Roll With The Cycles, Grab Some Cisco While It’s Cheap Again

Darwin's ideas work in stocks, too

“If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” – Eubie Blake, American composer (1887–1983)

You cannot underestimate the power of cycles.? They reoccur in nature, business, and financial markets with great regularity.? When we ignore them, cycles seem obvious in hindsight.? Foresight is where you’ll make your money.

Time frames may be different based on secular trends, weather phenomenon, innovations in health care, and government intervention, but generally, what goes around, comes around.? For example, economic booms and busts occurred, on average, every 14 years for 2,000 years.?Beginning in the late 20th?century, they began cycling every seven years as a direct result of government efforts to stimulate economic activity during recessionary downturns.? While they occur more frequently, they’re cycles nonetheless.

Tall Parents Have Shorter Children, On Average
Charles Darwin and his cousin, Francis Galton, were the first to note that tall parents have shorter children, on average, and vice versa.? With Karl Pearson, they studied over one thousand father and son pairs.? Galton termed this phenomenon in nature “regression to mediocrity.”? Since then, the method of studying how one variable leads to another variable has been called “regression analysis.”

Financial market observers see it all the time.? Excessively high prices eventually lead to excessively low prices.? The key to succeeding as an investor is knowing where the excesses are when they’re happening and exploiting them.

Special Offer: Make the most of explosive moves in gold and silver but don’t get left holding the bag when it’s time to run.? Click here for instant access to market timing analysis and specific gold, silver and hard asset model portfolios in Curtis Hesler’s?Professional Timing Service.

“Joining The Dow Can Be The Kiss Of Death”
In September, Jeff Reeves of InvestorPlace.com conducted research showing that by the time companies have grown to become the recognized leaders in their industries, share prices are inflated.? For example, turning the clock back to March 1999 when the Dow Jones Averages closed above 10,000 for the first time, then crested to 11,000 a few months later, four of the biggest names of the day joined the Dow 30. Here’s how they fared: AT&T (then SBC Communications), down 38%; Intel, down 50%;?Microsoft, down 47%;?Home Depot, ?down 38%.

During subsequent reformulations of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, laggards were replaced with other leaders of the time.? They included Pfizer, Verizon, Bank of America, Cisco, and AIG.? As a group, these stocks have been shellacked since they joined the Dow 30, but along the way they have continued to make a lot of money for anyone who purchased shares when stock prices were excessively low.? Many have tripled off of lows in 2003 and 2009.

The point is this: You cannot fight the power and magnitude of cycles.? They can make or break an investor.? Here’s one stock that appears far too low right now:

Fallen Angels Focus Stock: Cisco Systems? (CSCO, 20.15)

Cisco is the dominant player in the global networking industry.? Shares plummeted more than 16% on ?Thursday following a less than stellar outlook presented by company management.? While management cited near term challenges, we believe the selling has provided an attractive entry point for longer-term investors.

The company has a solid balance sheet, operating profit margins of more than 20% and net margins in the high teens.? Our fair value estimate (based on discounted cash flow analysis) is $30 per share; providing investors with 50% potential upside from current levels.

Gabriel Wisdom and clients of American Money Management LLC, including mutual funds managed by AMM may buy or sell securities mentioned without prior notice.

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Roll With The Cycles, Grab Some Cisco While It’s Cheap Again

Darwin's ideas work in stocks, too

“If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” – Eubie Blake, American composer (1887–1983)

You cannot underestimate the power of cycles.? They reoccur in nature, business, and financial markets with great regularity.? When we ignore them, cycles seem obvious in hindsight.? Foresight is where you’ll make your money.

Time frames may be different based on secular trends, weather phenomenon, innovations in health care, and government intervention, but generally, what goes around, comes around.? For example, economic booms and busts occurred, on average, every 14 years for 2,000 years.?Beginning in the late 20th?century, they began cycling every seven years as a direct result of government efforts to stimulate economic activity during recessionary downturns.? While they occur more frequently, they’re cycles nonetheless.

Tall Parents Have Shorter Children, On Average
Charles Darwin and his cousin, Francis Galton, were the first to note that tall parents have shorter children, on average, and vice versa.? With Karl Pearson, they studied over one thousand father and son pairs.? Galton termed this phenomenon in nature “regression to mediocrity.”? Since then, the method of studying how one variable leads to another variable has been called “regression analysis.”

Financial market observers see it all the time.? Excessively high prices eventually lead to excessively low prices.? The key to succeeding as an investor is knowing where the excesses are when they’re happening and exploiting them.

Special Offer: Make the most of explosive moves in gold and silver but don’t get left holding the bag when it’s time to run.? Click here for instant access to market timing analysis and specific gold, silver and hard asset model portfolios in Curtis Hesler’s?Professional Timing Service.

“Joining The Dow Can Be The Kiss Of Death”
In September, Jeff Reeves of InvestorPlace.com conducted research showing that by the time companies have grown to become the recognized leaders in their industries, share prices are inflated.? For example, turning the clock back to March 1999 when the Dow Jones Averages closed above 10,000 for the first time, then crested to 11,000 a few months later, four of the biggest names of the day joined the Dow 30. Here’s how they fared: AT&T (then SBC Communications), down 38%; Intel, down 50%;?Microsoft, down 47%;?Home Depot, ?down 38%.

During subsequent reformulations of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, laggards were replaced with other leaders of the time.? They included Pfizer, Verizon, Bank of America, Cisco, and AIG.? As a group, these stocks have been shellacked since they joined the Dow 30, but along the way they have continued to make a lot of money for anyone who purchased shares when stock prices were excessively low.? Many have tripled off of lows in 2003 and 2009.

The point is this: You cannot fight the power and magnitude of cycles.? They can make or break an investor.? Here’s one stock that appears far too low right now:

Fallen Angels Focus Stock: Cisco Systems? (CSCO, 20.15)

Cisco is the dominant player in the global networking industry.? Shares plummeted more than 16% on ?Thursday following a less than stellar outlook presented by company management.? While management cited near term challenges, we believe the selling has provided an attractive entry point for longer-term investors.

The company has a solid balance sheet, operating profit margins of more than 20% and net margins in the high teens.? Our fair value estimate (based on discounted cash flow analysis) is $30 per share; providing investors with 50% potential upside from current levels.

Gabriel Wisdom and clients of American Money Management LLC, including mutual funds managed by AMM may buy or sell securities mentioned without prior notice.

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View the original article here

BB Songs: Oops We Did it Again

Each month, Brooklyn Based will premiere an mp3 recorded by a Brooklyn musician exclusively for BB and you! We’re excited to be working in partnership with Nadim Issa at his state-of-the-art recording studio in Gowanus, Let ‘Em In Music. This month’s mp3, “Oops…I Did it Again,” is performed by Alina Simone. Look for future songs on our blog.

Alina Simone has a thing for Britney Spears. In an interview last spring the singer-songwriter let the world know that she listened to the pop star’s album “Circus” on the daily. So it should have come as no surprise that when we asked Simone to record a song for Brooklyn Based, she suggested covering Spears’ breakthrough hit, “Oops!…I Did it Again.” You better believe we got our school girl kilts out in anticipation.

The result is raw, powerful, and slightly reminiscent of her indie rock cover album of songs by the Russian singer and cult figure Yanka Dyagileva. But why would Simone find such musical inspiration in a pop star better known for her offstage antics than her songwriting skills? Turns out, Spears’ song got stuck in her head as mainstream pop songs always do, through overexposure.

“I spent time in Russia, working internationally, and Britney was everywhere, she was the soundtrack to my life,” said Simone, who is from Russia but was raised in the States. When she first heard Spears in the 90s, Simone “hated her” and thought her music marked the “downfall of Western Civilization.” But the former Disney star’s effect on Simone turned out to be so great that she devoted a chapter of her upcoming book, You Must Go and Win, to her “obsession.”

“Her albums are great,” said Simone. “They’re not the highest form of artistry but I enjoy it, it’s good pop music.”

The book, which Simone describes as, “A collection of tragic-comic essays (mostly) about my misadventures in indie rock, but also about my admittedly strange family and my travels in Russia,” is due out next year. Many of the essays are set in Brooklyn, including one called “Down and Out on Hope Street,” about a subletting disaster in Williamsburg punctuated by a flea-ridden mattress. Better than bed bugs, we guess. “Gloom-Deflecting-Mailman-Warrior-Gods,” another essay in the collection, “focuses on my disastrous (and hopefully hilarious) experiences with Craigslist auditions,” Simone explains.

High- or low-brow tastes and flea bites aside, looking at Simone’s past, she has a pretty good track record of choosing which artists to cover. Her album of Dyagileva covers, Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware, was critically acclaimed. Simone has said that she recorded the album to introduce Americans to a person and culture they didn’t know much about. Her Britney cover is perhaps an inverse of that formula–we know way too much about the pop star, but get to discover a new side of Simone through the song.

Simone was born in Kharkov, Ukraine to Russian parents and moved to the U.S. when she was one. She has lived in the Sunset Park/South Slope area since moving here two years ago from North Carolina. “I’ve never felt at home until I moved?here,” she said.

Her second full-length album, Make Your Own Danger, will be released with You Must Go and Win in June 2011. “The album is neither quirkier nor folkier,” says Simone. “If anything, it’s the most accessible and polished collection of songs I’ve yet recorded.” You can listen to “Beautiful Machine,” from the new album here, or, for now, satiate yourself with her gorgeous, stripped-down take on “Oops…I Did it Again.”

Published on 11.11.10. Text by Georgia Kral, photos by Andrei Konst

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

View the original article here

BB Songs: Oops We Did it Again

Each month, Brooklyn Based will premiere an mp3 recorded by a Brooklyn musician exclusively for BB and you! We’re excited to be working in partnership with Nadim Issa at his state-of-the-art recording studio in Gowanus, Let ‘Em In Music. This month’s mp3, “Oops…I Did it Again,” is performed by Alina Simone. Look for future songs on our blog.

Alina Simone has a thing for Britney Spears. In an interview last spring the singer-songwriter let the world know that she listened to the pop star’s album “Circus” on the daily. So it should have come as no surprise that when we asked Simone to record a song for Brooklyn Based, she suggested covering Spears’ breakthrough hit, “Oops!…I Did it Again.” You better believe we got our school girl kilts out in anticipation.

The result is raw, powerful, and slightly reminiscent of her indie rock cover album of songs by the Russian singer and cult figure Yanka Dyagileva. But why would Simone find such musical inspiration in a pop star better known for her offstage antics than her songwriting skills? Turns out, Spears’ song got stuck in her head as mainstream pop songs always do, through overexposure.

“I spent time in Russia, working internationally, and Britney was everywhere, she was the soundtrack to my life,” said Simone, who is from Russia but was raised in the States. When she first heard Spears in the 90s, Simone “hated her” and thought her music marked the “downfall of Western Civilization.” But the former Disney star’s effect on Simone turned out to be so great that she devoted a chapter of her upcoming book, You Must Go and Win, to her “obsession.”

“Her albums are great,” said Simone. “They’re not the highest form of artistry but I enjoy it, it’s good pop music.”

The book, which Simone describes as, “A collection of tragic-comic essays (mostly) about my misadventures in indie rock, but also about my admittedly strange family and my travels in Russia,” is due out next year. Many of the essays are set in Brooklyn, including one called “Down and Out on Hope Street,” about a subletting disaster in Williamsburg punctuated by a flea-ridden mattress. Better than bed bugs, we guess. “Gloom-Deflecting-Mailman-Warrior-Gods,” another essay in the collection, “focuses on my disastrous (and hopefully hilarious) experiences with Craigslist auditions,” Simone explains.

High- or low-brow tastes and flea bites aside, looking at Simone’s past, she has a pretty good track record of choosing which artists to cover. Her album of Dyagileva covers, Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware, was critically acclaimed. Simone has said that she recorded the album to introduce Americans to a person and culture they didn’t know much about. Her Britney cover is perhaps an inverse of that formula–we know way too much about the pop star, but get to discover a new side of Simone through the song.

Simone was born in Kharkov, Ukraine to Russian parents and moved to the U.S. when she was one. She has lived in the Sunset Park/South Slope area since moving here two years ago from North Carolina. “I’ve never felt at home until I moved?here,” she said.

Her second full-length album, Make Your Own Danger, will be released with You Must Go and Win in June 2011. “The album is neither quirkier nor folkier,” says Simone. “If anything, it’s the most accessible and polished collection of songs I’ve yet recorded.” You can listen to “Beautiful Machine,” from the new album here, or, for now, satiate yourself with her gorgeous, stripped-down take on “Oops…I Did it Again.”

Published on 11.11.10. Text by Georgia Kral, photos by Andrei Konst

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

View the original article here