*IRA
Reminder:
You have until next Monday to set up and contribute to an IRA
(preferably, in my view, if you qualify with an income below $95,000 single or
$150,000 joint, a Roth IRA). The
younger you are and more inconvenient this is, the happier you’ll be 30 years
from now that you made the sacrifice and got into the habit. Not sure where to start? The nearest bank will do just fine.
Do
it this afternoon!*
Spencer Martin: “Re ‘analysts’ Friday
. . . you'll get a kick out of this
graph.”
Toby Gottfried: “Rather than, company
earnings fall below analyst expectations, stock drops, shouldn't those
headlines read, analyst estimates exceed
company earnings, analysts fired?
Ivy Guy: “I'm in New York for the first
Ivy League Investment Club Conference, sponsored by Goldman Sachs. The
conference began today with the delegates (students from each school) hearing
the Goldman Morning Call at 7:15am, the summary of all the GS analysts' calls
for the day. One major point of the conference call was California’s
electric utilities. There had been very positive developments on Thursday evening, and so
the analysts said that the stocks (PCG and EIX) had nearly 100% upside; they
were priced like they were going bankrupt, but this was a ‘near impossibility.’
To reiterate, this is at 7:15am yesterday, Friday.
“The rest is history. At about 2:30, one of the
scheduled speakers begins his talk by saying, ‘If any of you own PG&E, call
your brokers--it just filed for bankruptcy.’ There was a palpable silence in
the room. We didn't know if this was some kind of joke. We'd just heard the
analysts of Goldman Sachs – GOLDMAN SACHS – talking for several minutes (a good
chunk of the morning call) about how this was a near impossibility. In a word,
everyone was dumbfounded.
“In my opinion, this was the best lesson Goldman
gave us during the day, inadvertent though it was. If you print this, please don’t use my name or school.”
Emily Rizzo: “Re 400 MBA
Candidates last week . . . Whatever happened to the clickle? I would love to pay you to write more of
these columns.”
F Well, if you insist.