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

To: jeffbas who wrote (17073)	5/14/2003 7:41:12 PM
From: Jurgis Bekepuris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78530

Jeffrey, I don't know your specific example, so I won't comment on it - you may be totally right about it. However, if competition is just on price and company can't sell product "BECAUSE OF PAST CURRENCY CHANGES" (your emphasis, not mine), a company cannot stay in a bad competitive position "REGARDLESS OF WHAT THE CURRENCY DOES IN THE NEAR TERM". E.g. if dollar shot back to be 1.2 euros (or 3 euros or whatever), NTZ would be in better position regarding its US sales (and, yes, Rock it does sell in Europe and has Chinese production, but let's forget about it for now :-)). You will say that such currency move is unlikely, but I will say that this "unlikely" is just currency speculation you are doing. OK, let's look at it yet another way. Let's replace "currency exchange" with "interest rates". Should I look at interest rates when buying a company? Maybe. Mostly I don't care unless they are getting extreme. E.g. at 10% interest rates, it may be better to buy a 30 year bond. :-) So probably we can apply the same rationale to "currency rates". Are they extreme now? Not very - they are still within historical range. NTZ survived in 1998, so why should it fail in 2003? biz.yahoo.com - and here the journalists are saying that we should not even buy stocks that benefit from currency exchange rate! Hey, so it seems that time to buy stocks is just never? So I still think that most of the time currency exchange rates don't matter. But you are welcome to consider them in your investment decisions. Jurgis