Cody,

I hope you’re feeling better. I’ve been reading your stuff religiously, and calling Cablevision to complain that we don’t get FBN. A little bummed at how down on the economy you are, but afraid you’re right. Also wonder about your “let ‘em burn” moral hazard approach. It sounds fair, but I dunno if we can afford to let the system crash (or if it would). I hate the bailouts, though.

Anyway, here’s my question: You’ve said, and I agree, that oil will most assuredly pop. I believe it may be happening now. If we again get to $75-$100 a barrel in the next say, six months, does that dramatically change the overall economic outlook?

Ever hear King Crimson’s first album?

- G

=

Why do people expect wealth redistribution to somehow help housing? It hasn’t and it won’t. Only time and lower prices will change the cycle. The stimulus packages and investment bank and gse bailouts are bogus at best.

And destructive at worse. Which is reality.

Oil aint the problem and never has been. It is a lagging indicator of the economic boom that just ended. Its going back to 30 before this downturn is over, IMHO.

Will download the first king crimson album on my Apple (AAPL) ipod touch over my time warner (TWX) cable broadband connection which will surf over cisco (CSCO) and juniper (JNPR) routers to intel (INTC)-powered servers from dell (DELL) and others run by Akamai (AKAM). Do you know who owns the rights to King Crimson and gets paid for the actual album purchase…warner music (WMG)?

- CW

==

Don’t know who gets paid for King Crimson’s stuff. The brains behind that group was Robert Fripp, and Pete Townshend called the first album an “uncanny masterpiece.” Wild picture on the cover, great stuff inside.

I wasn’t disagreeing with you (far be it), just trying to get your opinion. I know what you’re saying about oil, but if it drops, don’t prices come down? I mean, look at what Dow did – raising prices 50% all because of fuel costs. And airlines, etc.

Stimulus package is retarded, though I’ll be forced to cash my check.

- G

==

You really think Dow’s jacking prices 50 pct is a solely a function of fuel costs? Inflation is caused by excessive printing of fiat currency, creating more money chasing the same amount of goods and services. Inflation isn’t caused by high oil prices…though high oil prices are partly caused by the excessive printing of fiat currency. Much like the hundreds of billions that the Democrats and Republicans and the Fed illuminati cronies have been handing out on Wall Street to the richest people on the planet.

Imho.

-CW

==

OK, OK. I feel like John Kruk getting dunked on by LeBron. Agreed that prices are up because of dumb Fed policy. But high oil prices, regardless of their root cause, also drive up prices of products, no? So lower oil prices could bring lower prices. Lower prices could get the Fed to raise rates and bolster the dollar once again. The GSEs make me sick. They want to act like publicly held companies, but they exist to carry out political agendas.

And I just got your everything-is-connected joke about Warner. Slow on the uptake today.

- G

==

Agree that high oil prices drive up COSTS, but not prices. And yes, higher costs drive up prices or drive down profits, so high oil is bad for the economy…but it’s also partly a function of the steadily strong economic boom we just left.

What Paulson, the Democrats and Republicans in power right now and the Fed and the investment banks (you call it tomato I call it Illuminati) are doing is outright TERRIFYING. We are talking about as Altucher put it tonight, about people fearing the collapse of capitalism itself. Tell me again what’s causing the confidence crisis itself? Fear of a free market downturn or these proposals to nationalize homeownership.

And, for the record, I can, could, and would dunk over either LeBron or Kruk if they got in my way on my way to the hole. As you’d know if you had FBN and could catch my wild leaps in the Bull & Bear on Happy Hour.

- CW

]]> http://cody.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2008/07/17/you-call-it-tomato-i-call-it-illuminati-these-latest-bailout-proposals-by-those-in-power-are-terrifying/feed/ http://cody.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2008/07/17/you-call-it-tomato-i-call-it-illuminati-these-latest-bailout-proposals-by-those-in-power-are-terrifying/ http://feeds.foxbusiness.com/~r/blogs/codyword/~3/337350489/ http://cody.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2008/07/16/stock-picks-from-cody-the-cody-report-investment-newsletter-for-july-is-out/#comments Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:29:33 +0000 Cody Willard http://cody.blogs.foxbusiness.com/?p=318 Here’s a snippet from this month’s The Cody Report. You can subscribe by visiting TheCodyReport.net.

Banks are failing and people are losing their savings. Government agencies with trillions of dollars in mortgage exposure are being bailed out with tax dollars. The bank index is down 70% from its recent highs and more hundreds, perhaps thousands of banks will be closing their doors as the credit bubble has popped and deflates in front of our eyes. Taking the stock market with it.

The indices are down almost 25% from their recent highs. The average stock is down more than 30% from its recent highs. Caution has been key — and even with these huge sell offs creating some opportunities in individual stock names, investors should remain cautious with their overall exposure to the stock market.

One of my mentors taught me a long time ago that, like a good track bettor, you want to bet big when the odds are in your favor, bet small when you’re not too sure, and walk away when you know you’re probably gonna lose. Back at DJIA 14,000 a few months ago or just about anytime over the last eighteen months when stocks were much higher than they are right now — that was the time to walk away. Back in October 2002 when I launched my tech-centric hedge fund was a pretty good time to be betting big on the stock market. But right now, now that the average stock is down more than 30% from where it was trading most of the last year? Bet small. Have some money in the stock market, and be ready to put more money in as the economic downturn accelerates.

So with that trading backdrop in mind, here are this month’s stock picks — all long ideas and no short ideas this month (which is partly because so many stock prices have come down so quickly)

Sign up today at TheCodyReport.net to read on.

I said, why walk alone, why worry when it’s
warm over here. You’ve got so much to say, say what you mean,
mean what you’re thinking, and think anything. - Yusuf Islam, born Steven Demetre Georgiou, best known by his former stage name Cat Stevens

As the buzz around an imminent bombing attack costing thousands of human lives on Iran by Israel remains at high volume — God bless sports (and music too for that matter. I still listen to the politically-maligned Cat Stevens’ first four albums regularly even though his manager tried unsuccessfully to get me into his latest work over dinner a few months ago).

I wonder how much more violent and distrustful this world would be (than it is already) without things like The Beatles, U2, Bach, basketball, the Olympic Games, tennis, golf…

As travel and communication among citizens from disparate parts of the world continue to become much easier over the coming decades, we can rightly expect more trust and less violence to develop around the world too.

See, it’s not all gloom and doom away from the financial problems that the Democrats and Republicans and their cronies on Wall Street and at the Fed keep exacerbating with their endless redistribution of wealth into the real estate ownership class. That stuff too will pass, if we’ll finally let the excesses of the credit bubble work themselves out.

And on that note, please be very vocal about fighting these programs to bail out the bondholders (not to mention the shareholders) of these investment banks and GSEs. For the first time in months, I’m encouraged that the Democrats and Republicans in power are actually worried that we’re onto their fiscal and monetary scams. Don’t let them take more of your money to give to themselves and rich bankers and Wall Streeters. Can you believe they actually want you to believe that their forcefully taking your money for themselves is actually good for you? Since when does taking from the poor and fiscally responsible help the poor and fiscally responsible?

I figure this horse ain’t dead yet, and if we’ll keep kicking it, we might actually have an impact on slowing the theft of our freedom with our hard-earned money and the outright socialization of our financial system.

Now I’ve been happy lately, thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be, something good has begun
Oh I’ve been smiling lately, dreaming about the world as one
And I believe it could be, some day it’s going to come

Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again

Oh peace train sounding louder
Glide on the peace train
Come on now peace train
Yes, peace train holy roller - That obviously very evil dude, Cat Stevens, again

Moreover, that line of logic ignored the clear bull market that started in late 2002…about the same time the Fed quit the cutting rates phase they had been in. And stocks ran to new highs in stair step fashion with the steady RAISE rates phase from 2003 to 2007.

Anyway, it’s never easy and I wouldn’t suggest ever factoring Fed rate phases into your market approach. Because sometimes you should fight the Fed.

And other times you shouldn’t (such as in 1998 to 2000 when the Fed was cutting rates and the stock market bubbled).

Here’s a better catch phrase, “Ignore the Fed.”

PS.  This month’s The Cody Report stock market investment newsletter is out.  Visit TheCodyReport.net to get exclusive access to this month’s three brand new stock ideas — a telecom name, a semiconductor name and a retail name.  All three will surprise you.

I could ramble, a thousand miles or more
Never find the light I’ve seen in your eyes before
You gave me the freedom to go on my own way
But you gave me much more, you gave me the freedom to stay — Waylon Jennings

“Should I just pull all my money from my IRA now and pay off the house before I lose it all!”

So reads one of the comments on CodyWillard.com. And this week I’ve gotten more than a few emails and calls from worried friends, family, viewers and former partners from my hedge fund days full of worry and angst.

The good news is that we’ve now priced in almost 25 percentage points in the major indices. Yeah, a 25% decline is indeed the good news as the Democrats and Republicans that you guys voted for socialize our financial systems in the name of bailing out their cronies and pretending that they can do anything to stabilize the free markets that always reign in the end.

The bad news is that there’s still just not a lot of outright panic. And unfortunately, we probably need some outright panic to take us to the capitulatory bottom we need in both the stock markets as well as in the broader economy. Perhaps that economic and market capitulation will come when the public decides that the trillions of your dollars that the Republicans and Democrats and their cronies at the Fed and Treasury Department are throwing around in the name of “keeping confidence in the our markets high” are doing exactly the opposite — that is, all this printing of worthless dollars and redistribution of wealth from renters and savers and those who have been fiscally responsible to those who have levered themselves up on risky, cyclical assets isn’t doing anything but undermining confidence in our markets.

And then maybe those of you in the saver/renter class of the US society — those of you have been patient and responsible and believed that the value of your dollar would sustain itself into your retirement — if you’ve still got any money left that you haven’t sent to the levered-class and if that money hasn’t been completely devalued by the endless printing of worthless new dollars to give to the levered-class…well, then just maybe you’re finally going to get that chance to execute on your strategy of buying when others are running for the hills and forced to sell their assets on the cheap — into the free market, not to your government using your taxdollars to nationalize those assets.

I gotta tell ya’, the saver/renter class of our society is really getting to its wit’s end with all these games the rest of you are playing with money. Talk about heads you win, tails I lose…the saver/renter class has been patiently waiting for a free market cyclical downturn to put the money they’ve been saving to work. But now that the downturn has come, the saver/renter class is being taxed to keep the downturn from coming. Those who say that, for example, without the $2,000,000,000 of the renter/saver taxdollars (who else has any money to tax right now, after all, but the renters and savers?) that went directly to Bear Stearns shareholders to keep the stock from going out worthless, was somehow good for the economy and therefore good for the renters and savers surely look like the fools they are by now, no?

Put simply, the games that the Republicans and Democrats are playing with your trillions of tax dollars to supposedly stop this downturn have done nothing to stop the downturn. But they’ve destroyed the value of your dollar and increased your tax liability hugely — perhaps doubling the national debt along the way too.

So back to the question at hand?

“Should I just pull all my money from my IRA now and pay off the house before I lose it all!”

With the unstoppable downturn here and accelerating and a major redistribution of wealth from the saver/renter-class to the levered-class with long-term hurdles to the natural forces that can actually turn the cycle (such as capitulation and panic, for example, as noted above), I’m still preaching caution.

Long time viewers and readers know that I had my mom pull 30% of her retirement accounts out of the market late last year. We still have 30% on the sidelines, despite the market being down 20% plus since we made that sell. I told her that over the course of the next six months, we’ll probably get a good chance to put that money back to work in some sort of a market panic.

I figure just as the government’s not been able to stop the economic downturn, they won’t be able to stop a panic when it finally happens. Remember that nothing the government could do, not even cutting rates to 1% to pump billions of worthless dollars into our economy from 2000 to 2002 could stop The Great Tech Depression of 2000 to 2002. What put in the bottom for our economy and stock market? Time and price — two years and a 75% decline in the Nasdaq.

Patience and caution are still king at this part of the cycle. That doesn’t mean you panic and run for the hills and save everything. Again, we’ve already seen the value of the average stock fall more than 30% from its recent highs — and in the long run, you gotta stay exposed to the stock markets. Selling down your assets that are already 30% probably isn’t the best way of building net worth over the long term. Too late to sell, too early to buy. That ain’t necessarily what you wanna hear…but it’s how I see it and that’s all I can tell ya’.

Hopefully, the Republicans and Democrats you guys voted for won’t have completely robbed you of your freedom to stay in the markets along the way.

PS.  This month’s The Cody Report stock market investment newsletter is coming Wednesday.  Visit TheCodyReport.net to get exclusive access to this month’s three brand new stock ideas — a telecom name, a semiconductor name and a retail name.  All three will surprise you.

You created these “government-sponsored enterprises”, FRE and FNM (call them Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to make them sound warm and fuzzy), to enable the markets to offer under-market rates on loans to high-risk people (read: use tax-dollars to make cheap loans available to the people in the bottom half of the income distribution pie).

Think about that for a minute — these government “companies” were created for the soul purpose of making cheap loans using tax dollars to people whom the market doesn’t think are likely to pay those loans back.

Okay, now pretend that those these GSEs had failed in their mission and their numbers had never amounted to much of anything (you know, sorta like the Generation Hope Now redistribution of wealth joke that’s helped like 0.2% of those people whom it was supposed to…thankfully, as I’m sure you’re picking up on here). You Republicans and Democrats and those you choose to elect would bemoan how little the government’s doing to help poor people mindlessly leverage themselves up for hundreds of thousands of dollars…er, I mean, help poor people gamble on home and real estate prices…er, I mean, everybody would bemoan how little the government’s doing to help “poor people live the American dream of home ownership”.

Instead, the executives of these once sincerely-socialist GSEs lobbied and paid off Republicans and Democrats so that the GSEs could become publicly-traded companies (and the executives like Frank Raines, once a “servant to the people” under one of the heads of the Democrat/Republican regimes, could be paid like a head of a publicly-traded company too) without the need for capital requirements, disclosure, or even honest accounting. And so these companies, enriching their executives and shareholders at what is now clearly taxpayer expense, delivered on their promise of getting poor people wildly levered on extremely risky, cyclical, speculative assets called “American dream of home ownership”.

And that was pretty fine and dandy during the last twenty-five years while the consumer avoided any recession whatsoever and the broader economy steadily rocked along despite a couple a gentle and brief recessions and all that taxpayer-backed capital flowed into the real estate markets…

Thusly here we are today, and these monsters are now eating their creators and failing because…why? FRE and FNM can’t keep funding themselves because they’ve been too successful. Yes, they are failing precisely because they did such a great job of helping poor people lever up and now that the leverage is cutting the wrong way…well, remember the reason the free market wouldn’t offer those loans at those rates is because any company doing so would fail eventually because it couldn’t be done profitably or someone would have…instead the government took your money and knowingly lent it into a system that by definition would eventually fail.

So I’m gonna flip the logic of this devastating collapse of our financial system for you socialists, both those who admit it as well those who deny it but act and vote it, and applaud the runaway success that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac obviously are as evidenced by their failure.

And in the end, how many millions of those in the lower half of the income distribution pie are going to wiped out as the value of their homes falls below what they’ve “been so fortunate” to have borrowed.

PS. You guys really gonna give those Republicans and Democrats and their cronies at the Fed yet more power to create yet more socialist programs that by definition have to fail? The answer to these GSEs collapse isn’t more agencies to watch and “regulate” these GSEs. Shrink ‘em and let ‘em fade! This failure’s success shouldn’t beget more failures to succeed in failing, after all.

PPS. Republican and Democrat entities known as Medicare and Social Security…no, really, they’re not by definition destined to fail economically. I’m sure they’ll work out fine in the end

PPPS. This month’s The Cody Report stock market investment newsletter is coming Wednesday.  Visit TheCodyReport.net to get exclusive access to this month’s three brand new stock ideas — a telecom name, a semiconductor name and a retail name.  All three will surprise you.

So here’s today rant.

How Fallout Could Affect Main Street

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The rate increase being predicted should not block many deals.

Thus far, the biggest damage has been mostly to Fannie’s and Freddie’s investors, though the overall stock market has recoiled as the companies stumbled. In the housing market, consumers are still moving into new homes, and people continued to close on new loans Friday.

I hate to tell ya’, but the fallout from the credit crisis on Wall Street has already drastically affected you on Main Street. From friends in my hometown who found it took six weeks to get a refinancing done on his fully-owned home so he can start a new business, to my colleague at Fox who recently took four times as long and had to pay a rate almost a third higher than she borrowed at on a real estate purchase last year.Not to mention the spike in the cost of your energy and food supplies which is directly attributable and trace-able to the trashing of your currency by printing of hundreds of billions of dollars to give to Wall Street for free in the name of the rate cuts and bail outs and “help” for homeowners…

I love how they title the leap on the print pages for this article, “Fallout is Felt on Wall St., but Not Yet on Main Street”… you decide just how accurate that statement is based on these other headlines, which are also indeed taken from today’s New York Times:

Sleepless and Worried in My House

By M. P. DUNLEAVEY

IMAGINE that it’s still November 2007, the subprime mortgage debacle is in full swing, and a global credit crisis is shaking up markets around the world. You review your own housing situation, and proceed as follows…

Regulators Seize Mortgage Lender

Federal regulators seized IndyMac Bancorp on Friday evening, marking one of the largest bank failures in American history.

Weak Dollar Helps Shrink Trade Deficit

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States trade deficit narrowed in May as exports, including industrial supplies and consumer goods, climbed to records.

Rich, but Rejected

ALMOST overnight, investment bankers and others on Wall Street have gone from being Manhattan’s most aggressive apartment buyers to real estate pariahs.

Deferred Hopes and Stalled Projects

Tom White for The New York Times

INTERRUPTED REVITALIZATION Although the Esperanza, an ambitious condo project in Asbury Park, was put on the back burner by the worsening economy, its developer hopes to resume construction by the end of the year.

Since then, destructive market forces have slowed progress on other large projects around the state. Work has sputtered to a stop at two of them — the $1.5 billion Centuria development at the foot of the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, and the $66 million Town Center development in Somerville — before foundations have even been laid.

“These large projects are facing trouble,” said Andrew J. Merin, a broker who is currently marketing the rights to build Centuria, “because financing is almost impossible today.”

Developer Cuts Back on Plans for Tower to House Baseball’s Cable Network

A 21-story office building planned in East Harlem for Major League Baseball is shrinking.

But, according to real estate executives and city officials, Vornado’s inability to finance the $435 million project, known as Harlem Park, has delayed construction and is doing what critics who had complained about the tower’s size could not: reduce its height by about a third. That is in part because the developer seems to have had problems signing up other tenants for the building.

Hit by Fuel Costs, Con Ed Projects Bigger Rise in Bills

Con Edison is expecting to bill its residential customers in New York City and Westchester County 22 percent more for electricity this summer than last because of rising fuel costs, officials at the utility said on Friday.

When Big Becomes Too Big, a Dream House Goes to Auction

Alan Zale for The New York Times

Concealed bids start at $19 million for a 26,000-square-foot home, currently with 6 bedrooms, 10 bathrooms and 2 residents, in Connecticut.

GREENWICH, Conn. — By the time Stan and Dorothea Cheslock moved into their 26,000-square-foot dream house on 30 acres here, they were already dreaming of getting out.

-

No, no fallout for Main Street from Wall Street’s woes at all yet.

And New York media wonder why the rest of America thinks they’re totally out of touch most of the time. Or as my mom, who sadly just left my Soho pad to start her twelve hour trek back to Ruidoso, NM, quoted the ol’ saw, “Some people just can’t see the forest for the trees.

U.S. Weighs Takeover of Two Mortgage Giants

WASHINGTON — Alarmed by the growing financial stress at the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies, senior Bush administration officials are considering a plan to have the government take over one or both of the companies and place them in a conservatorship if their problems worsen, people briefed about the plan said on Thursday.

I mean, after decades of fiat promises and currency and companies like this (Fiat money, irredeemable paper currency, not resting on a specie basis, but deriving its purchasing power from the declaratory fiat of the government issuing it. [1913 Webster] Source: The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48),
the distortions in the marketplace are now up to $5 trillion — about HALF THE TOTAL DEBT THESE GOVERNMENT AGENCIES HAVE SOLD TO INVESTORS AROUND THE WORLD. Let’s be clear that these companies like FNM, FRE, SLM are tools of the Democrats and Republicans and their Illuminati and Fed banking syndicate cronies and are not in any way shape or form part of “free markets”.

And the kicker of just how badly the savers, renters and financially responsible are going to get screwed by those the people who borrowed $5 trillion that they couldn’t afford to pay back is put into perspective almost as a passing thought by the New York Times writers:

The government officials said that the administration had also considered calling for legislation that would offer an explicit government guarantee on the $5 trillion of debt owned or guaranteed by the companies. But that is a far less attractive option, they said, because it would effectively double the size of the public debt.

Yup in one fell swoop, the Democrats and Republicans in charge of the government and your fiat currency are looking to DOUBLE THE TAXPAYERS’ NATIONAL DEBT.

Here’s a great idea — let’s give these guys MORE POWER and CONTROL of our markets. Clearly, their “regulations” are the solution, not the problem, right? For whom to blame for the economic problems, we face, read on…

PS. How stupid are those guys who wanted to take SLM private last year looking these days?

For Short Sellers, It Doesn’t Get Much Better

Blood is in the water, and short sellers, often viewed as the sharks of Wall Street, are circling. As shareholders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac watched their investments plunge in value Thursday, short sellers, who bet against stocks, could count their winnings.

The thing that kills me in this article is how the author implies that the very issues that smart doomsdayers have been saying would come back to haunt these quasi-government lending agencies that distort the markets and cause bubbles like the credit bubble we’re popping right now are caused by the smart doomsdayers themselves:

He describes the research he has written over the years as an effort to educate people, although it could be said that his bear market musings also served his fund’s purpose by spreading a view that would eventually benefit the Tice funds. “It’s a terrible thing,” he said. “I wish we could have stopped this from happening.”

Yeah, don’t blame the Fed’s artificial low rates, the pushing ARMs, the secondary market issuance guaranteed by your taxdollars, lending bail outs, Bear Stearns lenders and shareholder bailouts, and certainly don’t blame former FNM CEO Franklin Raynes for his self-enriching accounting scams…

The whole of our economy’s problems are quite obviously David Tice’s fault. Just ask the NY Times.

For Rangel, Four Rent-Stabilized Apartments

Mick Hales/”Style and Grace: African Americans at Home,” Bulfinch Press

Alma and Charles B. Rangel’s Harlem residence, as shown in “Style and Grace: African Americans at Home” (2003).

While aggressive evictions are reducing the number of rent-stabilized apartments in New York, Representative Charles B. Rangel is enjoying four of them, including three adjacent units on the 16th floor overlooking Upper Manhattan in a building owned by one of New York’s premier real estate developers.

Yeah, this is one of those Democrats/Republicans who you guys keep voting for and giving more power because he’s fighting for poor people and renters and savers, right?

Whatever you do, don’t blame Rangel, the “powerful Democrat who runs the House Ways and Means Committee” for the collapse of your economy, dollar and mortgage value. Remember, it’s David Tice’s fault!

F.C.C. Chairman Favors Penalty on Comcast

WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday that he would recommend that Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.

The potentially precedent-setting move stems from a complaint that Comcast had blocked Internet traffic among users of a certain type of file-sharing software that allowed them to exchange large amounts of data.

Let me get this straight — Comcast owns the pipes, pays for the technology to make the pipes work, has competition from wireless and telephone companies and soon WiMax and other competitors….but they don’t have the right to decide what runs on those pipes? I say let the free market work — customers and public opinion will do the job of ensuring Comcast embraces free access to all Internet technologies. Don’t put a gun to the company’s head making them do it!

And to that point, hey, Comcast….don’t be like the Chinese communists! Open up and if you wanna charge extra for bandwidth usage, well, more power to ya!

I often used to write that the Internet companies and telephone companies were destroying a century’s worth of business models based on the elasticity of demand for usage rather than all-you-can-eat models. Clearly, these broadband providers are going to have to come back to charging customers based on how much bandwidth they consumer rather than flat-fee-ing it.

Of course, Comcast could pull a NY Times and just blame me for causing Comcast’s problems since I’ve been vocal about warning people of those coming problems that are now here and have crushed the stock over the last few years…it’s certainly not Brian Roberts or his father’s fault.

And as I mentioned in that last post three times and hundreds of times over the years on these pages, time frame is very important.

For example, though I like Pfizer these days as both a trade and investment now that it’s down to $18 this summer, Pfizer has been a horrible stock for just about any time frame in the last decade. If you put $10,000 into Pfizer in 1998, it’d be worth about $8000 including dividend re-investments. $10,000 into the S&P 500 over the same time frame, would be worth about $12,000 if you reinvested all dividends back into it. Putting that ten grand into Microsoft ten years ago would have resulted in about $10,000 or so including dividend re-investments. And $10,000 in Apple in 1998 would be worth about $200,000.

But let’s talk time frame again. How about an investment in each of these stocks in 1985?   That $10,000 Softee investment would be worth $2.5 million.  Yeah, MILLION.  (Which is down from the $6,000,000 that $10,000 had turned into at the top of the dot com bubble nine years ago…)

And from a year ago today:

In all the above cases, these “large cap” individual stocks performed far differently than the broader markets and each other. Picking good companies and paying a good price for them and knowing your time frame matter. Points driven?

Of course, actually executing on these points is another matter entirely…

He quoted instead that “These are the times that try men’s souls…”  Hey, I know it’s not by Thoreau, but I’m just writing it like I remember it.

At any rate, Thoreau’s name came up in a discussion with my mom and here’s a Flip It quote of the day:

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…me, I live my desperation loudly.”

Thanks to all of you for the very kind and supportive words about this disease and its results. I’m taking care of myself and resting and getting better.

A couple market-related thoughts to communicate, partly because requested by you guys:

• Don’t confuse a strong counter-trend rally with an end to the bear market we’ve entered. Remember your time horizon — and know that caution remains key during this part of the economic cycle…
• Stick with Apple and Google as longs here. And Softee — I’d probably be a buyer of more of all three right now…regardless of my concerns about the broader markets.
• Pfizer, Altria…yeah, those are still buys too, IMHO.
• Crox also — been telling some of my former hedge fund partners to buy more lately too.
• GM is still a binary outcome set up. Sticking around the $10-13 level would hurt the trade set up I referred to in that post, but I still think it’s heading much higher or to zero in the next few months and that’s the time horizon on that trade…did I mention remember your time horizons on any trades and investments you make?
• Can you believe the gall of Ben and his cronies who want yet more power and central control of the very financial markets that their policies and endless bail outs and money creation have left in depression?
• And from a longer-term perspective, do these guys not realize how badly they’re continuing to destroy our economic standing relative to the rest of the world? You don’t think those foreign banks’ hundreds of billions in write-offs from those investments stamped clean and safe by the liars at “AAA-rated by US-approved agencies” like Moody’s and S&P are just going to be forgotten in the coming quarters and years, do you?

Anyway, I’m doing fine and as I wrote on my facebook page — I won’t be stopped. Not even by a tick!
PS. This weekend, we’ll be publishing the July edition of my investment newsletter, The Cody Report, where you can get more detailed fundamental stock and market analysis. Sign up at TheCodyReport.net to get it.