I'm reminded of the old joke, if you don't like the weather, stick around it will change soon enough.
So it is with the stock market. All the optimism from last week is washed away in a few minutes. The bulls might encouraged that the Asian markets and overnight futures seem to be hold steady. I would rather see a washout on tomorrow's open, but lately the market hasn't given me what I wanted. Some folks put a bear or bull on the page so it can be seen at a glance where they stand. I'm still stamping the page with a chicken.
I continue to read "The Snowball," the Warren Buffett bio. Buffett was a millionaire by age 30, when a million dollars was a lot of money. Buffett did a number of things that I did not know. As a kid he collected coins, stamps and bottle caps. As a teenager he liked betting on horses. As a new stockbroker he picked some stocks that did poorly. One of his early investments involved a takeover that resulted in massive layoffs. The human costs of that takeover scarred him so much that he never did that kind of thing again.
Some things did not surprise me, such as him being a tightwad with his money, that he did the taxes and kept the books by himself for his investment firm for many years, that he learned from Benjamin Graham at Columbia, and then at Graham's firm, that Buffett made a lot of money on Geico.
I am now reading about Buffett and Charles Munger. Munger taught Buffett about the value of brand names and franchises. Graham's style is more to look at a company's liquidation value. Munger was more interested in what made for great companies. This led to Buffett taking a huge stake in American Express, and later Coca Cola and Gillette.
Still no trading positions.
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