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Home > What, ho! Some curiosity and nonsense from Paulette

What, ho! Some curiosity and nonsense from Paulette

March 2nd, 2015 at 06:00 pm

"Your tax refund is scheduled to be mailed by March 6, 2015. If you do not receive the refund by April 3, 2015, please contact us again. We are unable to take any action until then."

First and second mortgage balances sum to under $100,000.

I may re-register for the Motley Fool website. I had an account long ago but forgot my password and no longer have the email account I used for registering. I ask questions that are not in scope, I guess, for the Investing Forum here on SavingAdvice.com. Imagine anyone wanting to know how to evaluate stocks and time their purchases based on value and projected value!

Some of my brain is no longer accessible due to repeat head trauma, so I think wrong things like a stock price is determined on buyer and seller. So when stocks go up, that's due to higher demand, and less supply, and because sellers bid up the price. So when stock prices rise, it's due to transactions, more accurately, more buyers than sellers, more demand than supply. Someone must be bidding these stocks past fair value. Someone must be buying stock that appears overvalued and thinking that is not the case. How are they evaluating those purchases? How do they determine how much growth there is for a stock? I know people were buying $400K houses in Stockton, California in the mid 2000s, so I know there's a market for overvalued properties and assets. You will never convince me nobody on SavingAdvice.com ever bought anything overvalued without thinking the values were going to rise and coming up with a reason other than "buy now or be priced out forever." Heck, I've done it a few times with stocks. How do people know when or decide when they're going to buy something expensive? How do people determine condos in Manhattan or San Francisco or Vancouver or Hong Kong are a good deal? Or $400K houses in Stockton, California?

Visa and Monster have still gone up today, which suggests to me (remember, I am brain-damaged) that demand is still high. These companies' stock prices must come down sometime. Juniper Networks, Lucent, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, IBM all went down from high-flying PE multiples at some point. All I know is my fear that if I buy Visa now it'll tank 10% one week after I buy it, because I missed some timing signals. If I buy Monster now it'll tank 30% in a month because only after the buy transaction comes through will there be major announcements about how people with hypertension shouldn't touch it.

I'd had my eye on some stocks but they're overvalued to me. I keep thinking Starbucks, Amazon, Costco, VISA, Monster Beverage are overvalued, but lots of people don't feel that way. Look at the volumes from Friday February 27 2015: 4,311,727; 2,458,964 (58.6% of volume); 3,030,124; 1,982,831 (actually under average volume); 6,210,450 (6.3x normal volume for MNST). Even though I suspect Monster Beverages, and 5-Hour Performance Energy shots contributed to my brother's untimely demise, and the demise of young people, its ubiquity suggests lots of people have as great a death wish or the belief that as long as the beverage ingredients are listed and they include vitamins, no blood clots could ever show up in the lungs nor would cardiac arrest ever happen, because energy drinks are for active people. Every time I see Monster cans or tiny bottles of 5 Hour Performance at the drug store or supermarket I think of my grey-faced brother in his casket, the little altar of Asahi beer and Monster Beverage, his grieving widow, and his four-year-old boy. Everyone sees something different I suppose. Cancer deaths make sense to me, heart attacks from a half-century of smoking make sense to me, pulmonary thromboembolism deaths for non-smoking people who run, bicycle, do yoga, lift weights dropping dead at 44 do not make sense to me if energy drink consumption is not a risk factor. It must be my head trauma preventing me from making sense of this death, like it prevents me from figuring out the right time to buy high-PE stocks. Yeah, that's the ticket.

2 Responses to “What, ho! Some curiosity and nonsense from Paulette”

  1. snafu Says:
    1425336993

    You are attempting to apply logic where little logic exists and frustrating yourself. For the most part, stocks are bought and sold on emotion with a glance at the P/E ratios. Often Mutual Fund managers or Pension Fund managers are buying on a random conversion, observation or desperation to save their desired bonus...don't you think. One rational spot might be to check buy/sell lists from insiders. When the CFO is buying or selling it is usually based on some factual knowledge...I think. When Janet Yellen talks about interest rates or a particular industry there are clues to be followed.

    One way around it is to decide on your allocation, buy low cost Index Funds or ETFs via DCA for 20 + years and hope you won't need to withdraw in a bad [2009] cycle

  2. PauletteGoddard Says:
    1425338554

    snafu, you're right. I don't know how to function in an illogical universe and come out ahead. Either that or I'm unwilling. Something must change.

    I've got 17% of my Roth IRA in cash right now. I just checked a dozen blue-chip stocks' fundamentals and they're all higher than my comfort level and risk tolerance. I'm sitting on index funds and value-weighted index ETFs for the most part. The only stock I'd put money in right now is General Electric, because I have a Direct Purchase Plan for General Electric and its dividend yield is higher than the interest on two of my debts.

    I am now registered at the Motley Fool website with a new account, but there's little to no traffic there either.

    Thanks for the helpful suggestion to look at insider activity. GE has a stock buyback program at present, another reason possibly to add to my DPP.

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