Daily Posts Archive
Back when the U.S. was an agrarian nation, August used to be the best month for the stock market in performance terms. But it lost the lead as the strongest month in 1951, and now, with only about 2% of the country involved in farming, August has taken its place as the worst. So that should just about settle it, right? There’s no point in being invested in stocks in August. So selling in May and going away looks better and better. Not so fast.
What do you do when a stock changes character? Specifically, how do you handle it when a stock you’ve known as a growth stock may have turned into an income stock?
The biggest companies due to report during earnings season, including notes on volatility/price of options and recent order flow.
In general, I think the future is pretty bright. By all measures, the world’s population today is better-nourished, better-educated and less violent than at any time in history. The long-term trends for the world as a whole look good. And if you’re going to be a successful investor, it truly helps to have a long-term perspective—to be able to imagine the possibility of holding onto a stock for ten years or more. Admittedly, that’s hard to do, with the media’s focus on the short term. And in the year ahead it may get even more difficult, as the noise from the current record-setting G.O.P. Presidential field—and indeed, all the election-oriented activity of the next fifteen months—serves as a constant distraction from the task/pleasure of managing your own money.
Retirees should choose consumer sector stocks with well-established brands, reliable earnings, and a history of paying regular dividends. They might not be as exciting as Amazon, but these companies can add a reliable income stream to your portfolio while also providing upside.
Gold miners may look like a smart bargain play. But given the track record in gold the last four years, it’s not worth the wait.
It’s the beginning of August, high summer in New England, and a bit of summer fatigue is setting in. Summer in New England is short, so we try to pack half a year’s worth of cookouts, beach days, hikes, kayaking, sight-seeing and other outside recreation into three months. It’s fun, but the pace can be a bit frantic, especially as the season enters its third act. Frankly, all I want to do now is lie on a beach somewhere and read a book.
In this week’s video, Mike Cintolo discusses the mixed market, where growth stocks continue to act well on balance, but many areas of the broad market look awful and the major indexes chop sideways.
In today’s Wealth Advisory, I’m doing something I’ve never done before—reprinting an entire piece I wrote in Cabot Growth Investor last Wednesday. It doesn’t involve any specific stock advice (that is and always will be for subscribers only), but it details the wild divergences in the market (which are now getting lots of press—even the Wall Street Journal had a big write-up on it Monday), what it means, and how I’m advising people to handle it—I think it’s very timely.
Hostess is making news today as it is issuing $1.23 million in term loans—most of which will go toward paying $905 million in a special dividend to its private shareholders—which I may add, is also more than two times what the buyers paid for this tasty snack business, and triples the company’s debt. According to Bloomberg, these types of deals grew to nearly $16 billion in the second quarter, the highest level in the past 12 months. I’m not making a judgment for or against this action. I just want to make a point that this debt, or leverage recapitalization—spurred by low interest rates—is increasingly becoming a method in which private equity holders get their money back—without selling the business. But it does burden the company with additional debt, which isn’t going to fund company expansion or operations.