Hottest links for Thursday October 31th, 2013 the late edition (see Wednesday’s edition of hottest links). Get our free daily newsletter (which is being updated currently to make it even better) and never miss a single linkfest.
Top stories for today can be found below.Just a brief intro and self promotion to this late edition; Bloomberg has in-depth story about Greek equities being the best performer, up 146 percent since June 5th 2012. ValueWalk (and it was myself personally) ‘recommended’ Greece on June 17th 2012. You can find both articles below and see why I thought they might be a good buy (note I am long Greek equities and VALUEWALK LLC is not a registered investment advisor, check legal disclaimer for all the jargon).
Hottest Links: Stories
Value Investing
A Dozen Things from Philip Fisher and Walter Schloss
I had made what I believe was one of the more valuable decisions of my business life. This was to confine all efforts solely to making major gains in the long-run. [Tren Griffin, 25iq]
Financial Attention
Investors check their accounts more often when the market is higher. [Nachum Sicherman, George Loewenstein, Duane J. Seppi and Stephen P. Utkus, SSRN]
Caption Contest Wednesday: Vintage Ray Dalio
A young Ray Dalio, from a photo he included in a presentation he gave at Harvard Business School several years back. [Bess Levin, DealBreaker]
How Anxiety Can Lead Your Decisions Astray
When so much is unknown or unknowable, trying to decide what the right course of action might be triggers anxiety. In response, many of us seek the counsel of others to help us make these weighty decisions. [Francesca Gino, Harvard Business Review]
Do Endowments Add Value? Unclear
For the average endowment, models with only public stock and bond benchmarks explain virtually all of the time-series variation in returns, yield no alpha, and generate sensible factor loadings. [Wesley R. Gray, Turnkey Analyst]
Funds
Greek Recovery Makes Stocks World’s Best as Paulson Buys
Since June 5, 2012, two weeks before Msci Inc (NYSE:MSCI) gave notice it may reclassify Greece as an emerging market, the country’s ASE Index (ASE) has surged 146 percent, trimming the decline from its 2007 peak to 79 percent. [Namitha Jagadeesh, Bloomberg] Related; https://www.valuewalk.com/2012/06/ignore-greek-elections-stocks-might-be-the-best-buy-in-over-60-years
What’s So Famous About Sovereign Funds
At a first glance, it isn’t clear that SWFs will have a major impact on this community at all. Weighing in at $6 trillion in AUM, AWFs are a small subset of the broader community of long term investors. [Ashby Monk, Institutional Investor]
Och-Ziff: Keep Insider, Non-public, Information To Youself
Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC (NYSE:OZM), manager of $33.9 billion in hedge fund money, would really, absolutely-when it comes down it, in even the most extreme of circumstances-prefer if you didn’t put it in a position to see any inside information. [Rob Copeland, Absolute Return]
Looking At China’s ICBC Bank Through Contrarian Glasses
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (HKG:1398) (SHA:601398) may not be a household name in the West, but it’s the world’s largest bank in terms of assets – 18.7 trillion Chinese yuan renminbi (US$3.1 trillion) as of June 30, 2013. It’s number-two in market cap (US$223 billion) after Wells Fargo. [Steven Carroll, Alpha Now]
Are Fund Managers Too Hot on Korea?
The $4.5 billion iShares MSCI South Korea Index Fund(ETF) (NYSEARCA:EWY) is one of the recent Samsung buyers. It has enjoyed $898 million in investor inflows year-to-date, XTF data show. The other big mover is iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Indx (ETF) (NYSEARCA:EEM),where Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (LON:BC94) (KRX:005930) often sees money coming and going — the stock is the #1 weight in the ETF, at about 4%. [Brendan Conway, Focus on Funds]
Fidelity’s Rochte: New ETFs Only The Start
Fidelity’s long-awaited arrival in the world of proprietary ETFs has only just begun, according to Tony Rochte, the executive in charge of SelectCo, the company’s Denver-based sector funds operation that encompass both index and active strategies as well as both ETF and mutual-fund wrappers. [Olly Ludwig, Index Universe]
Cable-Cowboy Malone’s Irish Castle Signals Europe Focus
since largely abandoning the U.S. cable market in 1999, Malone has spent LIBERTY GLOBAL PLC (NASDAQ:LBTYA) about $40 billion in Europe. His Liberty Global Inc. is on track to report 2013 sales of almost $15 billion, data (LBTYA:US) compiled by Bloomberg show. [Kristen Schweizer and Adam Ewing, Bloomberg]
Misc
Cyprus: The Land That Money Forgot
Cyprus, you may recall, was recently required by the European Union to have Bank of Cyprus “haircut” its depositors by all but 100,000 Euros of their deposits. The good news, if such there was, was that the disappeared deposits would reappear in the form of reconstituted equity in the new Bank of Cyprus. [Dfriedenberg, All AboutAlpha.com]
Stock Tribes
From my perch at the crossroads I’ve been watching the formation of several tribes materializing around some of the highest-flying cult stocks, predominantly within the tech sector. There is a Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) Tribe and a Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) Tribe and an Amazon.com, Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) Tribe and a Facebook Inc (NADSAQ:FB)Tribe and a Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) Tribe and probably a handful of others right now. [Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker]
SodaStream – Making Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. (NASDAQ:GMCR) Look Squeaky Clean
Several months ago, we shared our opinion that Sodastream International Ltd (NASDAQ:SODA) was buying its Italian distributor to provide a revenue and EBITDA boost through accounting shenanigans. [Copperfield Research, Seeking Alpha]
Lagged P/E Ratios: Shiller Cape vs NIPA
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) observes: “Shiller P/E shows the market to be overvalued, but not as extreme if you use the NIPA data.” [Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture]
From Anonymity to Scourge of Wall Street
Leon W. Weidman’s pioneering use of the law — the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, or Firrea — underpinned the Justice Department’s tentative $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM). The United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, has deployed the statute most often, filing civil fraud actions against Wells Fargo & Co (NYSE:WFC), The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (NYSE:BK) and Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC), among others. A jury found Bank of America liable in that case last week. [Peter Lattman and Ben Protess, DealBook]
Hottest Links: Not The Onion
Minnesota Pitcher Gets Injured From Drinking Too Much Pepsi
Hamburger did well enough to earn a minor league contract with the Twins. He was sent down to Venezuela to pitch on a winter ball team, only to have his offseason cut short thanks to another one of his vices. That vice is Pepsi, to be specific. Overloaded with sugar, Hamburger ended up straining a muscle in his throwing arm. [Aaron Rupar, CityPages]
