Here is the first of two charts, this one in dollar terms:
$OSTK is effectively flat over 15 years, while the S&P Retail comp and Amazon have skyrocketed.
2/
It is even more damning to look at this in terms of percentages:
Amazon is the outlier, gaining 3270% over that decade and a half. A better comparison is the Retail comp, up 364.3% over that period.
And $OSTK? It was up 5.3% over 15 years, or about a third of 1% annually.
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Gee, I cannot imagine why these guys loved to talk about naked shorting and deep capture and the unfair press they got instead of growth and revenues and profits...
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It is a cautionary tale about the doggedness of a few courageous people -- Herb, Gary, Sam and others -- who refused to be intimidated when the rest of the media either went away or were bamboozled.
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Speaking which: I cannot imagine how The New York Times could cover his resignation and somehow omit the SEC investigations, accounting frauds and profit restatements; Perhaps @julie_creswell and @CadeMetz can explain this
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Perhaps they should go into the NYT own archives to do some research via @opinion_joe
FOMC seems 2b always behind the curve, historically, going back to the 1990s under Greenspan.
They are a big + boring conservative institution & are fearful of error. They tend to be less aggressive when making decisions, with significant ramifications.
Consider the errors of just the past 2 decades and you can see the biggest mistake they make is either arriving way too late to the party or once they are there, overstaying their welcome:
1. Only 5 stocks driving markets 2. Recession is inevitable 3. Breadth is terrible 4. AI is a bubble 5. Debt ceiling = disaster 6. Problematic new lows 7. Consumers running out of money 8. Earnings will fail THIS Q 9. HH Debt! 10. Rally faltering
Let's see if I can find something to undercut each of those 10 items:
Only 5 stocks driving markets?
Then why are Equal-weighted indices doing so well?
What drives market returns? These rolling 10-year total returns going back to 1909 (via Crestmont Research) show an average ~10% annual total return over any 10-year long period.
Ed Easterling (of Crestmont) breaks down those returns into these components: EPS, Dividend Yield, and P/E Increase (or decrease).
Note how cyclical P/E expansion/contraction is...
This is why it is important to include whether P/Es are expanding or contracting in any definition of a bull or bear market.
It takes the Earth 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes + 9.76 seconds to complete 1 orbit – to return to the exact same place relative to the sun. Our planet has done this about 4.54 billion times.
What does this unit of time have to do with investing?
Alas, utterly nothing...
This is an example of the irrelevant nature of the calendar - I'd be curious to see what the data looks like for successive rolling 12-month periods rather than calendar years; it might also be more useful than using January - December periods