Category: Business

In Stocks, “Cheap” is Different from “Undervalued”

My investment advice can be summarized one word:  valuation.  Through painful and expensive lessons in more than a decade of investing, I learned that when you buy “popular” stocks that everyone knows about, you get burned badly because they inevitably become overvalued.  It’s the function of the law of supply and demand.  When everyone’s buying

Investing Is Not “Gambling”

During the day, I pretty much do nothing but obsess about my stock portfolio.  Over the years, I've had difficulty convincing my friends, including my colleagues who do this kind of work, that investing in the stock market is not akin to gambling.  Perhaps the image of my beaming face when I talk about a

Is AAPL Overvalued?

Is Apple's stock (AAPL) overvalued?  As a person who's been following the stock since the mid 1990s and has owned shares since 2007, let me play devil's advocate.

Buy What You Understand

I think the best advice I can give anyone about stocks is "buy what you understand."

This mnemonic is easily confused with its deceptive cousin "Buy what you know."  People--and I used to be one of them--are fond of buying stocks of companies that they "know," usually from using the company's products but sometimes from something

Enron Teaches Us That a Moral Compass Matters

I recently finished reading "The Smartest Guys in the Room," an amazing account of the characters who were complicit in the rise and fall of Enron.   It is a page turner; I couldn't put it down.

The authors, Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, tell a story of how exaggeration, manipulation and obsession with the numbers, particularly

It’s Not What You Buy, It’s When You Sell

A buddy suggested I write about stocks to increase readership to this blog.  Why he thinks this is a winning strategy is beyond me.  I wrote  about the same kind of stuff in a weekly column called "Strictly Business" 87 times in four years in college but I got more attention the one time I wrote

In Politics, Principles and Bipartisanship Collide

Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire withdrew his nomination as President Obama's Secretary of Commerce.  The new president's first month in office has been quite bumpy, with the Commerce Secretary's job increasingly turning into a cursed cabinet post. As rough as it has been for the president, I am still withholding judgment on the Obama

On (Not) Bailing Out the Big Three

The Senate Republicans torpedoed whatever hope there was for the Big Three (why are they still called that even though they continue to shrink?) to receive a bailout from Congress.  Now the survival of GM and Chrysler apparently rests on the whims of the White House.

I hope Bush takes a stand and say no.  If

On the Many Things Making My Life Suck Right Now

My dad sent a random e-mail yesterday, reminding me  of the series of unfortunate events that have been taking place:

1) The Yankess did not make the playoffs; 2) The Patriots, sans Brady, is mediocre at best ten months after blowing the Super Bowl; and 3) The GOP got whacked earlier this month.

I also reminded him that the

On Math to Help You Get Out of Debt

A couple years ago when I was in law school, a friend of mine who was overwhelmed with credit card debt asked me to figure out how much in monthly payments she should make in order to fully pay off the debt in a certain number of years.  Although the math was rather easy to

On Laying the Blame for the Financial Chaos

I like to cut to the chase and believe, in general, that getting to the heart of the matter, in the most simplistic form, identifies the problem, which is the first step towards finding a solution.

I find what triggered the current financial crises, the subprime mortgage, to be a relatively simple issue.  Of course various
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