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

To: Madharry who wrote (33313)	1/23/2009 12:50:15 AM
From: Spekulatius	Respond to of 78764

Well a lot of us had the right idea about banks last year. I remember we had discussions about shorting banks in June 2008, but i suspect none of us really followed up on the idea. Shorting is not an easy thing to do but i am convinced that shorting/speculating against bubbles can make more money that being long. I have largely avoided US banks or even financials but dabbled in Asian banks (DBSDY, WF) under the assumption that they would be OK. Turned out to be a disaster for the most part (despite some decent trades). I never thought that this mortgage mess could bring the whole system down Now I do own some USB which is relatively solid and probably cheap but according to the ticker tape it trades like a piece of garbage. Nationalization of most of the sector is a possibility. Other nations have done it (Sweden) without converting to communism. In Germany a large part of the banking sector is owned by states and it's not the end of the world either, many are well run institutions sort of like credit unions here.