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Are you making changes in your portfolio? Getting frustrated with the volatility of the market? Wondering whether we're in for a bear market, a recession, or if this is merely a short term correction? Well, so are the pros, the pundits, and the economists.
Stick with what you know and build on your strengths. Assess your investments and decide if they are going to perform for you in this market environment.
In times of turmoil it can help to do nothing. If you have faith in a company and you feel it will give you eventual rewards, by all means keep it. I just read a posting by one of our fellow bloggers who called himself an Apple bull. He went on to say he had sold Apple because it was going down. That is what stocks do; they go up and they go down. Years ago I bought Apple (I paid less than $10.00 per share for it).The stock market has been through several bear markets and recessions, but holding the stock for the long term has more than made up for any short term blips.
My current portfolio holds primarily oil and gold mining stocks. To me this is a market climate for hard assets. My top performer has been SSL. I think Sassoil (now around 52 dollars per share) will be good to 68-70 dollars a share and this weekend Barrons echoed my opinion with a nice story on the company. Their patented technologies of converting coal to fuel could easily be utilized in the USA.
The gold mining companies have tremendous upside in this time of uncertainity. Gold is hovering around 800 dollars an ounce and production costs average slightly over 300 dollars an ounce. Big mines are buying smaller mines and paying bigger premiums. Kinross, Goldcorp, and Barrick all have upside left.
Gold should hold in a bull market for a few years. It has risen rapidly over the past three years. Prior to that the selling price was about equal to the production price (300 dollars) so little capital improvements were made to mines and production remained flat for several years.
Because the current price of gold is now more than double the cost of producing it, the miner's stocks should be looking pretty in the future. Eventually the dollar will strengthen and gold will decline. Enjoy the ride while you can; it's only happened twice in my lifetime.
The direction of the price of oil is anyone's guess. I just know we need it and natural gas to keep our economy flowing. That means the exploration companies and the drillers will stay busy. The cost of drilling rigs is astronomical, but there's lots of money to be made by companies that own several rigs, especially those of the offshore variety. And then there's the pipelines. Pipeline companies are necessary to transport oil and gas from place to place.
The speculators and the hedge funds can play havoc with the prices of both oil and gold. I've stopped paying attention to weekly fluctuations and only focus on the long term fundamentals. All of these are positive.
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Comments (1)
#1) I think that the recent rise of Gold has more to do with the rise of BRIC countries more than anything else. So as long as these emerging countries continue to grow, Gold will continue to go up. It's rise is tied to growth of emerging markets.
#2) This AAPL bull did not say that he sold AAPL because it is going down. I have said that i have sol AAPL to buy some other bargain stock. Not every one follows Buy and Hold policy. It's not the only method that works.
Posted by Raju Dantuluri | November 19, 2007 2:29 PM