This week was a bit nutty for me in terms of carnivals. I also hosted my first one in the form of the Carnival of Investing and submitted three posts to others, including today’s Festival of Frugality. As usual, I’ll highlight some of the other posts I particularly enjoyed this week.
From the Carnival of Personal Finance:
- Steve Mertz is challenging everyone out there to come up with viable ways to generate cash flow for someone who lost her job because her son was diagnosed with autism. Reward: a $200 gift certificate to your favorite restaurant for the best submission. This is a worthy competition, though sadly, I haven’t come up with any great ideas yet. Stop by and read about the challenge and the stories behind it.
From the Carnival of Capitalists:
- A nice article from InvestorGeeks examining the housing market and housing stocks. I agree with almost all of the points made, except one. The author claims housing stocks are actually attractive from a numbers (e.g. quantitative) point of view, though not from a “qualitative” point of view. I would argue that they’re also unattractive from a quantative point of view. The lesson here is that you always need to put numbers (in this case, P/Es) in their right context.
Housing stocks’ P/Es might look attractive “in general”, but go back and calculate what these same data were 5 years ago for each company, and you’ll see that current P/Es are unheard of in this industry. My Yahoo! screener keeps showing housing and energy stocks as good buys, but you always have to think about what’s behind the calculations that’s making them appear so attractive. Of course, doing some legwork and checking out reality is also always a good thing too.
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Steve Mertz
Thanks for the mention…Interestingly enough i’ve had three ideas presented so far-all by women! We men are coming up brain dead :)