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To: masa2 who wrote (67664)	10/21/2008 10:21:12 PM
From: tom pope	Respond to of 118717

9 to 1. Are you going for a record?

To: masa2 who wrote (67664)	10/21/2008 10:22:39 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 118717

It's hard to do much value investing when future earnings are unsure, balance sheet strength is unsure and the market will sell off a cheap, well-executing stock anyway for a dozen other reasons. If you have Warren's patience and multiyear timeframe, it's a great time to buy if you can pick the survivors. Much of my recent posting has been about exactly that. In the meantime, we have a nice bunch of regulars that posts about lots of different stocks. Plenty of bandwidth to go around.

To: masa2 who wrote (67664)	10/21/2008 10:29:49 PM
From: Steve Felix	Respond to of 118717

Something of value for you. Jeremy Grantham on 'The Curse of the Value Manager' by: Jeremy Grantham October 21, 2008 Jeremy Grantham of GMO has released Part I of his Q3 letter (.pdf, dated October 17, 2008). Here's how Grantham describes the challenge of timing and his current buying in this market: We at GMO have a strong value bias, and our curse, therefore, like all value managers, is being too early. In 1998 we saw horribly overpriced stocks that at 21 times earnings equaled the two previous great bubbles of 1929 and 1965. Seeing this new “peak,” we were sellers far, far too early, only to watch it go to 35 times earnings! And as it went up, so many of our clients went with it, reminding us that career risk is really the only other thing that matters. The other side of the coin is that only sleepy value managers buy brilliantly cheap stocks: industrious, wide-awake value managers buy them when they are merely very nicely cheap, and suffer badly when they become – as they sometimes do – spectacularly cheap. I said as far back as 1999, while suffering from selling too soon, that my next big mistake would be buying too soon. This probably sounded ridiculous for someone who was regarded as a perma bear, but I meant it. With 14 years of an overpriced S&P, one feels like a perma bear just as I felt like a perma bull at the end of 13 years of underpriced markets from 1973-86. But that was long ago. Well, surprisingly, here we are again. Finally! On October 10th we can say that, with the S&P at 900, stocks are cheap in the U.S. and cheaper still overseas. We will therefore be steady buyers at these prices. Not necessarily rapid buyers, in fact probably not, but steady buyers. But we have no illusions. Timing is dif?cult and is apparently not usually our skill set, although we got desperately and atypically lucky moving rapidly to underweight in emerging equities three months ago. That aside, we play the numbers. And we recognize the real possibilities of severe and typical overruns. We also recognize that the current crisis comes with possibly unique dangers of a global meltdown. We recognize, in short, that we are very probably buying too soon. Caveat emptor. Part 1: gmo.com