needhelp Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Im a genious to Thats not a hard benchmark.
The guys who run GS are master operators extraordinaire! By switching their fiscal year end from November to December, they were able to exclude the month ended December 31, 2008 from all of their results (didn’t show up in fiscal 2008 which ended November 30 and is obviously excluded from the fiscal 2009 results). GS lost over $1 billion or $2.15 per share in the month ended 12/31/08 and probably took a bunch of write-downs that won’t be included in their past or future releases. Given the glee over Q1 09 results, investors clearly ignored page 10 of the earnings release. Losing $1 B in a month is pretty crummy in my book…
Yeah, really great company. Over years, this company made billions and billions of Dollars in profits and when the have just one bad quarter, they need to call the government and W.Buffet for help. Where have all the earnings gone? How would a non-listed company fare with such short-sighted management? I suspect the money GS made along the way has disappereared in the pockets of those working there. Stock holders havn’t come away this fortunate. Lloyd Blankfine, GS’s CEO said why he wants to repay the TARP money asap - to lift the restrictions on executive and bonus pay. So investors are being asked to help GS executives return to their old compensation streams and all that against the backdrop of an earnings release that leaves questions open like: “What happened to December?” or “what are the assets REALLY worth?”. As long as clear and concise answers are found to these two questions, the earnings release has no value for me. I will dig around now …
Yeah, really great company. Over years, this company made billions and billions of Dollars in profits and when the have just one bad quarter, they need to call the government and W.Buffet for help. Where have all the earnings gone? How would a non-listed company fare with such short-sighted management? I suspect the money GS made along the way has disappereared in the pockets of those working there. Stock holders havn’t come away this fortunate. Lloyd Blankfine, GS’s CEO said why he wants to repay the TARP money asap - to lift the restrictions on executive and bonus pay. So investors are being asked to help GS executives return to their old compensation streams and all that against the backdrop of an earnings release that leaves questions open like: “What happened to December?” or “what are the assets REALLY worth?”. As long as clear and concise answers are found to these two questions, the earnings release has no value for me. I will dig around now …
They got the big payout on the AIG bailout as a counterparty to the CDSs, that they would not have recieved if AIG failed, while also hedging the AIG counterparty credit risk via probably shorting the stock. So they essentially got paid twice for the same risk, one from the short stock, they other from taxpayers. Of course the executives deserve to be paid as much as they do. They make the rules with their buddies in congress and treasury.
I like to buy stocks where management takes a relatively low salary and has a large vested interest in the company. Bonus if the same management has been there from the beginning. Let me start off a list: - BRK.A - LUK - CNQ