John T. Reed’s news blog

A reader below said NPV is the way to evaluate a stock, not P/E ratio..I will let my other readers decide—after I translate the terms into Plain english..NPV means net present value. I learned that in the CCIM course before I went to Harvard Business. We needed to understand it at Harvard to analyze some of our cases there. I felt sorry for my Harvard classmates who had no clue about time value of money (of which NPV is a subset—new MBA students there with no financial background have to attend a sort of pre-school on financial math and such...

In an 8-0 decision (before Kavanaugh was on the Court), the Supreme Court said Weyerhauser could provide additional information about why they should be allowed to harvest timber they own in Louisiana. Why is there any question about that?.Environmentalists claim such harvesting might call the extinction of the dusky gopher frog..The Endangered Species Act is one of the dumbest laws ever passed. It should be repealed. The environmentalists do not give a damn and about the environment or the dusky gopher frog. They are watermelons: green on the outside and red on the inside. All they care about is stopping big...

Rush is ecstatic that Trump is going to cut subsidies to GM to punish them for closing plants. Is he correct? 1. All government subsidies, mandates, tariffs, and sales taxes should be ended tomorrow by Constitutional amendment. 2. All taxes other than a head tax on each resident of the U.S. should be ended by Constitutional amendment, in other words, no corporation or other entity should have to pay taxes or even file tax returns. 3. Cutting subsidies to GM because they closed plants is likely to cause them to have to lay off additional people. 4. GM closing plants...

What do I think about the recent drops in the S&P 500 and the FAANG stocks?.I know nothing about short-term stock price movements. Neither does anyone else. Those who say they do are lying or, if they are sincere, mistaken..I like the logic of Ben Graham’s value approach based on fundamentals like return on equity and price/earnings ratio. But I hasten to add that Graham himself lost something like 60% of his stock equity during the Great Depression when he was investing according to his fundamental value theory..My belief is that sometimes the market is in a period of irrational exuberance,...

The November 26, 2018 Businessweek quotes Founders Space CEO Steve Hoffman, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, as saying “There’s nothing safer than cash.” Businessweek made that sentence a call-out in the article.He’s nuts. In high inflation, cash and dollar-denominated assets become worth less or just plain worthless. Cash is great in deflation like the Great Depression, but not in either type of monetary crisis. True of pennies and nickels, not other types of cash There is arguably true that there is nothing safer than U.S. pennies and nickels. They rise in melt value during inflation and hold their value during deflation...