*IRA Reminder: You have until next Monday to set up and contribute to an IRA (preferably, in my view, if you qualify with an income below $95,000 single or $150,000 joint, a Roth IRA). The younger you are and more inconvenient this is, the happier you’ll be 30 years from now that you made the sacrifice and got into the habit. Not sure where to start? The nearest bank will do just fine. Do it this afternoon!*
Spencer Martin: ‘Re ‘analysts‘ Friday . . . you’ll get a kick out of this graph.’
Toby Gottfried: ‘Rather than, company earnings fall below analyst expectations, stock drops, shouldn’t those headlines read, analyst estimates exceed company earnings, analysts fired?
Ivy Guy: ‘I’m in New York for the first Ivy League Investment Club Conference, sponsored by Goldman Sachs. The conference began today with the delegates (students from each school) hearing the Goldman Morning Call at 7:15am, the summary of all the GS analysts’ calls for the day. One major point of the conference call was California’s electric utilities. There had been very positive developments on Thursday evening, and so the analysts said that the stocks (PCG and EIX) had nearly 100% upside; they were priced like they were going bankrupt, but this was a ‘near impossibility.’ To reiterate, this is at 7:15am yesterday, Friday.
‘The rest is history. At about 2:30, one of the scheduled speakers begins his talk by saying, ‘If any of you own PG&E, call your brokers–it just filed for bankruptcy.’ There was a palpable silence in the room. We didn’t know if this was some kind of joke. We’d just heard the analysts of Goldman Sachs – GOLDMAN SACHS – talking for several minutes (a good chunk of the morning call) about how this was a near impossibility. In a word, everyone was dumbfounded.
‘In my opinion, this was the best lesson Goldman gave us during the day, inadvertent though it was. If you print this, please don’t use my name or school.’
Emily Rizzo: ‘Re 400 MBA Candidates last week . . . Whatever happened to the clickle? I would love to pay you to write more of these columns.’
☞ Well, if you insist.
