Today I bought stocks

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 15, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Hello everyone, Just a quick note to let all of you know that for the first time in about 4 years I bought U.S. equities today. Absolutely everything is on sale. We are talking about businesses whose future prospects remain strong for the far foreseeable future that are trading at prices not seen since the 1970s. More specifically I am talking about the P/E ratios (a valuation shorthand) being...
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Fear

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 14, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments In this posting I wanted to address the bizarre, ominous and ponderous fear that is hovering over the financial markets. Where is all of this coming from? Do you remember early on I wrote a piece about the fact that around 60% of all U.S. equities were owned by institutional investors? These folks are insurance companies, pension companies, and investment companies (i.e. mutual funds). The...
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Re- retail sales

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 14, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments OK, you probably saw, or heard, that retail sales were down 2.7% in December according to the Commerce Department. And you probably saw that the DJIA, due to the retail sales figures and banking industry problems, was down 2.9%. All I can say is: “Give me a break!” Yes, I know that things are seemingly really scary out there, but the end of the world is not upon us. It is as if the...
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Plan Obama

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 12, 2009 in Blog | 2 comments Another post. Today almost-President Barack Obama announced plans to create 212,000 jobs by creating digitizing healthcare records for the nation over the next 5 years. This suggestion is an effort to help revive the economy and it appears that it is being met with skepticism from the press. Part of the skepticism is that the task is extremely technical in nature. Another source of skepticism is...
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Weapons of mass destruction

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 12, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Hello everyone – I hope that each of you had a relaxing and rejuvenating weekend! I typically don’t like to write about politics because it is typically beyond the scope of the blog. I really only feel qualified to comment when political issues touch on business and investing issues. But today is an exception, and it has to do with the (dreaded) Iraqi weapons of mass destruction,...
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December’s unemployment report

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 9, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Happy Friday to everyone! I wanted to comment on Friday’s announcement of December ’08 unemployment figures. The absolute number of jobs lost was 524,000. Those lost jobs caused the unemployment rate to jump up to 7.2%, a 16-year high. In addition the media outlets are all reporting the total number of jobs lost in 2008 as 2.6 million, “…the most since World War II ended...
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In to intuition

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 6, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments I wanted to comment about the story from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that I excerpted here on the blog. Namely, I wanted to highlight the fact that the author of the story has an implicit mistrust of intuition. This is a continual source of frustration for me as a former, and successful, professional investor. Our culture is one that does not respect the powerful information that comes...
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