Posts by Andrew Gordon

When the clock-radio woke me up the other morning, the first thing I heard was the results of a survey on what people least want to give up during these hard times. The three winners were tobacco, alcohol, and chocolate.

As I read the Financial Times on the flight from Baltimore to West Palm last week, my worst fears were confirmed. The market meltdown is truly global. And several countries – including Turkey, Iceland, and Argentina – can sell their bonds to investors only by paying out double-digit interest rates to…

The bailout is the equivalent of a dying patient taking aspirin. The relief is minor and temporary, but the outcome doesn’t change.

The good news: The market is offering bargain-basement sale prices on many stocks.

The market is going for 30 percent off. Yet investors aren’t buying. It’s like that 48-inch LCD screen you’ve been dying to buy… someday. But why buy it now when you can probably buy it in December for an additional 5 to 10 percent off? Or why not wait for the post-December sale when you can buy it at an even steeper discount. Maybe you can do even better if you wait until March. Surely, stores will be desperate to clear out their old inventory by then.

Unless you follow the market closely every day, you should have two stock-investing modes – as a holder of stocks and as a purchaser of stocks.

And what about selling? Selling now is not a good idea. The

One of the more unpopular asset classes right now is a stock/bond hybrid called preferred shares. While they’re called shares, they have more in common with bonds. Preferred shares have a par value, coupon, and maturity date, just like bonds. And the nice thing about them is that common shareholders don’t get a penny in dividends or distributions until preferred shareholders are paid off.

I was watching Fox Business News one Friday morning when I heard that statement. I waited to hear the name of the company, but it didn’t come up again. The broadcast moved on to another topic – oil – and my attention was diverted.

Behind door number one are the market analysts. Behind door number two are the economists. And behind door number three are the CFOs. In a survey done about a month ago, they were all telling us very different things about the economy. Which group should we believe?

If you like to buy companies on the cheap – like I do – you probably look at their P/Es. That’s fine. Just know what you’re looking at. If it’s a forward P/E, ignore it.

What’s a forward P/E? Let me explain….

You can be the envy of every stockbroker… floor trader… and intra-day trader who is a prisoner of the flashing green and red indicators on his laptop. They all have to pay attention to the market. Every day. All the time.

In theory, you can make a lot of money investing in bubbles. But you have to deal with one killer problem: when to leave the party. As John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo, puts it, “It is more difficult to attend a party and leave before the trouble starts than not to attend the party at all.”