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Mark Cuban On Story Stocks

  
  Education
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Don’t Miss to Read :
Different catalysts matter for the different time frames. In short-term perspective, price momentum is the most powerful catalyst. Short-term could sometimes be a couple years in the market. Here are a few wise words, written in 2004, by someone who has been on both sides of the table – as a shareholder and company owner:

For years, a company’s price can have less to do with a company’s real prospects than with the excitement it and its supporters are able to generate among investors. That lesson was reinforced as I saw the Gandalf experience repeated with many different stocks over the next 10 years. Brokers and bankers market and sell stocks. Unless demand can be manufactured, the
stock will decline.
If the value of a stock is what people will pay for it, then Broadcast.com was fairly valued. We were able to work with Morgan Stanley to create volume around the stock. Volume creates demand. Stocks don’t go up because companies do well or do poorly. Stocks go up and down depending on supply and demand. If a stock is marketed well enough to create more demand from buyers than there are sellers, the stock will go up. What about fundamentals? Fundamentals is a word invented by sellers to find buyers. (more…)

15 Rules for Stock Market Traders-Investors

  
  Education
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1. Reward is ALWAYS relative to Risk: If any product or investment sounds like it has lots of upside, it also has lots of risk. (If you can disprove this, there is a Nobel waiting for you).

2. Overly Optimistic Assumptions: Imagine the worst case scenario. How bad is it? Now multiply it by 3X, 5X 10X, 100X. Due to your own flawed wetware, cognitive preferences, and inherent biases, you have a strong disinclination – even an inability — to consider the true, Armageddon-like worst case scenario.

3. Legal Docs protect the preparer (and its firm), not you: Ask yourself this question: How often in the history of modern finance has any huge legal document gone against its drafters? PPMs, Sales agreement, arbitration clauses — firms put these in to protect themselves, not your organization. An investment that requires a 50-100 page legal document means that legal rights accrue to the firms that underwrote the offering, and not you, the investor. Hard stop, next subject.

4. Asymmetrical Information: In all negotiated sales, one party has far more information, knowledge and data about the product being bought and sold. One party knows its undisclosed warts and risks better than the other. Which person are you?

5. Motivation: What is the motivation of the person selling you any product? Is it the long term stability and financial health of your organization — or their own fees and commissions?

6. Performance: Speaking of long term health: How significantly do the fees, taxes, commissions, etc., impact the performance of this investment vehicle over time?

7. Shareholder obligation: All publicly traded firms (including iBanks) have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to maximize profits. This is far greater than any duty owed to you, the client. Ask yourself: Does this  product benefit the S/Hs, or my organization? (This is acutely important for untested products).

8. Other People’s Money (OPM): When handing money over to someone to manage, understand the difference between self-directed management and OPM. What hidden incentives are there to take more risk than would otherwise exist if you were managing your own assets? (more…)

Trending Value Metrics by O’Shaughnessy

  
  Education
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James O’Shaughnessy is a well known “value quant” for his book What Works on Wall Street (4th Ed). He has a new column in Marketwatch discussing what he calls  “the top stock-market strategy of the past 50 years.”

According to Jim, using a combination of value and momentum strategies — “Trending Value” — is the best performing strategy since 1963. To capture this, he ranks stocks based on:

• Price-to-Sales
• Price-to-Earnings
• Price-to-Book
• Price-to-Cash Flow
• EBITDA/Enterprise Value
• Shareholder yield (dividend yield + rate of share repurchases)

O’Shaughnessy ranks all of these on a 1-100 basis for his Trending Value portfolio. He works with the top 10% of those ranked stocks with the best composite score. He selects a concentrated portfolio of 25 stocks based on trailing six-month momentum, creating an extremely cheap group of stocks that are on the mend.

Its an interesting ideas, one worth exploring . . .

The Inviolable Rules for Traders

  
  Education
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1. Reward is always relative to risk: If any product or investment sounds as if it has lots of upside, it also has lots of risk. If you can disprove this, there is a Nobel Prize waiting for you.

2. Asymmetrical information: In all negotiated sales, one party has far more information, knowledge and experience about the product being bought and sold. One party knows its undisclosed warts and risks better than the other. Which party are you?

3.Good advice is priceless: I know, easier said than done. The Street buys the best legal talent, mathematicians and strategists that money can buy. Make sure you have expert advisers and lawyers working for you as well.

4. Motivation:Always ask, what is the motivation of the outfit selling me this product? Is it the long-term stability and financial health of my organization — or their own fees and commissions?

5. Legal documents are created to protect the preparer (and its firm), not you or yours: In the history of modern finance, no large legal document has worked against its drafters. Private placement memorandums, sales agreement, arbitration clauses — firms use these to protect themselves, not you.

6. Performance: How significantly do the fees, interest rates commissions, etc., have an impact on the performance of this investment vehicle over time? Determining for yourself what the actual cost of money is will avoid more heartache in the future.

7. Shareholder obligation: All publicly traded firms (including investment banks and bond underwriters) have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to maximize profits. This is far greater than any duty owed of care to you, the client. Always ask yourself whether this new product benefits the shareholders or your organization. (This is acutely important for untested products.)

8. Reputational risk: Who suffers if this investment goes down the drain? Who gets fired or voted out of office if this blows up? Who suffers reputational risk?

9. Keep it simple, stupid (KISS): It’s easy to make things complicated, but it’s very challenging to make them simple. The more complexity brought to a problem, the greater the potential for things to go awry — not just astray, but very, very wrong.

10. There is no free lunch: Repeat after me: There is no free money, no riskless trade, no way to turn lead into gold. If you remember no other rule, this is the one that will save your hide time and again.

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