Not if you pay me ONE MEEEELLION dollars!
Are you kidding? The stock is worthless. It’s been delisted and trades on the pink sheets. Only idiots who don’t know any better still trade it.
It doesn’t matter. Whatever the government decides to do with them, even if they reorganize and refloat them, the existing stock will be certainly be cancelled.
You obviously don’t know a damn thing about capitalism.
It’s eating itself. There was a real upper limit on what capitalism could do as far as manipulating real things to produce imaginary things, and the imaginary things finally collapsed. Of course capitalism will still be around, it works great in the small, medium, and large scale, but hopefully we’ll see enough regulation that the crazy-large high risk products aren’t reintroduced to try and squeeze out that last few percentage points. To clarify my position, I think we’ve seen the end of the growth patterns that were produced over the last 20 years and will experience a much slower, and hopefully steadier, growth in the future.
I’m hoping (and predicting) that capitalism as an entity, i.e. a self-serving force, will fade out and be replaced by more progress-centric strategies. Max profits at all costs is not a healthy way to work.
H.
p.s. And on the Fannie rant, please read the first post again. This is not a thread about sound investments:
Stay out, all you long term “stay the course” guys. Unless it’s a better strategy. Let’s talk markets, options, daytrading, commodities market, short term buys, and such here. Sheer gambling!
Stuff I would do if I were brave: buy copper (everyone loves FCX), buy potash (POT), buy oil sands (SU), and buy the financials (XLF). Oh for technology I would buy SNDK since I am crazy about flash technology (this one I did buy last year, tags, but I bailed out at 50 since I am a chicken).
Instead I am invested in EWA, EWC, EWZ, SPY, and IWM … Boooooring.
I was this close to throwing money into Blockbuster at .05. Bottom feeding can be profitable.
Not enough liquidity in blockbuster, anyway I am not a fan of stocks that are going out of business.
Hot potato! Hot potato! Fuck!!
H.
p.s. FNMA up 11% this morning, dropping again. Guapo, find some sort of automatic stock thingy, set it buy at .30, sell and short at .33, then buy back at .30. You cannot lose!
How do you see Blockbuster turning things around? They’re dead as far as I can tell.
They tried to reinvent themselves as a Suncoast that also does games and rentals, but their stores are still way too big. They even try to push candy and popcorn on you now. It’s almost sad.
Oh, it’s too late now, i wouldn’t feel safe putting money into it.
Nobody cares about Hollywood video, it had no cachet or brand appeal, but Blockbuster still retains a significant presence in retail and has brand strength. When it dropped to 0.05c, it was sure to have one last gasp upswing, as the useful idiots line up behind some hair-brained scheme to get it back to profitability/sell it to someone before it finally shuttered and died. Sort of like Palm going from 2$ to 9$ when it released the Pre. Of course Palm was still dead, and it was only a takeover that saved it from insolvency (and whose value was in technology and patents, not it’s current products). When something as big as Blockbuster is sitting at .05 there is a very good chance it will have one upswing.
But now that it’s had it’s upswing i don’t have any idea where it’s going from here.
I am guessing Malathor wasn’t aboard the FNMA/FHLMC money train the past couple of days?
Doubled money this week. Pretty good for a worthless stock. Idiots are making some serious bank.
There is ONE glimmer of hope for Blockbuster in the Kiosk Wars (retail is just a dying whale). Redbox is fantastic about putting their kiosks in the least attractive areas possible. I’ve noticed that very often i just don’t want to go to a Redbox because of their location. At 10pm on a weekend i don’t really want to go to a dirty convenience store surrounded by people doing nothing but buying beer. Rebox kiosks should be packed, yet while i see them being used, they’re not used as often as they would be were they in a more friendly environment.
Ha, I missed this thread and just looked at what it had been doing. I have to get some balls on the crazy investment train, it tripled from where we were talking about it. Um, GTFO of it now, though.
So far my record:
EXEL: doubled- took 5%
DEPO: Up 60% - took 45%
FNMA: Tripled, didn’t buy, too scared
MPEL: Doubled, took 20%
MGM: Up 70%, took 10%
DYAX: Down 20%, sitting on it
Apparently I’m better at picking buys than managing holds.
How does one go about finding a financial adviser? I’ve got enough investments that I’m now over my head, and need someone to point me to the smart long-term decisions.
The right way I think is to ask your friends for references. Like what you’re doing now.
The wrong way is probably to call a brokerage and say “I want a personal investment advisor, gimme someone.”
I wouldn’t ask friends, unless they are very savvy financially. Generally people who hire financial advisers are pretty clueless about financial matters, and most do not do a good job in benchmarking their advisers.
As a starting point I would go to National Association of Personal Financial Advisor.
These are fee only advisers who don’t get compensated by putting in you in financial products that they get a commission. Instead you pay them for their expertise,which won’t be cheap $100-$250 an hour, but probably money well spent if you have a complex financial situation, involving stock options, real estate, life insurance, Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), estate planning etc. You should expect to pay $1,000-$3,000 for the initial plan and then depending on how much hand holding you require about 1/2 that per year afterwords.
There are a ton of confusing symbols that financial adviser have after their names, in general the only two that are worth a damn are CFP (certified financial planner) and CFA (chartered financial analyst). CFP is the preferred since it is focused on helping individuals. I started but didn’t finish a CFP program and it requires roughly the amount of work that my MBA required, but there is a pretty tough exam at the end that has roughly 50% pass rate.
If you aren’t dealing with particularly complicated things, i.e. how do I invest my 401K, save for my kids college, than a perfectly good alternative is to go to Vanguard. For $250 (free if you have enough assets) they will have a CFP spend a few hours evaluating your financial situation and give you specific advice on where to invest. Naturally the focus will be on Vanguard Index funds, but you could do much worse that stick your money in index funds.
Finally, I’ll put in a good word for the Early Retirement Forum. I am active member there and we are bunch of pretty financially sophisticated individuals, who are happy to provide advice, although it tends to be more in the lines of what not to do.
what’s the most effective way to use my hsa? i’m young and relatively healthy. right now it has a tiny % rate like a bank account and i use the debit card for medical expenses. it’s tax free but would i be better off setting up in a different financial institution that lets me put it in some mutual fund?
Thought of this thread as FNMA went over $2.00 today to close at $2.10. At the time of this thread it was a little over a quarter.
I assume Malathor never bought in, but I hope you ended up purchasing at some point, Houngan.
Nope, too chicken. I have a new theory of funny-money investment that I’m still trying to piece together. Most of my money is in Vanguard funds, but for the speculative stuff:
- Identify areas where there are two monolithic players
- Watch them, at least 30 or 40 examples
- Wait for a catastrophe
- Buy low, sell high
Sounds stupidly simple, but when you consider silly market swings like the Thailand floods (Could have 4x money on Western D., Seagate) or Nvidia heating problems where the market in question is completely dominated by two entities, short-range swings due to momentary catastrophes seem like a great speculation. You have a once-in-500-year flood in Thailand that massacres all of the hard drive makers; who exactly can spin up manufacturing to replace those businesses in the time it takes them to recover? No one.
This is pretty much betting against the reactionary bettors at the track. I’m still putting together a big enough list of exemplars so that it will actually have some action on a yearly basis. And as always, caveats for your real retirement money, etc. etc.
You are right on with that. The hard part is determining if they are at/near the bottom or still have further to fall.