Josh Stern

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    • Thu Jul 5th 18:16 PM
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      Corporate Buybacks: Where's the Justification?
      The decision to buyback shares should depend on whether they are over or undervalued. The worry about how the acquired shares will be used is just a way of saying that one doesn't trust the corporate governance. But then, why go long a company where you don't trust the governance just because they pay a dividend?

      It would be nice if most of the websites showing price vs. time charts would have options to factor in ex-dividends back into the share price in order to graphically show the total return over time.
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    • Thu Jul 5th 10:49 AM
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      Why Are REITs Trading at a Premium to Stocks?
      Couple points.

      1) Going long SRS gives you basically a 2X short of IYR and it even pays a dividend.

      2) I agree with you about the valuation, but earnings estimates for REITS seem to be in a healthy uptrend, and Phil Davis' post today confirms the basis for this: seekingalpha.com/artic... . So SRS/IYR short seems too dangerous here.
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    • Sat Jun 30th 12:38 PM
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      Use Equities to Stamp Out Inflation
      Leveraged closed end municipal bond funds are currently paying over 5%, free of Federal taxes and in some cases free of one's local state tax.
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    • Fri Jun 29th 11:44 AM
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      Use Equities to Stamp Out Inflation
      I agree with the gist of this article, but it's also worth pointing out that the common advice given out to Joe Main Street for buying bonds isn't sensible advice for someone looking at bonds with long term total return as their highest investment priority. The comparison between equities and a bond strategy designed to emphasize long term total return (with dividends reinvested) would be a lot more balanced.
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    • Thu Jun 28th 17:38 PM
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      Why Hedge Funds Are Overstated
      Mutual funds have a lot of formal and informal constraints on their portfolio that work together to push their returns close to the market averages: they tend to be diversified rather than concentrated, close to 100% long, invested in high liquidity stocks, avoiding derivatives, investing mainly in stocks, invested mainly in Russell 3000 names, etc. Hedge funds are free of those constraints, which is a useful freedom is the manager knows what he is doing. Consider, for example, this comparison between Bill Miller and Bill Miller with fewer constraints: www.thestreet.com/fund...

      I'm extremely dubious that the average hedge fund which charges 20+2 can beat the S&P500 after fees over the long term, but it's likely that quite a few individual funds will, and that the percentage of funds with large overperformance and with large underperformance will be higher than for traditional mutual funds.
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    • Tue Jun 26th 10:23 AM
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      Farmer Brothers: Brewing Potential
      Ms. Kramer didn't mention that half of the market cap is cash (no debt) and coffee the commodity is weak, while McDonald's new coffee focus may induce institutions to spend up for more/better coffee. That said, this is a pretty generic business, and I wouldn't consider a stock like this unless I had some analysis saying it was either very cheap (it isn't) or it was improving its competitive position (dunno this market).
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    • Thu Jun 21st 14:37 PM
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      Chinese Small-Cap Stocks Not Frothy
      Thanks much, I will look at SDTH.

      ACTS has a lot of cash on its balance sheet and very strong margins. The revenue
      estimates I see are 95.9M for 2007 and 124.5M for 2008. We should not penalize these folks too much for starting to pay income tax. Even in a no growth scenario, Enterprise Value/EBITDA in the 4.x range is very low. Also, technology increases in semiconductor fabrication are leading to overcapacity, so being fabless is attractive.
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    • Wed Jun 20th 14:38 PM
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      Chinese Small-Cap Stocks Not Frothy
      It's true. ACTS is one Chinese ADR I have come across that is ridiculously undervalued.
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    • Wed Jun 20th 11:11 AM
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      Market Outlook Continues to Be Bullish
      Energy prices ultimately factor into so many consumer costs it's hard to calculate them all. Imagine you buy something from Amazon.com that is made of 1/2 plastic, 1/6 assorted metals, 1/6 rubber, and 1/6 silicon, fabricated in Eastern China from materials gathered around various parts of the world , and air shipped to your door...then try to add up all the places where energy cost contributed to what you received (including electricity). When oil goes up, gasoline at the pump goes up much quicker than the cost of the consumer product, but either its cost goes up or the profits of the producers/services go down.

      On an unrelated note, can you comment on how you use Briefing.com Platinum service to help you?
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    • Mon Jun 18th 17:53 PM
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      Taxing the Winners of Globalization
      There are other possible levers to pull beyond individual income tax tables, including reductions to payroll tax, increases to corporate tax, and corporate tax credits tied to U.S. based payroll.
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    • Mon Jun 18th 17:38 PM
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      Delving Deeper Into The Inflation Issue
      People can drill down a bit here: stats.bls.gov/news.rel...

      The links shows the weightings, how much a given category has gone up since they started, and what it contributed to the percentage change for the latest month.
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    • Mon Jun 18th 17:22 PM
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      New ETF Dow Jones EPAC Select Dividend Index Fund (IDV): Worth a Gander
      I googled this explanation for the index: www.etftrends.com/2007...
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    • Sun Jun 17th 20:17 PM
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      Riding the Bull by Writing Puts on Large-Caps - Barron's
      The writing puts strategy makes sense only in the following situation: 1) you want to own the stock anyway, 2) your are short term neutral on the outlook for the stock or the market, and 3) you think current implied volatility on the options is too high. If the amount of shares you are writing puts on is equal to the number you would otherwise buy, then the strategy isn't really any riskier than a long position - you can always buy the put back just as you could always sell the long and the maximum possible loss is the same.

      What I find embarrasing is the idea that a fund manager would mention this in Barron's as their strongest investment idea. In that case, they should really think about returning their cash to their shareholders.
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    • Wed Jun 13th 10:47 AM
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      Trendline Deception, Part II: Interest Rate Trendlines
      Yes, it cracks me up that the justification for technical analysis is some combo of a) other people are using it and b) it describes the psychology of market participants, and yet it is typically true that one gets different technical signals with different time frames, and it is *extremely rare* that anyone using technical analysis actually tries to argue that a particular time frame is the main one being used by other technical analysts or the one affecting the psychology of market participants.
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    • Mon Jun 11th 08:01 AM
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      Tidewater Inc.: High Margins, Low Debt
      When I screen for undervalued companies, the list fills up with energy names. Since I don't want to out guess the futures market on the near and intermediate prices of oil/gas, I'd like to find other undervalued stocks that are negatively correlated to energy prices. XJT (an undervalued air carrier) is one good candidate, but I'd like to buy more undervalued energy names if I could find more undervalued counterweights.
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