Have a question in mind that you think is so dumb you’re embarrassed to ask it? That’s what we’re here for today!
This bonus post was inspired by a reader who wanted to know “where to ask a dumb question” here on Stock Gumshoe… and while his question was not actually stupid, and I’m happy to see questions pop up in our comment threads anywhere on the site, I thought it would be a great idea to open the floor and be more welcoming for the shy, the embarrassed, or, yes, even the uninformed.
So this is a no-judgement zone… smart people do things we’d call “dumb” all the time: Warren Buffett didn’t invest in Google in 2004, Albert Einstein married his cousin, and I just had to go back and double check that I didn’t call him Alfred Einstein (which I’ve done before, in print). So if you have that question that you can’t ask your stockbroker or your brother-in-law or Twitter without feeling like a dummy, let ‘er rip by submitting it below. I’ll be nice… and we might all learn something.
And yes, the SEC is always watching, so I must remind you that I can’t give personal investment advice… but I’ll try to share whatever opinion or answers I can provide to any investment-related question you’ve got, though if we end up with a lot of them it might take me a little while to answer thoughtfully.
So please, let your questions fly using the friendly little comment box below… and thanks for being the best readers in cyberspace!
(I will moderate the discussion just to make sure we don’t get too much profanity or offensive stuff, or personal attacks, but I’ll use a light hand — you can be mean to me if you like, just don’t be mean to any other participants.)
I may have the dumbest question … and I probably know the answer … something about “a free lunch”. But sometimes I still ask myself, “How do these guys, allegedly brilliant investors that have made countless millions for themselves and their followers, that hype and perpetrate totally baseless and merit-free stocks with the endless “”6,431% profits””, etc.”, get away with that crap? If a hard working, educated, albeit not even close to market savvy guy like me still gets sucked in from time to time, how much pain have some of these low-life’s inflicted on us poor, gullible suckers?
I guess that’s two questions but seriously, is there any line these dirt bags can’t cross?
Remember what tabloid newspapers and trash magazines were like when the general public used to buy/read them? Methinks that when technology caused people to lose their jobs in those media, they took their un-journalistic skills to writing for hyperbolic newsletters. Not that much of stretch, really, considering that they just have to follow the same script: Thousand percent gains in the headline, followed by screenshots of their alleged accounts as proof, further followed by numerous testimonials living a retired life to die for, how they made money on big-name stocks when these were once going for pennies…rinse and repeat for the next newsletter.
So if trash newspapers and mags saw no problem in crossing lines before, why can’t they now under a different collar, same dog? I see a bigger problem in that they clog the sucker’s Inbox, and when they they’re unsubscribed to, they get replaced by something similar, thanks to all that data mining and sharing.
Don’t worry about Einstein. He’s not bothered by some getting his name wrong. Of course, then, there’s Joe Theismann who said something like “There’s no geniuses in football. A real genius is a guy like NORMAN Einstein.” What do you think of rebalancing a portfolio? Are there any reliable studies that validate its worth? It just doesn’t make sense to sell your winners to buy your losers, unless, of course, your winners have stopped rising and your losers have stopped falling. Even then, shouldn’t you have already sold your losers by then using a stop?
With all the hype about marijuana stocks, have U seen or heard about the Qualcomm of pot? Supposedly the pot stock of Silicon Valley!!
Is there really solid data that buy and hold is a better long term strategy? I guess you’d have to ask, better than what? The alternative is short term trading, or putting in stop loss orders to limit losses in a particular year. Whenever volatility increases, we get loads of advice articles telling us to hold on; on the other side are a few people trying to sell subscriptions claiming they predicted this or that market crash and got their clients out.
The second question involves individual stocks in a portfolio after they have dropped a lot and the analysts change their ratings — this seems to me like it would generally be a bad time to sell, but then some companies do go out of business, not just out of favor.
Are Options a good idea if you study how to invest via them?
JAMES ALTUCHERIS OVERLOADING MY INBOX WITH crypto news. He clams to have made Manny$$$$ on these currencies, and will teach you to trade and make millions. I have learned a little about some of the Crypto’s but does anyone have any experience with him.
Overloading doesn’t even begin to describe it. I bought in because his initial ad was that he would use his expertise to tell us which cryptos to buy, but I don’t remember ever getting that advise; what he drowns you with is “Love yourself” sermons.
Same here with supposed cyrpto advise but that boils down to (paraphrase) “and I advise my readers to buy the dips in bitcoin and Ethereum” every month and stock play I think.
If you pay something like $1500 to $2000 you will get those extra crypto picks supposedly…the HOTTEST PICK in 2018 was the latest tease for his Crypto Insider type level. Which probably gives you new newsletter teasing a level above *that* one for $xxxxx.xx
And it’s guaranteed or you money back worded so that they only have to send you a free year of his newletter if it doesn’t double in value. but, again, it sounds like a money back guarantee.
Disillusioned
Travis why do you own so much Berkshire in your portfolio when returns are in par with the S&P500 and BRK pays no dividends?
Michael Robinson touting NanoCrystal technology. What’s the stock?
https://pro.moneymappress.com/p/NVXELC39TIM/LNVXU514/?SID=wp-tinycompany%2cPatriots+4+Life&iris=848551&h=true
Dear Travis,
There are plenty articles claiming that blockchain technology will change our life like internet. Often comparison is made betweein current situation in cryptos and internaet in 2nd half of 90’s. Till now the main known application of blockchain is mining different currency tokens. What are the other applications and what are the main players. Do you invest in any blockchain stocks different than cryptos?
There’s a lot of great info out there if you can spend some time Google’ing. Blockchain as a technology is going to drastically simplify, (and often boost security for a lot of processing and supply chains. Boring stuff in most cases, but it’s a huge part of world wide business, everything from medical records to tracking food products farm-to-shelf and certainly in the financial industry where lots of numbers need to be reconciled.
The best example I’ve come across so far was Walmart’s second successful foray into testing blockchain tech;
“One day last December, Frank Yiannas went to a Walmart store near company headquarters in Fayetteville, Ark., and picked up a package of sliced mangoes. Yiannas is Walmart’s vice president of food safety, and the fruit was part of a crucial experiment. He brought the mangoes back to his office, placed the container on a conference table, and gave his team a mission. “Find out where those mangoes came from,” he ordered, setting a timer.
It took six days, 18 hours, and 26 minutes to get an answer. That’s better than the weeks it can sometimes take companies, Yiannas says. Still, a near-week is a long time. In the event of an outbreak of foodborne illness—one in which a suspected pathogen is tied to mangoes somewhere—a lag that long could be painfully costly. By that point, Walmart might have had to pull every package of every mango product off its shelves, as a precaution; farmers, distributors, and Walmart itself would take the hit.”
***NOW After running their second successful pilot program for the mangos;***
“A few months after the fact, Yiannas repeats a version of the IBM demo for me. He enters a six-digit “lot” number on a web portal. In an instant, the mangoes’ identifying details appear on-screen: Mango spears, 10 ounces, “Tommy” variety (a cultivar optimized for transport). The fruit was harvested April 24 from orchards in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. A day later, the fruit underwent hot-water treatment to exterminate the eggs of potentially invasive insects. On April 27, an importer received the shipment; after a few more days, it passed through Customs and Border Protection, entering a U.S. processing plant where they were sliced on May 1. From there, the mangoes moved to a cold storage facility in Los Angeles (you can pull up a safety inspection certificate with a click of a mouse). Finally, the lot arrived at a Walmart store.
The time it took to compile and present all this information: about two seconds. (It clocked a similar time when Yiannas demonstrated it at Walmart’s annual shareholder meeting this summer.) In the event of an E. coli or salmonella outbreak, the difference between two seconds and six-plus days can be decisive, even lifesaving. But in the context of a supply chain, a blockchain is far more than an emergency measure: The granular, secure records in the system could help prevent fraud, and provide an easy-to-use interface for executives to keep tabs on the flow of goods, as well as for regulators to peek under the hood when necessary.”
Dear Investor Clouseau,
Thx, very illustrative example and personally I do believe that the blockchain technology is disruptive approach to the financial qnd contracting world. I am prepared to invest in a blockchain stock s which are different than cryptos. However I do realize that there is a big risk related to it. My question to the Gumshoe community is what are the investing worthy public companies out there.
What are the Chinese stocks going into the MCSI?
Dear Travis,
First I want to say you guys are the best and I have a lot of respect for you guys. I wasted a lot of money on pricey newsletters, and the majority of them are just junks out there.
My stupid question is what is your personal opinion about Paul Mampilly? I think his Extreme Fortunes service is the biggest scam of all time. Now he is promoting an even bigger scam service called the “Million Dollar portfolio”. Even more expensive and of course no refunds allowed. They even added the part where there is no time frame in terms of when they can deliver results.
Are they any decent investment newsletters out there anymore?
I want to hear your take on it. Anyone else who also has an opinion or comment, please feel free to chime in as well.
Thanks.
I think any of the newsletters out there will always have bad picks. They will always have some people that made some money off of them and others that lost. I don’t expect there is any one letter that will constantly outperform year after year. But I would sure say that Gumshoe is one of the best and cheapest places to glean a lot of what’s out there. Good luck!
I’ve never met him. In general, the most successful newsletters are successful because of marketing, not just stock-picking performance.
I expect that every newsletter ad overstates the editor’s
brilliance, and exaggerates that editor’s opinions and predictions. I expect most newsletters are probably more sane and reasonable (and maybe educational) than you’d think after reading the ads… and dramatically less successful on a short-term trading basis.
Does not meeting Mamphilly mean you have no opinion regarding what he espouses in his newsletter pitches which is reasonable to assume you have seen? I think you dodged the question, am I wrong?
The answer I have is this.
Paul specified TER a ffurtherw years ago. I did buy options on this and made over 75%
Did not gt out in time (GREED), so I have lost 1/2 the profits. He also recommended NVDA and MSFT. Both are doing well.
I did not subscribe further. Kash
With long term interest rates rising, should we be talking about buying puts on home builders? They seem to only be down 50% of their low a year ago, or do we believe that trade is done?
I wouldn’t assume that relationship over any period of time that’s short enough to reasonably speculate on put options — there’s a lot more that goes into driving demand for homes than just the mortgage rate. Certainly housing stocks might go down if houses get less affordable, but demand for housing remains extremely robust even with interest rates off their lows, and there can be some of the opposite impact… if people start to really think that mortgage rates will rise over a long period of time, they might rush to buy homes.
It’s been a long time since we had a real “tightening cycle” for interest rates, but by way of illustration here’s what Lennar, Toll Brothers and D. R. Horton did from summer 2004 to summer 2006, when the fed funds rate was being ratcheted up from 1% to about 5%, and when the 2-year note (the yellow line) almost doubled in yield. You can see that they did well early on in the cycle, with most of them outperforming the S&P 500 for the first year or so of tightening, but came down a bit later…. when we were just starting to notice the worrisome aspects of the housing bubble:
Dear Travis i just wanted to know your thoughts on a company name Alteryx (ayx) The mutley fools say it’s a buy.
I haven’t ever spent any time researching this one, on the surface it has pretty impressive growth numbers but also requires pretty heavy spending on selling and back-office/R&D work for what is essentially a high-gross-margin software product. Analysts are expecting them to roughly double sales from 2017 to 2019 without becoming any more profitable — so in a fast-changing world, that makes me nervous… mostly because I would have to know the company much better and understand what differentiates them from the competition before I’d be wiling to pay that much (12X sales) for a relatively small company in a fast-evolvling and competitive field.
On the other hand, if they do really have a better product then the high gross margins mean the sky is the limit. Unfortunately, I remember hearing similar claims about Tableau Software, which makes me think the ups and downs might be more dramatic as they grow (Tableau at one point lost 75% of its value from 20105 into 2016, though has recovered pretty nicely over the past year or so). I’d look into what kind of customer concentration they have, and how they think about their end market and the size of the opportunity.
stellar lumens, a reco that was touted by rickards. a buy at .70, its at .32 today, i feel like this could be a better risk due to the lumens being a more international stable exchang… rumor says ,crypto on way out.. do you think , your idea food for thought
I have no grounded personal opinion but yesterday James Altucher claimed in his letter that just now is the best time to buy cyptos in dips because they will rebound in summer. I inscribed in their Cypto Trader and till now after one month lost aound 25%. I am aware of risks and know that this is a strongly volaitle market therefore I still have hope.
One of the advisors wrote¨do not invest money in cryptos which you can not afford to loose¨
I almost joined the Crypto Trader, and I almost joined the one where he gives you a crappy HP Celeron Chromebook and a stock pick every Monday to do an options trade that guarantees the opportunity for a minimum of $3000 gain per month. Now he is offering that as a Crypto play and says his average is 92% on 39 plays.
That Stellar pick would have me highly discouraged but he isn’t the only one who likes it. Then again, the other person I know of touting it is, come to find out, part of Agora. Teeka Tiwari and Palm Beach Group. I was kind of sad to find that out because it seemed like Teeka was actually altruistic about this stuff.
All this being said I agree it looks like a great time to purchase certain cryptos during these dips.
My one reservation about this market is what is to stop THE BIG MONEY (got a mean streak, big money got…no…soul – rush) from buying or investing in a XXXX coin or development group working on XXXX coin and then shelve it if is perceived to be a threat?
Then again, if the cat is truly out of the bag, and THE BIG MONEY has lost to crypto (the kingdom they would rule) then Bitcoin, Ethereum etc…are probably going to indeed shoot through the roof. Especially if WALLSTREET can use them a new derivative tool, which apparently is in the works.
Very often you refer to the Mighty, Mighty Thinkolater in figurative language…like
‘needing an oil change or time to warm up’ or ‘feeding clues into it maw and waiting for spitting out answers’. Without divulging trade secrets, just what is the thing other than an anticipated array of dedicated computers or such like?
That’s a secret. Which is why I usually keep it in the garage, under a tarp.
Right in the middle of this seriousness I get my first morning chuckle!! Thanks TJ!
ditto Gambini 🙂
Boy this is so cool, I can’t wait t0 pour through it cuz when it comes to this industry I feel like I’m not with stupid, I *am* stoopid.
I am unable to see any topics beyond the middle of the letter C. What am I doing wrong?
Safe Asset Slaughter – Harry Dent at the END OF THE WORLD (as we know it) or just life or death HYPE to sell newsletter or subscriptions to such?
not, how can someone get away with equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater and selling rain jackets. Then when there is no fire saying “Hey, it could happen and you were prepared”?
Anyone have any idea as to what he is talking about?
And the web page for the warning that THE END IS NEAR.
https://pro.dentresearch.com/p/SLAW2016/LBNBU551/?h=true
Similair stuff you can read in Wealth Wave letter of Sean Brodick. However he advise to buy gold while Dent pushed readers to ger rid of it.
Demographics seem like a foundational element to study as a clue to what can or may happen but his certainty that gold is not a worthy instrument in times of trouble these days I just don’t understand.
I wonder why SAFE ASSET SLAUGHTER isn’t worthy of Thinkolater treatment. Seems that kind of bombastic title would be a great candidate and easy fodder for the Mighty, Mighty Thinkolater
Travis,
Big fan.
Re: TTD. It appears to be a great model in a fire house segment. High loyalty. Breakout quarter. Do you still like at recent prices?
Thx
Todd
Yes, though I haven’t added any more since the big earnings surge. Lots more optimism now, so hopefully we’ll see volatility as sentiment bumps up and down, and some “buy the dip” opportunities. I really like their early positioning in ad-supported streaming, but being a service company for advertisers should also give them some strength of advertisers worry more about how much control they’re ceding to Google and Facebook. Interesting Times, pricey stock.
The U.S. dollar has been on a nearly unstoppable uptrend since the start of the second quarter, rising in tandem with government bond yields, while equities got the short end of the stick. Now, investors wonder whether a buoyant buck will derail earnings growth. Since the beginning of April, the ICE U.S. Dollar Index (IFUS:DX-Y.NYB), a popular gauge of the U.S. currency that measures it against six rivals, is up 3.9%
On the other hand the US$ is supposedly being dethroned as the currency oil is being traded worldwide. That would mean a devaluation of the $ vs. other currencies like the Eoro, remimbi or others.
Your thoughts.
The US$ isn’t being “dethroned” as the currency for oil trading, it probably still plays a role in 80-90% of international oil trade… its facing some nascent competition as China and Russia try to become less dollar-dependent, but those changes are still
Small and slow and it will probably take a while. Much of the impetus is to get out from under US sanctions for Russia, Iran, etc.
The US dollar will strengthen with rising rates because all other liquid currencies/bond markets are way behind and pay far lower rates. That won’t last forever, but it seems a likely near-term trend, at least until global bond holders begin to kick up a fuss about rising deficits, something they haven’t cared about for years.
Next time there’s a panic, the first knee-jerk reaction will probably be “buy treasuries,” as has been the case for 30+ years… that could get ugly in the longer term as our debt balloons with rising rates, but unless Europe really gets moving again I’d guess the dollar will remain relatively strong.
My view of the end game for all this debt is that we’ll face persistent and dangerous inflation in the US eventually… but that has seemed likely for years, so that view hasn’t done me any good just yet,
And we can clearly “muddle along” with unsustainable policies for a lot longer than most sane investors would assume.
Travis, if dollar is strong for near term, would you suggest selling gold bullion now-ish?
If the dollar is going to be strong, sell gold and buy dollars. If the dollar is going to be weak, sell dollars and buy gold.
Unfortunately, every bet about the near future is a chance to get it wrong and lose money. Predicting the future is hard. I haven’t sold my gold or gold stocks, but I have increased my allocation to cash.
THANK YOU…YOU’RE THE BEST!
GO CELTICS!!
I’m a newbie, so… a couple of questions. Where would I find a tutorial on how to place calls and puts? And do you personally feel that cannabis-related stocks will go way up this year? Not asking for advice, just your opinion. Thanks!
https://www.investopedia.com/exam-guide/series-3/studyguide/chapter9/calls-and-puts.asp
Investopedia has a lot of great info, it’s gotten a little harder to find stuff on their website since they’ve started to advertise their non-free services more, but if you’re patient or search savvy you can almost always find the definitions and explanations you’re looking for. They also have a fantastic, free stock market simulator which I highly recommend playing around with.