research In Motion and RF Micro Devices. How can you get throught the Rs without slamming Rambus? <g> His picks are an eclectic group of names and I like some of them. Barron's shows an Ibbotson chart that proves that small cap value stocks outperformed small cap growth stocks in every decade outside the 30s. Too bad we're heading into the Bush neo-30s and the chart will be wrong this decade.
6. My old buddy, Andy Bary, writes a fairly uninspired article about cheap stocks. The highest value stock on the list is 9.9 times eps. The lowest is selling at 1.3 times. My guess is that most of these cos. won't see any earnings over the next few years. If ever.
7. An article that slimes generic dopers. Praises the big research pharmas.
8. Market Watch was great again this week. Doug Korty makes a great case for overvaluation on stocks even after their declines. Sadoff and Ronald score some nice points in talking about our sad debt situation. They sound much more rational than the geeks talking about % of GDP, which is a fake number, or % of income, which is a nomadic number.
9. Not to let his boss get all the publicity for Pimco, Paul McCulley writes a nice letter to Mailbag. He is ticked that an article condemned Strong Ultra Short Term Fund, which has a totally misleading ad on tv of late. Well, he agrees about the joke that is Strong Ultra Short. He just hates it when his own fund is said to be the same sort of fund. That was bad reporting. He has cleaned Strong's clock since the Earth was cooling.
This sort of thing happened to me once. An author condemned the type of fund I managed and praised another type of fund. Her numbers proved her point. But, individually, my fund had the best numbers of the funds in both categories. Yes, her table showed that, but she still mugged my fund in the article. Her magazine did not print my letter. O.K., it contained more obscenities than an Osbourne hitting his thumb with a hammer, but, still....<G>
Dats all, folks. |
