Lot of news this weekend: big banks meeting with Treasury and the Fed, Lehman Brothers having to file for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch agreeing to sell itself to Bank of America, AIG looking for cash.
Fortunately major media outlets were calming influences:
“Street of Fear” – Fox News website
“Crisis on Wall Street…” – Wall Street Journal
“A Hellacious Hurricane Hits Lehman Brothers” - Barron’s
Okay, a little sarcasm.
So what do Jim and I think? Well first we remember two of our principles (we actually remember them all, but two of them are particularly appropriate):
· Strive to be patient investors in an impatient world.
· Never look for validation in conventional wisdom.
We thought of these two principles because today will be a tumultuous day in financial markets; it has started out that way as I type this. And in tumult we believe we can find opportunity. We will be looking for companies that have little or nothing to do with some of the financial assets causing the current problems – subprime mortgages, CDOs, etc – where selling has caused the price to decline well below our estimate of the company’s business value. Or, as I like to say, we will be looking for really easy decisions. Here is hoping that we will find some.
-John
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment