You should really subscribe to Netflix and watch the episode 3 of the show "Dirty Money".
That episode is about Valeant. You'll get some details there that you probably didn't know.
- The people in the documentary that talk negatively about Valeant look to have a pretty good opinion about themselves. The pretty indian girl (Fahmi Quadir) looks well above all of us with her fancy suit;
- At some point, a guy says that nobody had a bad opinion about Valeant except him and an handful of other people, which is pretty cocky and false. A lot of people never liked Valeant even if they weren't the majority;
- Bill Ackman had a serious man crush on Mike Pearson at some point;
- Mike Pearson is a big motherfucker and he deserves to be hated by everybody;
- The Philidor scam was a pretty creative one. They created drugstores with fictional owners with names of characters from "The Shining" (you know, the 1980 movie with Jack Nicholson).
- I'm saying this since a couple of years, but man, Bill Ackman is soooo bad. At some point, we can hear him saying that he didn't do his due diligence with Valeant. LOLLLLLL. What else do you need? That guy lost 4 billion of dollars with a stock just because he had a boner when he was in the company of an overweight guy. If anybody writes a comment on my blog telling me that he has respect for Ackman and he's a great investor and blablabla, I'm seriously gonna make a fool of you in public;
- You'll see the story of a woman taking Syprine pills for abour 30$ a month before Valeant took control of the drug. Lately, the price of the treatment was almost 300 000$ a year. Thanks to Valeant;
- Strangely, nothing illegal was found in the Valeant case. Just deeply immoral actions and I can see that clearly now even if at the time, I tried to convince myself that it was a respectable company;
- Personal learning: In this fucking world, you can see that you can't trust politicians (Trump is the worst american politician of the last 1000 years, so even Indian chiefs before the coming of Europeans did better than him), you can't trust artists (they're all rapers except the females), you can't trust journalists (because like the great Trump says, they all create fake news) and you can't trust big investors and CEO's because most of them don't know what they talk about or they're simply crooks. At least, we have our priests and religious leader who never did anything wrong.
Go see it now. It's a good lesson for everybody. Even for those who never believed in Valeant.
Ackman's returns lately:
RépondreSupprimer2015 -20.5%
2016 -13.5%
2017 -4%
To be fair, he also went through a period of a number of years with a compounded annual rate of return of about 23% or 24%.
I'm not sure if Donald Trump's tax policy is in the long term best interests of the American people. But he is making it very easy for us to make money in the stock market. Here's some research:
80% of the cash reserves of the top American corporations are held overseas. The New tax bill does not just lower corporate tax rates (leaving more earnings/profit for america's corporations) but it allows repatriation of these overseas cash reserves at a one time discounted rate. He wants to bring home all those billion$ and let the biggest corporations put the money to work.
Here are the top 5 U.S. companies with the biggest piles of cash:
1. Apple $261.5 Billion
2. Microsoft $133 Billion
3. Alphabet / Google $94.7 Billion
4. Cisco $68 Billion
5. Oracle $66.1 Billion.
I think I will buy Microsoft/MSFT next week and add to my position in Alphabet/ GOOG.
Microsoft is surprising. A few years ago (6-7 years ago), I followed MSFT much more than today and to me, it looked a lot like Cisco (i.e. a great company of the past, but not so great anymore). It turned that MSFT has been a good investment (from 28$ (2013) to 94$ (2018)).
RépondreSupprimerToo funny; I was watching this last night. Those gangsters at Volkswagen are back at it. Greed knows no boundaries. It was interesting to see that they are all cheats... MB, BMW and Audi.
RépondreSupprimerFor the record we sold VRX at $286... because it broke below our resistance level... no other reason. When you are running concentrated portfolios as we are (and I suspect many on here too) I feel it's important to have stops in place. We don't always get it right but avoiding 90% losses is CRITICAL. We also sold Concordia in the $80s... again, avoiding massive capital draw down.
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