Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I completely agree with Business Week. This stock market is oversold.

For instance, Yahoo is definitely worth more than a 16 X P/E, no internet company of Yahoo's reach and size should be worth 16 X P/E. $2B in cash, $4B in liquid assets, and only $2B in liabilities. $1B in profit, every quarter. It's just a function of the rest of the world going online and using existing web portals, a lot of them are going to use Yahoo. That, or they'll receive another offer for a buyout, which is highly possible.

Another good stock buying technique is to buy small chunks of the stock market over a set amount of time, I believe this is called "averaging down". It relies on the fact that you don't know where the bottom will be, so it averages that risk across multiple investments, which is a lot safer than just placing 1 bet for where you think the bottom will be. I think that if you were to average down into a leveraged index ETF right now (ie. MVV), you'll be making buttloads of money in 5-10 years, with an averaging down investment schedule to take the money you want to invest, and split that investment up over a 2 year span.

Of course, I'm just a lowly tech entrepreneur that has also lost a little bit of money in this recent downturn, so what do I know, haha



I heard that the strategy of investing the same amount of money every month ("stock goes up, good, stock goes down, you just bought more shares, good") is not actually a very good strategy at all. Supposedly, brokers use it to get you to spend money with them on a regular basis, especially if the fund or broker makes commission or a fee per trade.


I think it's called "Dollar Cost Averaging." One trade a month, especially with a discount broker, is not going to break your bank. It also has the advantage of not being subject to your emotions, and emotions are responsible for untold billions of investor losses.


How could it possibly be a good strategy?


It's all about risk minimization. Assume for a second that you don't read the news and all you see are numbers. (This kind of scenario is kind fairly accurate for most investors because most investors don't beat the index, so they might as well be news agnostic anyways.) Right now, in our hypothetical, you want to invest in the market. You saw that it fell 30 odd % since the top and that if you compare that % to previous great depressions and recessions, it's on par with the bottom of those analogous situations. If you buy in at one single point, you have a high risk that the stock market will drop and you'll lose a lot of money. But if you averaged in, you'll minimize the risk of catching the exact bottom of the stock market, and overall, should increase the average buy-in price.

The main reason why this works as opposed to just reading the news and choosing based on logic is because more than 50% of professional investors fail to out-invest the index. That means that you have a much better chance of catching the lowest buy-in to the stock market than if you were to use "logic".

It's pretty counter-intuitive, but it makes sense if you just come to the realization that we're not that good investing.


The line of thinking is that you spend the same amount of money every month buying the same stock/investment. Since you're making multiple purchases, you are reducing the risk of a steep drop off in your stock since the price paid for all your investments will be averaged over a period of time.

I've also heard that there are no significant benefits to this strategy, although I haven't done very much research on it.


> $1B in profit, every quarter.

Well that's gross profit, which isn't really profit at all.

Their net profit for the recent quarter was 131.22 million and $600 million for 2007, a far cry from the 4 billion you specify.

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:YHOO


I said they have $4 B of liquid assets on their balance sheet.

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=yhoo

(Oh yeah, MS rumors to buy Yahoo, I called it before it happened! haha)


I was referring to this line from your post: > $1B in profit, every quarter. The 4 Billion comes from the $1B you specify in each quarter x 4:)

No worries:)




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: