Forum Archive Index - October 2003

[Capitalist <capitalist@paradise.net.nz>]

Macdunk said:

<<The ta fa debate everybody talking nobody listening with the few so called Intellectuals having the stage to show how smart they think they are>>

 

Who died and made you Pope Macdunk?  May I suggest the "delete" key provides salvation .

Woody, you have said you dislike ad hominem, and yet use just this with Snoopy. Incidentally, Apple Computers has been my most successful investment this year. I bought in February for USD13, and have just sold for USD23.50 because I needed the money for something else. Snoopy is right- fundamentally it had an attractive line-up of products, a fine balance sheet with more than $4 billion in cash and short-term investments, and virtually no debt for a company that had a market cap of $5.6 billion. Even though I look at the charts, this is what I based my investment on.

 

Obviously you are a  true chartist Woody, who doesn't care to know what business a company is in as long as you can study its chart. Fundamental information on earnings and dividends is considered at best to be useless- and at worst a positive distraction. For this reason many chartists will not even read the business section of the newspaper!

 

You might have heard of John Allen Paulos, author of  A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market. He cites John Maynard Keynes, who said that stock picking is akin to a beauty contest, where the object is not to choose the prettiest woman but to choose the woman who others think is the prettiest. Investors must anticipate, Keynes wrote, "what average opinion expects the average opinion to be." (This is the theme of many TV shows). But Paulos points out that guessing average opinion is not so easy.