investing seems like the easiest game in the world

[OverVolt]

Conceptually, investing isn't very complicated or difficult.

Practically, making investing decisions with your money while some positions are going your way and some are going against you, or all in one direction, is a completely different scenario and requires an additional set of objectives and implementations, most of which few people have sensibility and discipline with.

He holds but one piece of the puzzle yea. Ultimately, he is correct. Then you have to take a derivative of human emotion essentially.

There will be denial, dead cat bounces, panic, then more denial, etc.

When Soros bought Facebook shares among all the insider selling what he was really doing was just playing the dead cat bounce, too many shorts riding the momentum down from the IPO to be squeezed. I bet his next filings will show he got rid of his FB position.

OP, analyze FB and LNKD. Which is worse? :awe:

Then there are other rules, like when trade volume spikes the price is usually in the course of changing direction. I find it odd that stock prices currently "levitate" on less and less volume. The market barely exists in reality at those prices. I'm expecting a huge surge in volume to precede the next downswing, whenever that happens. Institutional panic because there sure aren't any retail investors making this market.

 

[Spungo]

Wow, seriously? And you don't think that [Canada's] real estate bubble bursting is going to do some damage?

I'm pretty sure their bubble burst several years ago. My relatives in Ontario were saying the market dropped by about 1/3. During the boom, buyers would have bidding wars. That wasn't happening in 2009 or 2010, whichever year it was when I talked to them last. The debt crisis in the US wasn't caused by a bubble as much as it was caused by lending money to crackheads. Canada's banks are some of the strongest in the world because Canada has laws against lending to bums, putting a fake AAA rating on the bond, then selling that bond to some union's pension fund. I feel weird typing that out. How on earth is that legal here? Good lord. It was president Bush who talked about having an ownership society. I'm not sure if any Canadian politicians said the same thing. Canada does not have anything equivalent to Fannie Mae or Freddy Mac. During the meltdown, not a single Canadian bank went under. Canada also does not give tax deductions for interest paid on debt, so there's less incentive to stay in debt. Canada is also not very big on the ideas of subprime lending and no-doc mortgages. When Canada's housing market crashes, people are stuck with massive debt that they are capable of paying for the next 20 years. People in Canada are not allowed to "walk away" from mortgages without declaring total bankruptcy, and banks are allowed to garnish wages to get money out of them.

So, if you were investing back in the 1990s, you would hold on to Eastman Kodak (blue-chip company, decades of innovation, plenty of cash) and shun Amazon (lots of debt, losing money every quarter, new sector of the market which may not pan out)?

I would need to see Kodak's balance sheet. I would not buy Amazon in the 90's. Remember that your odds of losing everything were astronomical if you invested in an internet company. Remember Nortel? Pets.com? So many of them failed that it caused a market crash. Lots of people were wiped out because they were buying .com lottery tickets.

OP, analyze FB and LNKD. Which is worse?

FB is a good company; it's just too expensive. LNKD looks stable as well, but it's not growing as quickly. I would say FB is better.

I knew about the first and last. Did not know JPM was in such good shape. I really don't trust the banks balance sheet at all.

And with good reason. Things like banks and insurance companies are very theoretical. A company like Intel can say it owns a factory worth a billion dollars. A bank will say it owns a promise written on a piece of paper that is theoretically worth a billion dollars + 2% interest every year for the next 20 years. The issuer of that bond goes bankrupt and suddenly that piece of paper is worth nothing. Financial companies can make money by doing basically nothing, but they can also lose money by doing nothing. Ireland was doing fantastic then it crashed hard.

Anyway, that portfolio I started (see sig) is down 3.88% in one day :awe:
IAMGOLD is down 11.92%, but I still have faith that my fake portfolio will recover. The current price is the lowest it has ever been. The news links on the right side of google finance say that the company is apparently selling for less than book value. If this sucker goes bust, someone should make a callout thread. We can all laugh at how terrible a stock pick it was and what we learned from it 🙂