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Monthly Archives: July 2010

How to Stay Interested in the Market

July 9, 2010
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How to Stay Interested in the Market

Something most investors find difficult to do during down markets is simple:  Stay interested.  This is totally understandable–for me, this is my job and my passion, so following the stock market is something I do no matter where I am (though on vacation I’m obviously not checking stocks every 10 minutes).  The average investor, on the other hand, has a real job as well as other passions, so if the market isn’t doing anything grand, he has no reason to pay much attention to it on a day-to-day basis. I am here to tell you, though, that such thinking...

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Battlign Yourself to Become a Better Investor

July 8, 2010
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Battlign Yourself to Become a Better Investor

I’m going to start today’s Wealth Advisory with a rather long quote from “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator,” the famous fictional biography of Jesse Livermore.  This passage is rarely mentioned, but I think it’s one of most important in the book.  Here we go: “I sometimes think that speculation must be an unnatural sort of business, because I find that the average speculator has arrayed against him his own nature.  The weaknesses that all men are prone to are fatal to success in speculation–usually those very weaknesses that make him likable to his fellows or that he himself particularly...

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Sysco (SYY): An Undervalued Food Stock

July 7, 2010
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Moving on to the market, we got a nice rally today, but one swallow does not make a summer (Aristotle) and one up day doesn’t make a bull market.  But the rotten sentiment levels–which may have reached a nadir last week–mean there are plenty of stocks trading at bargain prices out there. One worth investing in is Sysco (SYY) the leading distributor of food and related stuff to restaurants, hospitals, hotels and schools. It’s a favorite of Roy Ward, editor of Cabot Benjamin Graham Value Letter, who recently added it to his Wise Owl Portfolio and wrote this: “SYY...

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The Stock Market Knows Best

July 6, 2010
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The Stock Market Knows Best

I hope you enjoyed a wonderful Independence Day holiday.  The highlight for me was having all three of my kids back home and feeding 32 family and friends in my back yard, featuring lobsters caught by my brother-in-law!  But today it’s back to work, and I begin this issue with some concerns expressed by readers in recent weeks. “I am increasingly concerned about the impact of inflation on the value of my portfolio.” “Over 2/3 of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal, whose births were paid for by taxpayers.  95% of warrants...

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China Gives Rise to Female Billionaires

July 5, 2010
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I recently came across Forbes’ list of female billionaires and was particularly interested in the feature on the world’s richest self-made women. Forbes reported that worldwide, 14 women have amassed personal wealth of $1 billion or more, accounting for 2% of all self-made billionaires. The thing that interested me the most about this was that out of the 14 women, seven have made their fortunes in China. According to Forbes, women in China today contribute half of the household income, up from 20% in the 1950s. China’s booming economy has created lots of economic opportunities, and when combined with...

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