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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (45004)	11/14/2017 12:59:13 PM
From: zzpat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361197

A few other issues. The average time a company is on the S&P is down to 14 years now. That's the lowest in S&P history. Second, the number of retail investors who can force change is down to 10%. 90% will always beat 10%. Third, the number of businesses we can invest in has dropped by about half since the 1990s so the money that's out there is in far fewer companies. IMO CEOs are doing it all wrong. Sears did massive stock buybacks with the assumption that investors would reward the company with higher stock prices. The CEO was willing to reduce inventory, reduce spending on store repairs, reduce everything to get one thing, more stock buybacks and happy investors. He started doing this before the Great Recession. Now, look at the company. I'd suggest that it's this short-term pandering to investors that's crippling American business. While we have great CEOs and a few great companies when I pull up index funds (ETFs) and dissect the top from the bottom it's very clear that there are very few companies that are excelling. Those companies pull up the companies that are in trouble and the muddling along group is satisfied with mediocrity. Before I invest I check to see how many buybacks the CEO did and what effect it had on his market cap. In theory, the market cap should rise (less supply). Often times it does not. A perfect example of this is WMT. Look at its market cap from 2014-2015 when buybacks were massive and still the market cap decreased. What turned them around wasn't buybacks but buying e-commerce companies that helped them compete with Amazon. Macrotrends My understanding is that the government needed the bankers to explain to them how to undo what they did. As you may know, the bank regulators had no idea what they were looking at prior to the crash. But even when the government didn't force the bankers out you'd think the board would. They lied to investors and the board for a very long time (when foreclosures were hitting record highs quarter after quarter).