Thursday, February 26, 2009

some hastily assembled observations

1. A buddy of mine, who first put in my mind the idea of buying depressed bank stocks, bought some of these bank stocks himself a couple of days ago. Several times a day I get text messages or emails from him which consist of, for example, a dollar sign ("$") repeated like one hundred times, or a series of stock symbols in capital letters along with several dozen exclamation points. And yet the dude told me the other day that he planned to hold these stocks for "the long term". Which brings me to...

2. These stocks are, uh, what you might call extremely volatile. Citigroup, for example, routinely vacillates -- over the course of a single day -- between being up by as much as 30%, then down by as much as 30%, etc. Check out the 5 day chart. It literally looks like a line drawing of a roller coaster that you'd be too afraid to ride on.

3. A commenter in the thread below notes that JPM may be a better long-term investment than Citi. This may be right. I picked Citi only because the share price was the lowest of the major banks, and therefore carries the greatest opportunity for big short(ish) term multiples (while also, of course, being the riskiest of the lot in terms of its likelihood of going to zero at any time).

4. I don't know much about Bobby Jindal. And I didn't watch his speech the other night, but all the accounts I have seen -- including among Republicans -- have been uniformly negative. I don't know how this guy got elected to office in Louisiana (of all places), but I think Republicans ought to be careful making this guy into some kind of standard-bearer for the simple reason that the average Wise County redneck (representative of the Republican "base") probably takes one look at him and says "So I guess the Republicans done gone and got them a darky Secret Muzzlum Terrist theirownselves. WTF is this world coming to?!", and immediately goes to the local pawn shop where they then convert their remaining worldy assets (beer can collection? NASCAR memorabilia?) into guns and ammunition for use in the impending race war.

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