Off the Record: What Wall Street Doesn't Want You to Know - Hardcover

Gordon, Craig; Kindel, Stephen

 
9780609607794: Off the Record: What Wall Street Doesn't Want You to Know
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0609607790 ISBN 13: 9780609607794
Verlag: Crown Pub, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

A Wall Street maverick shares the secrets of investment success as he explains the fine art of profitable intelligence gathering by spotting trends, collecting data, and understanding the current pulse of the marketplace.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Craig Gordon is the director of OTA-Off-the-Record Research, a firm providing marketplace intelligence to the investment community. Previously he was director of research for RCM Capital Management, and he has taught marketing at the University of California at Berkeley and Golden Gate University. Mr. Gordon has served on several boards of directors and is active in a charitable enterprise called the San Francisco Comicle, which raises funds for community programs. <br><br>Stephen Kindel is a former senior editor of <i>Forbes</i> and <i>Financial World</i>. <b>The One Book You Must Have to Invest in Stocks</b>

Aus dem Klappentext

t maverick shows investors how to find the next Home Depot, Cisco, or Microsoft -- before the Wall Street establishment.<br><br>When it comes time to making a major purchasing decision -- a car or house, say -- most people will do their homework and find sources of independent information to help determine whether it's a good buy. The same is true when you face a serious medical decision. Would you rely on someone touting Dr. X's skills on a television show and then call up the good doctor to arrange for an operation? Not likely.<br><br>Then why don't we do the same kind of thorough kick-the-tires research when it comes to making investing decisions that will have a big impact on our financial future?<br> <br>Many of us either don't know how or don't think we have the time. We rely instead on those we think are the experts -- the big brokerage houses, for example. But Craig Gordon has a little secret to share with you. Too many so-called investing experts don't do their homework eith

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Precision Investing

How I Find the Profitable Nuggets in the Marketplace

If you invest money in the stock markets, either through mutual funds, or directly, through a broker, you probably do the same things that other investors do. You pick up the newspaper every day, open it to the financial pages, and look up your stocks or mutual funds. Or maybe you subscribe to an Internet stock-tracking or trading service, and your portfolio comes to you on-line every fifteen minutes or so. Maybe you smile because your stocks or mutual funds are going up. Maybe you frown because they fell from the last time you looked at them. But mostly you sigh, because the market isn't giving you any clear indication as to whether you made the right choices.

Certainly, over time, if you stick with the stocks and mutual funds in which you've invested, you'll do pretty well. According to Ibbotson Associates, a Chicago-based research firm, stocks have proven to provide the best return on your money over the long haul, with the least risk. That sounds surprising because everybody knows that the stock market has had periods when it has crashed, but it's true. Stocks are a profitable, low-risk way to make your money grow over the long term.

The problem is always relative return. Are you doing better than the market averages? Better than the rate of inflation? Better than your friends? Could you be doing even better? Do you get tired of listening to other people tell you about the great stocks they bought that have gone to record levels, while your mutual funds and stocks are just barely keeping pace with the market averages? Do you get irritated when you hear stories about people making great fortunes in the market, while your stocks seem to ho-hum along? Do you begin to wonder why some people just seem to have better access to information, and why they make better investment decisions?

I'm normally pretty cheerful; but when I think about what a hard time the average investor has keeping up with the experts, I sigh just the way that you do. In fact, if I could put one of those tiny electronic chips that you find on greeting cards-the ones that sing "Happy Birthday," or some such message, into this book-I'd program my chip to heave one great big sigh every time you opened the cover. That's because I feel so sorry for the average investor.

Here's why. I run a company called OTA Off The Record Research (or just OTR) which is based in San Francisco. We supply information to large institutions that invest pension money, mutual-fund money, and private money. The information we supply is designed to help those institutions make better investment decisions, both in buying and selling stocks. OTR Research has been supplying this information for several years and, frankly, we're really pretty good at what we do. Institutions rate us among the best sources from which they regularly buy information, so I guess that means we must be doing something right.

OTR performs marketplace checks. Simply put, we have about 150 people who go out into the marketplace and find out what is going on, who is buying what, how much they are buying, and how often they buy. We look into how a company is doing relative to its competitors, and how an industry as a whole is doing. We translate that information into reports our clients then use to help them determine whether to buy or sell stocks, and which ones. It's that simple. When we do our job well, the institutions make big money and outperform the standard stock indices by which everyone measures performance. When you see a mutual fund or a pension fund that is beating the Standard & Poor's 500 index, chances are that information supplied by us helped them make a buy or sell decision which improved their performance. Even when we don't supply the information, it's probably fair to say that the fund is using a marketplace-check information model similar to ours.

I heave a sigh every time I pick up a newspaper or a business magazine because ordinary investors could be doing much the same thing that I do, and getting better returns. You'd be surprised at how little extra information I'm talking about. One good nugget per year for each of the stocks you own can propel your returns into the upper ranks of performance. Let me give you a few examples.

In the late summer of 2000, everyone was hot on Nokia, the Finnish maker of wireless telephones. It seemed as if everyone had a mobile phone, and that the growth of the industry was going to be endless-both for new subscribers, and for people upgrading their existing phones with new technology and services. People were looking at the mobile-phone market as one large market, but one of our sources pointed out that it was really several markets. There was a business-user market, where demand was stable and even rising, and a student and personal market, which was price sensitive and unstable. Our source told us that Nokia was moving aggressively into the lower end of the market and would therefore have to change its product mix and accept lower profit margins on its products. We advised our clients in July 2000 that Nokia's earnings growth was going to slow, which it did almost immediately. The stock dropped $20 per share, or 33 percent. Our clients, who had sold Nokia before it fell, were protected.

Or take our report on the cruise-line industry. For years, cruise lines have been a major growth industry, with bookings rising at double-digit rates almost every year for a decade. The two pure plays in the business, Royal Caribbean and Carnival, responded the way companies are supposed to when demand is rising: They added lots of capacity. Not only more ships, but much bigger ships, until, by late 1999, capacity began to outstrip demand, which meant that people who were booking cruises could wait longer to book them, thereby driving down the price per cabin. Both cruise lines got hit with a double whammy-they had too many unsold berths, plus they were discounting the cabins they were selling. We began advising our clients about the overcapacity crisis, even as the cruise lines were maintaining that they were selling out their ships. Our findings were in such conflict with Wall Street that some of our best clients questioned our report, until we told them to call their own travel agents and see if they could get a reservation. They could, and very soon thereafter, the entire industry suffered a steep drop in valuation.

Not all of our reports are negative. Sometimes we spot a positive trend in a negative industry. For example, in 1999, there was a lot of talk about the dangers of genetically modified (GM) food. As a result, all of the companies that made GM seeds, such as Monsanto, saw their stock prices hurt by the controversy. But then we discovered Delta and Pine Land, a company that sold GM cotton seeds. People didn't mind wearing goods made of GM cotton. They just didn't want to eat GM foods. So, while the industry as a whole was falling, the firms that bought Delta and Pine Land on our advice saw their shares appreciate 40 percent.

Sometimes we see companies do things that don't immediately make sense. For example, the beer industry has been under competitive price pressures for several years, as the large beer makers-Anheuser-Busch and Philip Morris (Miller) slug it out for incremental market share. As a result, the stocks of both companies remained low because they could not improve their margins. But then during 1999, we noticed that Anheuser-Busch-which makes Budweiser and Michelob-would periodically raise prices in a single region of the United States. If a competitor did not raise them as well, A-B would cut their prices. But if the competitor did not challenge them, the higher prices would stick. We went positive on Anheuser-Busch because we felt that both sides of the beer war wanted and needed profits...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Crown Pub
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0609607790
ISBN 13 
9780609607794
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar