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

To: Graham Osborn who wrote (55932)	8/22/2015 2:51:02 PM
From: Paul Senior	1 Recommendation Recommended By E_K_S Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78656

Regarding: While pure technical shorts would not have a place here, cases of fundamental overvaluation would seem appropriate. Regardless of how many regular posters are on the thread, I, as moderator, am not willing to change the emphasis and focus of the thread by welcoming specific short sale candidate discussions in order to increase the number of posts and breadth of discussion. 1. Graham did not encourage his enterprising investor to short. Somewhere there's a quote I believe that says something about leaving shorting to the professionals. That is mostly not us. There's something unappealing to me about shorting. It is not about distaste for betting against a company, or country or employees or management. It's about the idea that money can be made in any market: If a stock is very cheap, you buy it. If it's expensive (too expensive), you sell it short. The idea that if you can figure a stock is cheap, you can figure a stock is expensive. That shorting is the opposite of buying long. Well, I disagree with this. To me it's like walking backwards -- you walk forward, you just need do the reverse or opposite. Not so easy in practice though. And same with shorting: it involves different skills and different temperament from going long. 2. A discussion of the techniques of shorting inevitably brings us into discussing calls or puts. This is not a topic that applies to classic value investors. Even given that puts/calls as we know them now were not available to Dr. Graham in his day. This is a more or less a straight value thread that allows different interpretations of value, intrinsic value, margin-of-safety. Through the past twenty years this thread has attempted to keep the focus on value investing - buying undervalued stocks, stocks with a margin-of-safety. If that's not enough, there are other threads and venues elsewhere.