patrick.net

hmmm

Someone's a sucker.

Watch as that bad boy goes back to being worth 350K.

Yes, someone may be a sucker; however, without adequate information, such as that found in the MLS, can buyers really make informed decisions?

As E-man said, I wouldn't buy such a property knowing the infomation because it ticks me off too. And Yes, there's a sucker or two. Not all people use internet to find out what was going on, and some people don't bother doing research at all.

I had my eyes on a property like that too. It's under contract, so we will see how's that work in a few weeks.

1. Unless it was purchased in cash for $595k, how did it get appraised at that price when it just sold for $350k a few months earlier?

2. Are you certain the "purchase" in Dec. 09 was actually a purchase and not just the foreclosure amount?

3. Even if everything posted is legit, most likely there was some insider deal that occurred in Dec. 09 that most of us would not be able to take advantage of anyway, so rubbing it in our faces is kind of silly.

seaside says

As E-man said, I wouldn’t buy such a property knowing the infomation because it ticks me off too. And Yes, there’s a sucker or two. Not all people use internet to find out what was going on, and some people don’t bother doing research at all.
I had my eyes on a property like that too. It’s under contract, so we will see how’s that work in a few weeks.

No one in his/her right mind would overpay $200,000+ for a house. Are you suggesting that this buyer did because he/she didn't research the Internet? If I may ask, where do you go to get the information you need to become an informed buyer?

@E-man,

I think I agreed with you about what you're feeling as a buyer.

Emotionally upsetting that is. Is that right thing to do? Is it ethical, ect... those are legitimate questions. But that has nothing to do with the reality when a business is a business.

The bottom line there is that the buyer pays for the value he sees at the time, not for the history. Flippers and investors should do the work needed to be done, so that they can show the buyer the kind of value he seeks. That's business decision b/w two parties.

Hey E-man. you always got my best wishes.

I see no public MLS listing of any sale other than the one on 2/24/10.

It was probably an insider deal, or a friend hooking another friend up with a good price.

Here's the MLS remarks for the deal on 2/24/10.

Offered $40,000 below appraisal from Nov '09. Custom tile floors, bamboo hardwoods, granite countertops, remodeled baths, crown molding, vaulted ceiling, garden window, RV parking and high API scores in the local schools. Could you want more? How about a motivated seller? Come see this home and make it your new one for this year. Sorry, no FHA financing at this time. Open Sun, 10 Jan, 1-4 PM
Private : Six offers on property. Seller credited $1010 towards buyer's NRCC, provided Sec 1 Clearance (>$2,100) and completed minor chimney repair (>$700)

Woah, just noticed this thread. Shoot.

I've never actually purchased into any preferred shares, but I did get in on GE this year, and did like the dividend yield idea. It was exciting to see money just randomly deposited in my account.

With the dividends, how are they re-invested? Are you taking a payout and paying taxes on them, or can you reinvest directly? I haven't really dug into this area before, but was going to start. It's always daunting and so full of misinformation that learning anything new about stocks is always a pain.

Okay, no dividend short cuts I've been missing out on.

Any other stocks you've held, recommend, or watch that pay out dividends? Ones that might have fallen slightly from favor but you still keep an eye on?

I'm looking to shorten my learning time here, by removing crud that I shouldn't be investigating in, or researching and sticking with a handful of decent stocks to pick over and learn/understand from. Before making any large bets on something unknown.

ge/citi have paid off nicely this year. I sold out of ge just recently, but I'm still holding citi. Any perspectives from your point of view on the direction city might be taking in the next year or so?

All good points SF ace... I've done a decent accumulation for banks, well mainly in Citi, because the others looked like they had fully recovered already, or nearly. I'm going to take another look through what is out there.

#2 is a good one and hard sometimes. #3 is something I need to learn to do, I tend to go all or nothing still. #4 is interesting, I've never really thought of exiting after an upgrade, I figure I'm on the right track at that point. #5 is something I'm starting to come to grips with, I fully agree with the order there as well. I would like to get into some more technical trades, how much work is it to get into those? I figure the more trades I do, the less of the "love" aspect I'll obtain, and more likely to dump crap when I should, rather than hold it because it should be doing better but isn't. #6 is good, I saw GE just tank, and figured I could accumulate and wait for the return of the dividends, but it took off without the dividends, so I sold based on your comments before about being able to capture capital gains and/or dividends. I figured I wasn't going to see too much more from it this year. #7 I've never dealt with, and something I wouldn't mind looking into more.

And I'm going to second E-mans question on this one.

Btw, for anyone looking for a really interesting book, I really enjoyed warren buffets snow ball. It really shows his personality, it goes from child hood to current and involves lots of stories all along the way. Very little to do with investing fundamentals, mostly history of what he's done and why. People always say they're investing like warren buffet, but they aren't. Warren Buffet would trade a stock quickly if he got what he wanted out of it. Even when he was young, he learned how to buy up enough of a company to influence it, and push it in his direction, then sell it and move on. When he no longer could buy up pieces of companies due to his wealth, he dropped stock trading and went with bershire, and basically gobbled everything up, but also bounced companies off each other, by taking free cash from one company to help a company that traditionally needed spurts of cash. He also knew bershire was dead, but the owner tried to short change him, and instead of selling the company he didn't want, he bought it all. It appears that he's taken companies that say have investment cycles and matched them up. Instead of having a company sit on a huge sum of money, waiting for the next "investment" cycle to begin, he used it in another company that had already started it's investment cycle, so he always kept all of his capital working, unlike most other companies who just need to keep a decent buffer around them at all times for when the economy changes. Anyways, I really enjoyed the book. Fascinating, easy reading and Warren really has an interesting personality and life!

You had mentioned doing short term trades based on technicals. Did you ever get into this kind of trading? I only think of doing it once in awhile, perhaps when all the stars align, and looks like a good solid couple of weeks is coming, where I'm not likely to make any mistakes. I assume it's pretty time consuming. I had a friend who is into Forex, but after reading about it, I realized it's just a simple zero sum game, looking for new players. He's doing ok, but I would rather get into something a little less risky, and less based on my skill vs the other players skill :) The biggest draw was having a counter part to bang ideas off, to try and stop each other from making silly and costly mistakes.

I've read a couple books on technical trading, it looks interesting, time frames are all over the place from minutes to days to weeks or longer. What I found interesting is he wasn't using very many technicals. A few trend lines, but nothing much more complex than that. My friends system mainly concentrated on maintaining capital, obviously rule #1. So I'm wondering if simple trend lines/patterns and a good capital reserving system would be enough in the markets. I can't see me beating a computer program tuned to the exact market though. I'll make mistakes, where a billion dollar program is less likely to, thus I'm more likely to bet the wrong direction way too many times. Hence why i figured waiting for the stars to align, and everything is generally heading up, and then chasing the fastest risers.

If you did get into the technicals, what kind where you using? Or what would you consider using if you did get into it?

I know their are traders out there that make a living, but I figure most die off quickly. If it did work as well as these books always claim, everyone would be a trillionaire in about 30 weeks. If it worked only 50% of the time, there would be half the population at home trading and living off their returns.

I read somewhere that Warren Buffet said that if he had only a bit of money tomorrow, he could probably get 50% returns on it easily.

@E-man

I found the same thing with the Forex trading. The people who did ok, did ok. I expla ined it to my friend who is in forex trading as playing poker with a master player, and a table of idiots. If you can dodge the master player, you'll do ok. But if you end up going against him, you're dead. I figure most forex traders are small enough that they can skirt the master traders, while taking pennies from the idiots. The idiots lose to the big players regardless. I figure the same is somewhat true with day trading, or technical trading.

From what I've learned, but not yet practiced, is how to bail on a stock effectively, without getting too emotional about my losses. I've read that winning 1 out of 5 times is all it requires to do pretty well, but that means getting used to losing 4 times before picking a winner, which needs practice. I figure the only way to learn is to be with others who are doing similar investing, otherwise it's a massive uphill battle, with an expensive learning curve. All other techniques seem to rely on getting out of a stock, they have all kinds of great ways to get in, or know when to get in, but every technique has the same stop loss strategy, like you just stated here. Buy, put your stop loss in right away and let it go.

I agree it's a waste of time to often talk with the nay sayers. I agree we aren't going to see another housing bubble. We'll see another get rich quick scheme in the next couple of years, hopefully I know more now and can jump in/out of it! Back in 1998 I looked at the stock market and said this can't last, these numbers don't make sense. Then in about 2002, I said the same thing about housing. But I totally missed the momentum bubble, and the fact that I could have gone 3 safe years on both. What I find, is that I hone my skills on thinking about these investing strategies, and that does help me see things from different lights. It also helps me see "why" the herd is heading in a direction, and what it will likely need to see before it changes direction, which can be pretty useful information.

I'm going to look at some of the stocks you've mentioned. See what I can come up with for them. I dont think i have the patience for day trading, but 3-4 days holds, or few week holds would be "enjoyable", and thus a great learning experience as well.

I'm actually hoping for a good run into November, and then moving money to my wifes brazilian account. They are having elections down there, and losing lula. So I figure their currency is going to take a major hit during that time period, even though their fundementals are pretty strong. Hopefully I can make a house purchase down there before things come back in line. Their elections appear to have a couple of semi crazys up. Think about putting palin on one ticket, and say one of bushes daughters on the other ticket. They can't do anything too insane but the possibilities are endless.. it's going to spook the investors. I'm hoping I can jump in there, and get a great exchange rate for a purchase. The house will be kept for an investment, and long term. Eventually we might even use it our selves. If the economy doesn't recover, we'll have lots of strong usd's to live off of, if it does recover, we'll have a cheap house.

The warren buffet book is probably #2 on my favorite book list, withe #1 being stephen hawkings universe in a nut shell, and #3 being allen greenspans book.

The warren buffet stories are just funny. He would collect bottle cap tops from around vending machines to sort them based on favorite drinks, times of year, and collect other data points. He ran lots of small businesses when he was real young, including buying pinball machines and putting them in businesses and splitting the profits 50/50 with the owner, and 50/50 with the friend who would fix the machines. He talks about taking all the nickles out and splitting them down the center and telling the guy to pick which ever side he wanted, and why he did it. He discusses his foray into track gambling, and then into creating his own horse odds sheet and selling them. He talks about finger printing nuns, and recording license plate numbers in case the bank was ever robbed, he figured the robber would have to come down his street, and he would have all the plates for the cars that came by.. He is quite a character.

Very well put. I started practicing when I was in my early twenties, but managed to do more damage than good as well, but didn't lose everything. Luckly, it's still sitting around, it didn't fair too badly during 2008, but I managed to dump a lot more in 2008/2009, which helped.

I would agree that any kind of day trading or technical training requires work, and a different type of mentality. Books are interesting, but every book I've read pushes their strategy as the way to go, while showing how others are useless (which are coincidentally missed in the other books dealing with this strategy). In the end I've realized it comes down to practice like you said. Pick a strategy, and practice it if you want to try that. For me, I would like to keep track of 20-25 companies like you're saying and predict whats going on, to keep sharp and ensure I'm always on the right path eg green/yellow/red light mentality at the very least. However, without having some skin in, it's hard to really be sure you're practicing and not playing delusional tricks on yourself.

I fully agree on finding strong people to be around. It's never failed me. Others in different walks of life I know, have been pulled down by their peers, essentially doing exactly what you stated above. It's hard to explain alternatives to those people! I try because they're friends and they sometimes make some changes. I also know that for me to make some of these changes, like become more in tune with my investing, I'll need to change some of my priorities as well. Spending more time investing and less time worrying about nickels and dimes. I have way too much in personal accounts now to ignore my ignorance levels.

Even though many hate Jim Cramer, he has good ideas for the average person. As for telling you what to do, he's obviously not too useful, because people have learned to game his picks, and obviously he's large enough that anything he says distorts a pick for awhile. His books on his life are pretty interesting, he is a pretty decent writer and they are easy reads. I liked the one about his life, which really explains his TV personality pretty well. But beside that, he has good ideas, like you need to keep on top of your stock picks. You need to spend an hour a week at least going over them. You need about 5 of them, many more and you'll need to put in too much time and you'll stop doing it, or ignore a few of them to make life easier. You need a stock you love, or risky because you need something going crazy to really keep you into it. All great ideas. After you're seasoned and have your first big chunk in the bank, these rules are probably not what you need. But for the 20 year old, it's probably a great rule to go with. I wish I had done it back then, it would have been cheaper :)

Mind sharing some of your 20-25 stocks you watch? You shared some of your preferred shares picks, but I'm looking for some that behave semi "normally" so that I can start making some of my own predictions during earnings season and during the year. I'm going for about 10-15 stocks that are likely to move around a bit, so I don't get bored.

These last 2 years have been pretty good to me in the stock market, I figure we've got awhile longer to go, thus I'm picking stocks that will likely all go up, it's a matter of how much. Do I win small, average or big.

I've gone through several different investment strategies, and keep coming back to the brute simplicity of earnings and dividends. Especially after reading "Margin of Safety" by Seth Klarman and "The Intelligent Investor" by Warren Buffett's teacher Benjamin Graham. The Klarman book is good, but _wildly_ overpriced. I just happened to find someone to loan it to me.

Anyway, all I look at these days is a consistent record of good earnings, actually paid out as dividends, and low debt. That has worked reasonably well.

I agree about tech. They just never seem to pay a dividend. Microsoft shareholders had to actually organize and demand a dividend (shocking!) rather than just let Microsoft sit on a giant pile of cash forever.

It would be nice if more shareholders could get organized to force the company to work for shareholders rather than simply for management bonuses.

I know, dividends are double-taxed blah blah, but I invest in my 401k rollover, so the taxes are not really a consideration.

Thanks for the stocks! Obviously being in tech, I've been drawn to them over the years. I've known for a long time they aren't the best area to be in, even though they get a lot of attention. They were in my "comfort zone" though, this is going to be the year I leave that zone. My investments have a potential to augment my income by 40-50+% this year and I do okay salary wise. I should really be spending a lot more time handling these investments, penny wise, pound foolish.

This is one stock we should all be watching:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=LULU

Unfortunately I didn't pay attention to it last year :( It's a killer clothing company, and every woman who gets conned into buying one piece, then drops 90% of their clothing budget into this company. Believe me, I've seen it repeated time after time. They're started to get larger and larger now, more celebs are wearing their clothing now too. If you doubt me, buy your wife/gf a piece and watch what happens. It might still be a good buy though.

You've obviously never given a woman lulu lemon clothing :) This isn't a crox/brand thing, this is just a line of clothing that gets bought because it's extremely comfortable, and lasts. The only reason I know this is because the company was based in Vancouver, and when we visited family they started pawning this stuff off on my wife about 6 years ago. Every time my wife went back, she would get more. Then all of a sudden an IPO and they're down here. Now every time I go to the gym, I see more and more of this being worn on a daily basis. Last year, I noticed almost no one wearing it, this year, I"ve noticed about 30% of the people wearing it. The women who do wear it, slowly change their habits to wearing this all the time.

I haven't bought into this stock because I really don't trust my analytical skills yet on reading balance sheets, sadly. I've had the security analysis book on my desk for awhile now, along with 3-4 other books. I've relied far too much in the past on what I knew of a stock and less on the low lying fundamentals, more on product line ups, and how well they're executing.

I'm not really sure where the fundamentals sit on this company, because it does have momentum, but it's also growing at insane rate.

I would tend to agree with you, and one reason I didn't invest in it. I looked at it and thought it had gone far too high in valuation already, even without digging into anything else.

The yoga side of things is where they get the women hooked. They make a killing off the fact that the women don't wear these items to yoga. I would normally agree that knockoffs would come, however every woman who has tried them says they fit so well! Others could copy this, but they don't seem to. If the "fad" gets large enough, I could see them easily holding onto this lead for a long long time and making a solid presence like nike. Just a name that isn't going away. It is slightly risky, there is a high premium. Without that premium, I would definitely jump on it, but you're right the 3B valuation is just out there.

I have another question. I'm using you guys for a lot of information here, and thanks!

Any sites you would recommend for finding interesting stocks? The sheer number of stocks out there has always been fairly intimidating to me, and so I've only stock with some of the basic, ignoring sectors I didn't understand and sticking mostly to tech. While it's done me ok, it's probably a dangerous place to leave myself in for the next 5-10 years.

I'm always bombarded with montley fools news letter, gurufocus news offerings, and many others. Are there any worth reading/using/paying for? Like any system, they cherry pick their wins to show great profits. Like any large scale system, it becomes ruined by the sheer number of people doing the lemming walk. Essentially the level I would love is exactly what you just posted on lulu. Balance sheet looks good, high premium, slow growth. Niche markets will likely fill in the gaps if they get large enough.

I was afraid you had far too many insider friends!

That is one reason I like tech, because that is where "my" insiders sit. I have a large holding with AMD, which has done !@#$ all for me for a long time. I held it forever it went up, but without reading the financials I didn't realize I should have sold :( Now I'm sitting on it, and waiting for a good push again. They have a major release coming out next year, and they're lining up wins left and right now with major competitors. When I called up Dell last, they pushed AMD on first, then after telling them I needed Intel, they pushed AMD again. I went to my managed hosting provider, and they're now pushing AMD, where as I couldn't get one AMD option with them before. The lineup they've got coming out looks very impressive, debt levels look ok now. And many more technical reasons. Anyways, I foresee about 18 months of potential growth for them. But that is all due to being fairly intimate with Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and the partners who resell their products. I was hoping to find an outside source for other companies!

The sheer number of stocks makes it fairly difficult to find and follow good ones. I'm hoping to investigate fully the list you gave me, because I figure that is probably better than whatever MSN is peddling for the day.

Gurufocus is fairly interesting, and I bought into C, when I saw Soros had taken a large position in it. Basically the same reason you went with DNDN. It's hard to tell if it will be a good bet or not. I'm going to look at other banks this month, and then look to construction for later in the year - as you pointed out, it will likely be the next to come out of the recession, so I would like to gain knowledge of that industry before that happens!

Fantastic!

Although it's 10-K's look dreadful, but getting better. The losses have been astronomical, and for so long. However, I believe that could be changing next year. It profitability and stock price are completely cyclical. Next year there is a completely new architecture + new fab process + fusion chips (GPU+CPU). The netbook market looks great, but very low profit. But those would be something like 1W dual core, 64bit cpus with a GPU onboard.

With the whole litigation with Intel over with now, it looks like they have a decent chance of making some good inroads. I noticed in other countries that Intel was used almost exclusively in small shops, where as it's more better than 50/50 here.

I suspect they are going to take a major trimming in stock value over the next couple of weeks. They're going to hurt a lot of stocks as well, but in the end they're going to be quite a value.

I'm just wondering if I should shed my citigroup for a few weeks and see where this all ends up.

@e-man,

I would avoid all drillers (offshore and even the ones that operates the lesser rigs) and probably upstream oil right now. There is already clear sign that instititions are lightening up, a mass exit among all drillers including the big four (RIG, noble, Diamond and forgot the other one) There are signs that the big money wants to exit these positions as fast as possible as orderly as possible. I feel there is a liklihood that institutions would not buy at support level thus we may see it penetrated. Insitutions generally take a few months to lighten up and will not come back for at least six months thereafter. I would wait for things to develop and believe opportunity is further down the road, not right now.

Hint,notice that no one is downgrading any oil, gas, drilling industry right now, when clearly the situation warrants downgrading. I see mass exiting for awhile. IMO. On the other hand, wait for the downgrades to come, that is a pretty good sign the institutions will load up thereafter. (I know it's counter intuative, but trust me on this one, this is how institution often buy millions of share at a time. Big $$ buys after downgrades and sell after upgrades in these kind of situations. It takes big $$ to move stock price of these companies so these are institution driven)

Dendreon was a ten bagger in three years. I was in Atlanta one night and I got a phone call that certain institution bought x amount. This was an institution that knew what they were doing, when provenge looked bleaked, they forsaw what was eventually coming, I just let the money ride hoping provenge will succeed and it did. I knew someone way smarter than me with way more information resource did all the homework already. It doesn't make me rich but it does pay for my next car. now Im trying to figure out how much that drug is worth and see where I should exit.

@pkennedy, I'm still looking into AMD. Preliminary I do not like AMD as an investment stock. They make too little money when times are good, Whatever money they make during good time are spent huge investment in capital and research. When times are bad they fall into debt and stock dilution. This is a classic company that does nothing to the shareholder but sustain huge paycheck to executive managers and employees. In other words, good to work for but bad to invest in. Just look at how much the shares have been diluted the last 20 years and you realized this is not an investor friendly company. Having said that, the company is a cyclical play so it would rise along with the semiconductor industry, but I suspect you can do better than owning AMD.

Actually, the only thing that AMD is good at is growing the capital account consistently, that is just a terrible and long history of dilution and I want no part of it. In a nutshell, AMD can double their market cap, but if they also dilute you in half as well, you're no better off as an investor. Essentially, this is pretty much the history of AMD thus far. I personally despise these sort of companies as a shareholder.

Caveat, My opinion only.

@sface
Yes I want out of it, I have to take a loss on it to get out, but I believe they are in a decent cyclical pattern right now, with a good number of products lined up to bring the stock up more than others. It's been a poor investment, and I'm looking for a decent exit strategy. I am decently confident that it'll raise over the course of the year, less confident on my ability to find other good stocks.

@e-man
What exactly tells you an institution is bailing in a chart?

@sf/e-man
GS, what are you takes on this?
BP,, the drillers might be exiting, but what about BP? Seems like a good inflation company to be in, as OIL will follow inflation for sure. As the economy recovers, I suspect oil to become more expensive as well. Zephyr believes inflation is going to come into play, as the only real method to bring down the deficit, as it's at a high enough point that tax gains during the good times won't be enough, and tax increases won't be enough.

@E-man
Always good to bounce ideas off people!

My brother in law is a trader at GS, I'll give him a call to see what he thinks about the internal workings of the firm currently. I already have enough shares of GS already. Looking from the outside, this security fraud things is quite a stretch (fraud is quite a hurdle), never-the-less, it is bad publicity to the commoners. To the rich clients, they love Goldman's so that is all that matters in the end and it will be business as usual.

The thing about the market is things change every day, every week. I rather generalize things than make it too specific.

For oil, I recommend PTR and PBR. Buffet once owned PTR but had to divest due to bad publicity only, I'll pick up where he left off.

@e-man
Thanks for all those graphs!

I'm sort of a bumbling gambler, so semi rational gambling sounds like a step in the right direction!

Hence, why I want to get away from tech which is far too much gambling and get into more value investing. My hindsite is awesome.. I fully understand my mistakes afterwords..

PBR is one that I want to get into, but also one that worries me a little bit. I'm going to ask my wife a bit about this one, and perhaps her father. He is a big pusher of PBR as well.

It's a government owned entity, setting prices, etc. New found Oil but no new found "riches for the poor" is probably going to be a political band stand in this upcoming election. With promises to share the wealth with the poor. I'm not positive on this, but it is something I could see happening. Whether they would do anything, is unknown, but Lula won be making promises and payments to the poor. The next person up is likely to continue with those promises. I'm betting the conservative party won't stand behind this, but the workers party could push something like this.

Btw, turmoil like this is what I'm hoping for during these elections. :) Brazil has enough multi nationals + enough growth for the last decade that they won't give it up easily, but fear will be strong during these elections due to workers party members promising the world like lula did. Their political system has run offs, so if one party doesn't get a clear majority, then minority parties are kicked out and new voting happens with the new subset for the president. So we could get several rounds of this.

hmmm

How about answ? This one I quickly looked at once. Some one at my office pointed it out, and we were discussing it. It's small cap with limited volume. I'm not sure if it's track record for sales is going to continue, but it's a massive site on the internet according to quatcast. It's ranked #15 right now. Market cap of only 65M. p/s of 3.37.

I'm not sure if it will continue to make money, but it has so much traffic behind it, that they only need to come up with a small improvement in their business model to generate significant income.

It's ok, not good not terrible. I don't like the 6% convertable (around 4-6 dollars) preferred's A and B hanging around as a common shareholder. That financing last year (not great timing) improved their balance sheet but the cost was too great. It will impair the value of the company signifcantly if someone else wants to buy it.

However, the variable cost is so low that growing the base and monetizing the user base would flow right into cash. The key is whether that could be executed and will be worth a lot of money for potential suitors. I have used answer.com to primarily seek/ask questions about fixing cars but the potential is limited as well. I'll wait until Q1 comes out to see where they are at.

The site im really bullish on is linkedin.com. It is going to destroy monster international and whatever yahoo, google and MSN has as equilvalant, someone will pay big bucks to acquire that one. That is a sure IPO buy for me.

Let's throw another similar one out there, thoughts on loop?

That is funny, because i've ended up on answers for car repair issues as well!

Interesting, I'm going to look over their financials a bit more to pin point your concerns and see if I can see them (knowing they're there... see if I can even get it in hindsight...)

linkedin is interesting. It's very large internationally, almost everyone I know over seas uses it. It's highly used for consults I've found. All other job engines are just full of spam unfortunately. I've never used it for finding candidates, or for looking for positions, but I keep in touch with people there, who I would rather not keep in contact with on facebook :) I've been spammed by recruiters, trying to get me to introduce them to management, other than that I haven't really figured out to use it for anything beneficial for myself.

loopnet.com? Are you looking at this one, I've never heard of them. Quantcast shows they are heavily skewed asian and 100K earners. Traffic has been flat for the last 2-3 years, actually it's dipped by about 15%.

Traffic is low enough that hardware costs should be minimal, depending on the quality of their engineers it should be less than 10K/month. Probably 1 engineer to maintain it, maybe 2-3 if they're really sloppy. I'm guessing that programmers aren't a major expense either, as the site probably doesn't change that much.

Income looks good, 65M means they're making doing something correctly. I'm not exactly sure what they are selling. PE seems high? Year over year it doesn't look like much growth, maybe even a small decline due to higher expenses? 65M, 75M 62M?

Ok, that would have totally gone over my head. I would never have seen that red flag.

I had a roommate that had a PHD in pharmacology, and basically drug making seemed like a bad investment. At best it takes about 12-14 years to get a drug out the door, that leaves a 6-8 years to recoup what is essentially 1B in R&D. If they're stalled for several years, that eats into the 6-8 window. I own a bad drug company, bought high, holding it still. I figure I'll hold it until I need a tax reason to sell - otherwise it's not worth selling, the money is so marginal. Ugh!

Anything else interesting to look into?

If it's such a great product, one of the big firms would swoop in and grab it for pennies. If all they need to do is drop a bit of money into it to grease the wheels..

I used to watch the news with my friend, and essentially news advertising = drug companies. Every fancy looking drug that came up, he would say "so-and-so drug" essentially once he decoded what was in these ads they were saying "cure aids with asprin.. "

We're really scraping the bottom of the barrel now with drug manufacturing (actually drug discovery). We're taking what we have and trying to find new uses for it, new drugs are far and few between. I'm pretty skeptical on all drug companies now... Doing new studies takes time, if it requires "changes" good luck.

It seems that they just need strong management at this point. Clinical trials are expensive, but hundreds of millions expensive? for a final stage? Time consuming, yes, but that expensive? That seems high. If they pare the company down, then the burn rate wouldn't be so bad. I don't know why the fda is concerned, but I would assume it's in one particular area not a "umm not good enough! do it all over!" type of failure.

Ugh, I'm always holding stocks when I should be selling. I have to learn to sell more efficiently!

Now that this sell off has been going on for a few days, I'm starting to wonder if we're heading down for a correction or if it's going to tapper off.

Even generic can be expensive. I learned that from my room mate too! Apparently there is a lot to be said about knowing what is in a cake, and actually putting the ingredients in the proper order and baking/cooling at each step, etc. Some are easy, some are extremely complex to make, even when you know what to copy. Although, I'm betting generics will fair very well over the coming decades.

Personally, I have a gut feeling that this downturn will last quite a white.

Then again, I had that same feeling before it ran up so much in the last year. I was very wrong.

On the third hand, a lower market is just a buying opportunity for solid dividend-paying stocks, most of which seem to be drug companies.

Buying opportunity is nice, I would rather have my money out, so I can have more fun during a buying opportunity though...

Hm I asked Zephyr for some places for more balanced information, and he gave me www.rtable.net, have you guys read this site before? It's like patrick.net, but for economics. Having all that news in one place, so easily to sort through is nice! It seems to be linking to mostly quality articles as far as I can tell.