Wayne Crimi. Well my attitude is basically this: "What we are looking for is value plays". If I can't identify value plays myself or pick up on value plays that others have mentioned, or if nobody is mentioning anything they think is a value play, then it's a waste of time thread. Nice to have discussions about Buffett vs. Graham, or relative pe's vs relative ROE's or importance of management, or asset bubbles or whatever-- but such discussions are, IMO and from what I can tell, not the purpose of this thread.
To me, at least some of the concerns you bring forth are Red Herrings. For example, there's been stuff written in the literature for at least 25 years that I recall, about the sorry state of pension funding, and how, if the true costs of pension liabilities were known, some of our largest and smallest companies are in big trouble. Well, that's 25 years of this. And these companies are, from what I can tell, mostly still muddling through. Anybody who spent much time trying to determine true pension cost exposure in each company he/she looked at, or made investing decisions based on pension issues (like avoiding such companies), wasted time and missed, IMO, some wonderful investment opportunities.
Obviously, I don't understand what you are trying to do to help. For example, you bring in Greenspan, asset bubble inflation, central bankers, and we are going to pay for this. Well, what would you have me or anyone else do? Sell all our stocks which we own and think are undervalued or all our growth stocks? Not buy any stock that anyone posts on on this thread because of this and other dangers you can point to? You may be entirely right if you are saying that market is going to punish us all. But that's not been the right belief in the past few years. It has been a hurtful rather than helpful position for anyone who's followed it.
Everyday there are new lows being made in some stocks. If alleged value investors cannot or will not find at least a few of these stocks as undervalued, then it's my belief that these folks are not really value investors - Buffett investors maybe, or something else investors - but not value investors. That again of course, is in my opinion. Paul Senior |
