F Wall Street Articles
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Why Isn’t Value Investing More Popular?
6/14/2010 | Mariusz Skonieczny | 6 Comments
Though there are many extremely successful value investors, few money managers and individual investors choose to follow the value investing strategy. They don’t follow it because it doesn’t work all the time. That is, investment returns are not positive every day, every quarter, and every year. Because it is a long-term strategy, investors do not have the discipline to stick with it even though, over long periods of time, it works wonderfully. Instead, they keep searching for other strategies that work all time, or at least appear to work all the time.
Introducing TickerTalk
6/12/2010 | Joe Ponzio | 14 Comments
In just two short weeks, F Wall Street will be celebrating its third anniversary. My, how time flies! And it seems as though, for three years, we’ve kicked around the idea of having a forum here. I have always been hesitant for two reasons:
- forums, in time, tend to become very unmanageable and overrun by idiots, stock pumpers, spammers, and gamblers
- there are already millions of great forums out there, from Alex’s newest forum at Let’s Talk Value to Jae’s value investing forum at Old School
In thinking about the forum idea, I believe that what you want is not a forum, but a place to exchange ideas, talk about value investing, etc – whether or not it’s in a true “forum” format. Thus, we decided to go another route and make some changes here:
Focusing on the Business to Save Money
4/21/2010 | Joe Ponzio | 31 Comments | about: JTX
Jackson Hewitt Tax Service (JTX) is the second largest paid individual tax return preparer in the US (based on the number of individual tax returns prepared and filed with the IRS). In 2009, its network of 6,584 offices prepared 2.96 million tax returns. According to Jackson Hewitt, that’s 3-4% of all tax returns prepared by a paid preparer in 2009!
It’s the second largest player in its industry – an industry that deals in one of the two uncomfortable certainties. (Taxes, though we’ll see how death is playing into it too.) And its stock is down 95+%. What’s not to like?
BreitBurn Energy: Playing the Commodities Crash
2/2/2010 | Joe Ponzio | 29 Comments | about: BBEP
And the blogging returns. Thanks all for your patience. It has been a wild few months, between market crashes and rebounds, a business “split” so that my partner and I could each focus on our core competencies (yes, it was friendly; and, no, there’s no juicy back story), and so much more.
Late in December, SeekingAlpha asked me to do an interview about my “highest conviction pick” in our portfolios. Surprisingly, it was a tough interview because I felt good about all of our positions. (The only position that had me biting my nails was Jackson Hewitt, which we ended up dumping around $4 when it seemed clear that they would not get RAL funding. A discussion for another day.)
In any event, the interview was just published today. The summary:
Be Back Soon
12/10/2009 | Joe Ponzio | 24 Comments
Sorry folks. I’ll be back soon. PROMISE!
I appreciate your patience! -Joe
Profiting from Fear
9/28/2009 | Joe Ponzio | 37 Comments | about: VOL
I often tell clients and investors: “If I can find one or two opportunities a quarter, I’m ecstatic.” As we close out the third quarter of 2009 in a few days, I’d like to share with you some of the investments we’ve made. As I mentioned in this post, I simply don’t have the time to maintain an F Wall Street portfolio, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been investing!
We’ll start with a position taken on July 27, 2009 – Volt Information Sciences. It’s the company to which I alluded in this article, and then mentioned in this comment. Below is the text of an e-mail I sent to clients shortly after I bought the stock. After the text of the e-mail, I’ll provide some thoughts.
A Prequel to F Wall Street
9/3/2009 | Joe Ponzio | 7 Comments
I wanted to write a quick post about an interview I recently did with Miguel Barbosa of Simoleon Sense. Miguel’s is a great blog that covers a number of aspects of financial behavior and psychology.
You can find part 1 here, and part 2 of the interview here. It shouldn’t surprise you that it’s in two parts: The interview was conducted through e-mail and, in my long-winded fashion, came out to seven or eight pages typed. As a comparison, my posts are usually between three and five; so, brew some coffee!
I titled this post as such in reference to a Twitter comment made by Jae Jun (@Jae_Jun) over at Old School Value in response to the interview:
@JoePonzio @SimoleonSense Actually it’s a great prequel to F Wall Street
Enjoy!
Understanding the True Profit Margin
8/7/2009 | Joe Ponzio | 33 Comments | about: KO / WAG
On the heels of yesterday’s article, I received an e-mail from a friend this afternoon asking me about my thoughts on inventory turns and profit margins. To paraphrase: The math doesn’t work right, as the inventory turns don’t affect the profit margins each year.
I didn’t do a good job of explaining it properly; so, let’s look at the “true” profit margin of a company.
Questions and Concepts in Value Investing
8/7/2009 | Joe Ponzio | 12 Comments | about: HOG / PFE / WMT
It’s been quite a while since I’ve written an article, and for that…I’m sorry! The past few weeks have had me extremely busy – reading, researching, and ripping apart companies. We’ve made a few investments this quarter, but I haven’t had time to write about any of them here. Sadly, F Wall Street’s portfolio has gone from largely ignored to entirely ignored.
Of course, I couldn’t ask for more out of a lazy man’s portfolio. Being some 17% in cash brings me no joy; but, this portfolio has continued to outperform the S&P 500 Total Return Index (the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested) by 19.7% a year, growing 4.2% annually versus the S&P 500’s -15.5% annual return. That said, the F Wall Street portfolio is going bye-bye. Though I will continue to write about investing and individual companies, I can’t maintain the portfolio in real-time (or even somewhat real-time).
Still, this “value investing” stuff works. And though we’ve only been going two years, if you don’t believe by now that buying good businesses on the cheap and ignoring the markets is the way to go, it will probably never sit right with you. As Buffett says: You either quickly get the concept of buying $0.50 dollars, or you never do. Let’s jump into some interesting questions from visitors, and concepts in intelligent investing.
Selling DBB Because I’m a Bonehead
6/18/2009 | Joe Ponzio | 9 Comments | about: DBB / JJC
As I mentioned in this post, I got rid of DBB – the base metals ETF. Admittedly, I’m hanging my head in shame – not because we lost money (actually, we made money) but because I made a stupid judgment mistake that cost us opportunity. (Fortunately, there’s a lesson in here.)
My mistake was not in my evaluation of the commodities or reasoning for buying them. The mistake was that I bought an investment that grouped the three together instead of buying a virtual certainty.
gbpacker said,
Hello, I am using Excel 2003. I enabled Macros and with crtl-q, I entered a ticker symbol. I am getting the...
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