David Jackson
David Jackson
Send Message
David Jackson
Stop FollowingDavid Jackson
More on GS by David Jackson
COMMENTS STATS
864 Comments
709 Likes

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
Steve Jobs understands this well. His key quote last night: "We have amazing new products still to come this year." It's hard to sell or short a stock when you hear that sort of thing.
Proof that smart investors are looking ahead to new products: the top search on the AAPL transcript is "iAd": seekingalpha.com/artic...
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
Given the size of IBM, this probably indicates that the tech sector is less strong than the recent results from INTC and ORCL suggested. Given the weakness in the stocks of other tech leaders (eg. GOOG), it makes me more cautious about tech overall.
Note also that IBM will have a meaningful impact on the Dow today: seekingalpha.com/news/...
Goldman Sachs and Mean Reversion [View article]
>> Even with broad asset classes, there's risk that instruments don't trend together over time -- see seekingalpha.com/artic... .
>> And individual stocks tend to exhibit trend-defying momentum -- see seekingalpha.com/artic...
The Bar Mitzvah Portfolio: Five Long Term Winners [View article]
I wonder whether the key factor in picking instruments for such a long term portfolio (I'm assuming you're not going to adjust the portfolio until it's time to liquidate it) is ensuring that your choices will maintain their competitive position 10 years from now. And while that might be the case for McDonalds, Sears and Goldman Sachs, I just don't have confidence that you can make that sort of call with tech stocks like Google and Apple.
A litmus test:
<b>What tech stocks would you have picked 10 years ago?</b> Perhaps Netscape or @Home. Remember them? Netscape was the clear leader in the browser market -- the future of the whole Internet -- and @Home was going to own the high speed infrastructure for the US internet. Definitely not Apple (look at the chart and what people were saying about it 10 years ago!) or Google (it wasn't public).
How did the tech stocks subsequently perform that "felt" as good 10 years ago as Apple and Google do today? Not well. This illustrates the challenge facing people who try to pick individual tech stocks for long term portfolios, described in more detail in The Problem With Tech Stocks.
Additionally, your portfolio is all US stocks. But GDP growth is currently and projected to be much faster in emerging markets than it is in the US. And with high US consumer debt, a chronic budget and current account deficit, it's not clear that exposure to the US consumer (Apple and Sears, and perhaps also McDonalds) in more than 2/5ths of the portfolio makes sense.
The bottom line:
- for a portfolio of this duration, I think you'd have much lower risk picking ETFs instead of individual stocks.
- once you're picking ETFs, perhaps you should allocate more exposure to foreign stocks than you have here.
David
NY Investment Bank Salaries = Vietnam's GDP [View article]
I agree with your point though. All of us who have grown up with the amazing opportunities offered by the US or European countries have a lot to be grateful for. As Warren Buffett frequently says, his stock picking abilities would have been useless if he'd been born elsewhere.
NY Investment Bank Salaries = Vietnam's GDP [View article]