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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Clarke who wrote (13948)	2/17/2002 4:05:55 AM
From: Don Earl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 79061

Interesting comments. I'm not sure if I understood the reference to goodwill amortization. I recall seeing something (not sure where) that companies would be allowed to write off all their goodwill as a one time charge. If I'm not mistaken, for tax purposes it's a 15 year straight line deal, but I've seen GAAP at anywhere from 5 to 40 years on different companies I've followed in the past. Since I've always tended to discount goodwill as an asset anyhow, I've also tended to discount it as a charge against earnings. If we're talking about the same thing, I think it more or less evens out. I'd be interested in your views if I'm missing something since I haven't looked at it in any detail. To be honest, I didn't really expect to flush any other bears out of the woods with my last post. I don't follow Japan much beyond keeping casual track of the Nikkei, the yen, and current news on the NASDAQ site. My impression is things are in worse shape than they were during the "crisis" in late 1998- early 1999. But I'm never quite sure if I'm looking at sensationalist style reporting or impending doom. The Nikkei is trading well below the 1999 lows and the yen is close to that point. It sounds like their banks are in heap big trouble, but that's the part I don't have any way to evaluate with any kind of confidence level. I suppose I'm picturing more in the way of a long steep down trend rather than a sharp drop. Something like the dot com meltdown where the smart money closed their positions over a period of time before anyone fully realized the bubble had burst, but more broad based. On the flip side, the market has reacted so completely different from my expectations enough times that I no longer believe in a "sure thing". I hope we're both wrong, but I don't think it hurts anything to lean toward a more defensive position in the way of cash. There's always another trade, but there's not always more money.