For the collector value

I'm looking to make a quick buck on Carnival Cruise stock

I bought Apple stock when the Ipod hit the market and people went nuts for it. Still have that stock and it's done very very well for me.

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Originally posted by Hay2bale:

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Originally posted by 1s1k:
Now you know why I said buying single stocks is more like the gambling mentality even though many disagreed. Oh well it hurts but at least it wasn’t his life savings. Just kind of an expensive lesson

I am one who respectfully disagrees with you.

It is not buying individual stocks that makes you a gambler, but rather which individual stocks you buy that makes you a gambler. If you follow the framework of Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffet and John Bogle, you are not a gambler.

In my opinion, if you give your money to a "professional" money manager, then you are a gambler.

I am more concerned with the return of my money than the return on my money. The "professional" money manager has to beat the market, or his investors will run away. If he needs to take additional risk, he doesn't care, he is gambling with your money.

I have a (small) portfolio of about 40 stocks. I have owned or followed these businesses for forty years, trading in and out of them in order to buy low and sell high. I buy when the stock is near a 52 week low and consider selling when the stock is at a 52 week high. Some might say you can't time the market, but I say you must.

Sometimes you lose. That is how it works.

That's certainly your prerogative. Since you used Warren Buffet he most definitely says that most people should not buy individual stocks. Also you say you hold 40 stocks so you might be as diversified as a mutual fund or index fund. Really how many you hold honestly means nothing as you could be in the hole millions of dollars. Really it needs to be compared to 8-10% a year or what a good fund will do over the course of your lifetime.

I hold individual stocks and mutual funds. Other wise it becomes a boring exercise. I invested in certain healthcare stocks and did well. I have had stock in Southwest Air for over twenty years. It got clobbered recently and that was unpleasant. I still hold the stock. I inherited 200 shares of Pfizer which I sold a couple of years before COVID. Yeah I could have made a bunch, but you do not look back.

Looks like First Republic Bank took a hit.

Does anyone else think this bank situation is strange? In 2006, house prices were going up, people out of high school were going into real estate and owning 3 houses at a time and people could tell something was off.

This time, I didn't come across any indication. The guy who shorted the 2006 and has been a bear the last couple of years didn't call this. So what's the real skinny?

I'm not a financial expert, but to my layman's eyes, the root cause of the failures don't seem to be directly related, other than being exacerbated/hurried by the overall current shakiness in bank confidence and volatile economic conditions.

Rapidly rising interest rates caused big problems for SVB in particular, who had made poor choices with investing their huge glut of deposits from a couple years ago in low interest long term bonds, and ended up grossly upside down in them when interest rates rose sharply, unable to sell them to generate funding to cover an unexpected increase in withdrawals without taking massive value hits.

Signature Bank was heavily involved in the cryptocurrency industry, which was a bad play. The sharp drop in crypto value in 2022, and ongoing lack of confidence in crypto continuing into 2023, led to their demise. (Same exact thing with Silvergate Bank, who was even more deeply involved in crypto, and who voluntarily closed this month before they could fail and be seized.)

Credit Suisse has been on shaky ground for a while now, with a steady trend downward for years, and mostly stagnant value stretching back many more years prior to that. Partly due to bad business decisions, and partly due to numerous problems with big hits from various fraud, manipulation, and money laundering scandals over the past decade or two. So they had been circling the drain for a long while now, and their failure or acquisition was probably inevitable even in a strong economic climate.

So basically, these three bank were in bad shape already, and were barely hanging on by the skin of their teeth. The current economic uncertainty led to people being even more risk adverse than usual, and a recent trend of lots of people withdrawing their assets from these shaky banks and moving them to banks in better shape put the final nail in their coffins. But even before that, they were halfway in the grave already.

Call it Financial Darwinism. The sick and lame banks of the herd that had been able to skate by thanks to bear growth markets and low interest rates are now being culled by the harsh realities of economics, while the stronger, smarter, and healthier banks remain.

I don't yet know enough about First Republic to comment on why they're spiraling down. Could be similar to one of the above examples. Could be something totally different.

First Republic is located in the same area as Silicon Valley Bank.

My Credit Union has some incompetent people working there. I have been with them 65 years and wouldn't keep any large sums of money in their bank.