Chris Grande

• More companies disappointing
• Cisco saying Europe looks tough and IT Spend Trend Weak
• European leaders clashing over “austerity”

We do this every year. Analysts talking how big the second half was going to be. Then we get smacked in May. Sorry learned that lesson a while ago. And more recently when last year I held some deep value ideas and some money printing ideas that nonetheless got slapped too.

We’ve had many (I think too many) well-known investment people saying that this was NOT going to be the year to sell in May and [Read more...]

I don’t trust the markets. I don’t trust individual companies. And I certainly don’t trust management of most companies. Why am I telling you this?

Because that’s one of the biggest ways people get burned in the markets: falling in love with a company, with a CEO (figuratively), with stocks in general. it has pushed me more into index investing over the past 2 years. Let’s look at one industry that is famous for terrible management: gold miners.

It’s also famous for company specific problems. And both company problems and CEO problems can sink a stock. Not only has this industry been in a terrible downtrend for a while now, but we’ve also had individual disasters at some companies and terrible management decisions at others that make this a tough place to find individual good ideas. Therefore, the ETF is the way to go for me.

Trust in Markets

Many people buy hope – [Read more...]

This morning several support levels were broken on stocks, indices, commodities etc. Gold took it the hardest as it moved strongly below a trend line, and would need to reverse today to prevent a downtrend from starting (though of course it can always do what it wants after).

Of course if it reverses, it could be a very positive sign as there are plenty of gold bulls that would like a reason to pile on.

You can see in stocks though just how much cash the buy the dippers have as they try to support the market by buying as prices fall. I’m not sure they could hold this up as enough well-known companies have forecasted soft quarters ahead to keep many buyers at bay.

Hyper-reaction to earnings announcements was one market peculiarity that I pointed out in Friday’s blog post.  This trend continued today after hours as 2 “hot ” stocks – RAX and MAKO – were slapped down (MAKO almost 30%) due to imperfect outlooks for the near future.

Understand something – both companies are showing impressive growth and in a market uptrend, both will likely outperform a stock like CVS (no knock on CVS!). However, in a down market –  and we are in the beginnings of a downtrend (could end tomorrow who knows, maybe Ben Bernanke will spout something silly) – these priced to perfection growth stocks will [Read more...]