To All, Barron's review. Good issue this time around. 1. Abelson makes some funny comments about Gerstner losing his ability to perform earnings day magic. Of course, he never generated any business eps momentum at IBM, but he sure fooled a lot of analysts and investors for awhile with his accounting flim flam. He also touts some insurance cos. and banks, including my old put buddy, BancOne. At least he left First Onion off the buy list. <g<
2. "A DRAM Shame" joins me, Fred Hickey and Bill Fleckenstein in casting some aspersions on the honesty of Dell. True, they are much too nice, but, Barron's definitely has the bullier pulpit.
3. Market Watch has a piece from Northern Trust, which is often quoted here by myself and others. Good poop. The Richland Report takes some shots at our reckless Fed Chairman. Abby Jo spouts her usual crapola, though she is worried about rising foreign currencies. Oh, whip it on me, baby. Betting against the dollar has been my investing mainstay for the past year. Glad she finally noticed the dollar going to hell in a handbasket. <g> Allen Sinai talks about earnings risk going forward, though he never mentions the lack of quality in the current eps reports. A couple of tech guys don't like the market.
3. A fluff piece on Warner Lambert's new cholesterol drug is making me warm up to this overpriced bowwow's puts.
4. Barron's ranks web sites and SI came in 9th, though they say 10th in the article. Now, 9th isn't bad absolutely, but when AOL, TheStreet.Idiot, and Morningstar, which buys what went up yesterday, ranks ahead of you, something is wrong with the rankings. As Walter Mondale once commented on a straw poll that was called a beauty contest: "you have to question any beauty contest where I beat Gary Hart and Alan Cranston beats us both." <g> Frank Cappiello and I personally thumped Morningstar's closed end fund pickers in the May 1995 Kiplinger's so badly that Morningstar eliminated that service soon afterwards. Of course, we also thumped the two II All American analysts who cover CEFs, and they are somehow still in business. <g>
5. "The View From Virginia Beach" is the best interview I've read in a while. Dennis Gartman is my kind of guy. He hates the Dow, thinks Japan and China are in deep kimshee, loves commodities, and would buy Europe. Man, if he wasn't so ugly, I'd say we were related. <G> The only mistake he made was in thinking that there has been a huge recovery in foreign economies. There has been a huge recovery in their financial markets, but the economies tend to be on the verge of recovering, are not actually recovering. Of course, many of the 3rd world countries use US style funky counting, so it is easy to see how he is being fooled. And some, like Japan, flat out lied about their GDP one quarter.
6. An excellent "Other Voices." A professor from The Baruch Zicklin School, of all places, (a bit of Whartonian snobbery here. Baruch is o.k. for those who cannot get into Wharton. As are Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc. <g>) He basically takes a shot at the moron school of buy and hold. Gotta love it. He effectively uses my argument that the buy and hold concept ONLY looks good because we are measuring returns to a manic high in the markets. Using other time periods, it sucks.
7. John Hussman has the letter of the issue. He talks about Abelson's contention that GE is only growing at 5% instead of 13%. He agrees, of course, because Abelson is right and does not use a calculator belonging to Walsh. But he takes issue with the idea that 5% eps growth would only deserve a multiple of 24 times, as the S&P 500 has historically had a 5% growth rate in eps over the past 10, 20, 50 and 100 years and sells at 33 times eps currently. <g>
A half wit (I may have my fractions wrong. I often confuse halves with eighths and quarters. <g>) who doesn't understand accounting takes Abelson to task for telling the truth about GE. Alan replies and basically makes a total fool of the dude.
Another dummy wants Barron's to keep running negative, actually, realistic, pieces on Intel, Amazon and AOL so he can buy some more. Barnum was right. <g>
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