Moon Kil Woong's  Instablog

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I am not a lover of buying stocks that have had 20-30-50-or 100% runs up on. Especially in a market like this. Because of this I can't really add to my CAT or XIDE holding.

Recently I bought two very decent stocks that have yet to run up significantly. DHR and AMGN. DHR is a conglomerate with decent management and an aquisition strategy which hasn't participated in the run-up but has not melted down either. I suppose stability doesn't pay as much as blind reckless business models in this run-up. AMGN is a laggard in the pharma area due to lack of recent wonder drugs. It's osteoperosis drug should get approval soon which will help out but the main issue is that it's revenues are acceptable as well as it's gross margins. It is not a sexy stock, but that's why it's still a good value.

So why haven't I added to SYT which has only moved up marginally. Actually Cramer is absolutely wrong in saying farmers will not pay for good seeds before paying for other things. Good seeds add to grop yield and often add to the price they can sell their crops for. Although I'd like to buy more just to spite him, I prefer diversity when I see multiple good values.

Which leaves my laggard, IXYS. Although I was recently dissapointed in their drop in sales, I still like exposure in this field and will look to buy at a lower price once management becomes confident that sales will accelerate again provided the price does not rise accordingly. All thinks in life are not certain and even i am fallible (although I still feel that I will do ok holding this position in the long run). 

I appreciate people who are interested in my positions and welcome any rational feedback or opinions on them. If you wish to buy any of these I suggest you check up on them thoroughly. I completely hold to the view not to take other people's word for the responsibilities in investment I should do myself and advise others to hold those views as well.

All other holdings of mine predate disclosure on Seeking Alpha, thus I will only feel the need to disclose them if I should decide to comment on them in the future.

Seldom do I write a blog or post merely because those on Seeking Alpha do such a splendid job at covering all bases. However, the fact that CalPers has sued Moody's, Fitch, and Standard & Poor for providing perfect triple AAA credit ratings on junk close to when it was trading as junk ticked me so much I felt it necessary to comment.

Remember CalPers represents the biggest public pension fund for the public employees of California which is effectively bankrupt and is now coining their own fiat money which equates to IOUs. If it wasn't from a big and important group representing the employees of the State with the biggest GDP which is in dire straits, this issue would go to the courts and be passed off in favor of the ratings agencies in a ruling roughly equating to "Nice try but you're little people." 

However, as is, the court system run by California employees is not liable to deny a fair hearing. This is bad for the ratings agencies. Most likely, the unseemly face of how ratings agencies get bribed to rate debt issues will be revealed yet again. But instead of it being spoken of mockingly by a few on Seeking Alpha, it will be served up to thousands of  public employees that right now already feeling a bit angry at what government is not doing (even though they are in it).

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"This is the way the world ends. Not in a bang but a whimper." T.S. Elliott.

Why am I drawn to this poetic line when thinking about our current financial crisis? Actually this is a crisis of conscious more than anything else. Perhaps I am lamenting the end of capitalism by a thousand cuts. The parsing up of risk and reward and arbitrary and corrupt redistribution of financial wealth we are seeing today.

Sure, people say this is necessary in order to save our economy that we bail out too big to fail corporations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Then of course by the same measure bail out too big to fail banks. Then bail out too big to fail derivatives/Insurance companies like AIG. And yet, by doing so we loose ourselves and our moral compass. It is no wonder that we find ourselves allowing the unconscionable to occur afterwards. We force big banks to eat one another to become even bigger while failing to prevent the greediest and worst culprit Citibank from shrinking. Likewise, we embrace Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and ask them to do exactly what got them to go under in the first place, sell mortgages at artificially low rates to people who maybe shouldn’t buy a house. And what happens, they start gobbling up marketshare with even greater added risk to the taxpayer even though the Treasury said they wanted to see them get smaller not larger to lower endemic risk.

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