not exactly. Yes, I agree that DJFC did a great job explaining the long term outlook of companies and explaining a very old school buy and hold forever strategy for looking at stock and how to choose. but, buying and holding until you retire is a flawed strategy, in general. Dividend yields and a steady stock can make it a viable strategy. However, in general, if you own individual stocks, you need to look at it differently. If you want to buy and hold until you retire, then buy a mutual fund and a pro manages the nderlying stocks for you.
However, my point was all based around making money in the stock market. I was addressing how the institutional investors look at a stock and how they make buy or sell decisions. Although you can analyze dividens all you want, what the institutional investors are doing will greatly impact your stock price. I was trying to explain a real world view on picking stocks and trading stocks. I don't by stocks to hold forever, I buy them to make money....period. I am only long 4 stocks right now, so I never invest in too many at one time. It's too hard to manage. I also own a mid cap mutual fund that i can let sit and grow. I was trying to point out that the traditional "brick and mortar" company valuation doesn't work for companies like Google, and there are many factors to look at, and one strong factor is the Streets opinion. Look at Google since this debate started. It started when Google was at $345 or $360 or so. As I type this, Google is trading at $437.18. even if you bought 10 shares back when we started this a month ago, you would have returned more than 21%..IN A MONTH. DJFC was so busy calling me retarded and telling me I am hard headed, yet I was pretty accurate in my assesment of GOOG and many other stocks.
As for me, I started my career as an analyst for Large Cap companies and after 8 months went to bond trading. did that for 6 yrs and got out of the business all together to sell tech and telecom for a few start ups. Got sick of that and now I work for a market data provider. I am a specialist for buy-side firms. I work with portfolio manager and analysts to get them market data and portfolio analytics and I help them make money. I help them use our toos to make better investment decisions. I work with them on how to screen stocks for selection, how to analyze stocks and also get them data to fill their quantitative models. I know I know, not nearly as qualified as DJFC, but I can only hope to do my best to one day learn the markets and company analytics like him.
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