dilettantedude

http://www.integrityfunds.com

12 Comments

    • ON: Thu Oct 9th 14:37 PM
      Commented on:
      Deflation Changes the Rules
      debt and asset destruction are inherently deflationary. i don't think all the new debt is about to be monetized yet. the government is simply creating debt, selling it, and buying other debt with the cash. it isn't buying goods and services or employing lots of people or raising wages, so i don't see how it can be inflationary until it starts increasing demand relative to capacity. good luck on that. it's a problem i wish we had.
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    • ON: Mon Jul 7th 23:25 PM
      Commented on:
      Cash Flows, Earnings Quality, & Stock Returns
      first of all, anyone who values a stock based on quarterly, instead of estimated annual, FCF is an idiot. accruals vary greatly from quarter to quarter, and more so in seasonal companies. quarterly numbers contain a great deal of noise and little information, other than maybe being positive.

      the FCF methodology makes sense from another viewpoint, also. wall street, and most other analysts, focus on EPS. because they do, that's what public companies manage. wall street does not focus on FCF, so it's a fairer representation of the true profitability of a company. all you have to do to see this is to graph FCF and EPS over several years. you can lay a ruler along the EPS bars, while the FCF bars jump all over the place.

      nevertheless, a company with FCF/share consistently higher than EPS is almost by definiton being undervalued. it doesn't necessarily mean it's cheap, but clearly if real money/share is greater than manipulated EPS, and real money thus gets a lower multiple than "wall street money," something's wrong somewhere.
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    • ON: Mon Jul 7th 22:49 PM
      Commented on:
      The World's Revenge
      for the wingnuts who are bound by ignorance to bleat about how high taxes will wreck the us economy, let me point out that the greatest flowering of entreprenurial spirit and technological genius was in the US in the 1950s and 1960s when marginal income tax rates were between 80% and 94%. you know, putting a man on the moon? xerox, polaroid, antibiotics, the first real computers, the internet? it was a period when we paid for the enormous infrastructure this country required after ww ii - hospitals, schools, water and sewage treatment plants, roads, bridges, government buildings, etc. etc. etc. it was paid for up front, using high taxes, with a constant, low level of government debt throughout the period, no borrowing from the chinese or our grandchildren to have our goodies today. it was a more moral, more responsible generation than today's wingnuts, one that understood that a citizen paid his own way up front for his own benefits with his own taxes, and paid for his children's benefits as well to leave them better off, instead of stealing from them like the republiban has done through the scam of taxes that are too low to even maintain our childrens' living standards, never mind improve them. sheesh! ignorance of history is no excuse for selfishness and greed.
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    • ON: Tue Jun 17th 11:08 AM
      Commented on:
      2 Reasons to Hold a U.S. Stocks-Dominated Portfolio
      This is simply ignorance of history. The Roman REPUBLIC declined because they spent too much on war, and allowed their favorite sons to begin evading the historic obligation of every political leader to serve his country in the army. They were able to pay the poor to serve in their place, and thus began the internal social and moral rot that within little more than 50 years ended the Republic. Discussing the fall of the Empire is irrelevant to where the US is today. You should stick to at least remotely comparable periods, and read some history instead of just assuming everyone who disagrees with you does so because they read Gibbon. You should also try reading Jane Jacobs on Cities and the Wealth of Nations, among many others, and educate yourself about the source of wealth creation before you start pontificating about how the US can thrive regardless of other circumstances. Then try some objective thinking instead of just being a brainless cheerleader.
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    • ON: Mon Jun 2nd 09:53 AM
      Commented on:
      'Index Speculators' Hoarding Commodities
      I'm always baffled by anyone who thinks instutions and other speculators can 'hoard' futures contracts. Do these people believe the hedgers and university endowments and union pension funds are actually taking delivery of tons of wheat or ships full of oil???

      Look, they buy 6 month futures contracts. A month before expiration they sell them and buy more 6 months (or whatever) contracts. There is no hoarding. There is no net buying. The futures buys and sells exactly cancel each other out. This means that futures prices must converge to cash prices in the spot market each day.

      Next time you hear someone blame rising commodities prices on futures speculation, ask them to explain that.
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    • ON: Thu May 8th 12:25 PM
      Commented on:
      The WSJ Is Wrong on the Housing Crisis
      anyone who would rely on the wsj editorial page for objective information would walk into a village of cannibals and ask "what's for dinner?"
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    • ON: Thu Apr 17th 12:34 PM
      Commented on:
      Tinkering with Inflation Calculations: The “Pollyanna Creep” Phenomenon
      The Romans debased their hard currency because they didn't have statistics to debase.
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    • ON: Thu Apr 17th 12:34 PM
      Commented on:
      Tinkering with Inflation Calculations: The “Pollyanna Creep” Phenomenon
      The Romans debased their hard currency because they didn't have statistics to debase.
      View article »
    • ON: Sun Mar 30th 12:05 PM
      Commented on:
      Get Out of Commodities - Barron's
      This article seems to deny the reality that the BRICs really are building out their infrastructure. It's an enormous build-out, and it takes huge amounts of natural resources and it will go on for decades. It's just getting started. Sure, there will be ups and downs around the trend line, but this is NOT like the dot.com or the real estate bubble. It's productive demand exceeding available resources and with a long term tail wind.
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    • ON: Mon Mar 17th 10:04 AM
      Commented on:
      Waiting for McDermott International to Correct
      McDermott earned $700 m in free cash flow in 2007. If one assumes 0% growth in all their businesses for 2008 & 2009, then 14.5% for 2010, declining by 0.5% annually for the next 3 years, then growth at 9% for the following 5 years, an estimate of fair value based on free cash flow (NOT earnings!) is approximately $57/share. These are very pessimistic estimates for 2008 - '09. One can arrive at a fairly wide range of fair value estimates depending upon one's assumptions about growth in the energy markets, but estimates would seem to be heavily biased toward fair value or below at the current price.
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    • ON: Fri Mar 7th 12:39 PM
      Commented on:
      Comparing Income Taxes: Clinton vs. Bush
      you also completely ignore, because you cannot explain, the big increase in the Gini index (a global metric for how evenly income is distributed) for the US, which is now approaching that of Mexico and China and is no longer at the level one expects of more civilized societies.
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    • ON: Fri Mar 7th 12:36 PM
      Commented on:
      Comparing Income Taxes: Clinton vs. Bush
      this is an ignorant approach to taxes. it ignores the other side of the equation, which is whether taxes (income) offset the depretiation in the national stock of resources, physical infrastructure, local, state & federal institutions of government such as local schools to the NIH, and so forth. Clearly it doesn't, so Bush's low taxes (and Clinton's as well), create a hidden tax, expressed by the deterioration of the indices of a civilized, free society. This hidden tax falls far more heavily on the poor, because they depend on these institutions and this infrastructure to a greater degree, and have less flexibility to adapt to deterioration.
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