John Dorfman Columns category, Page 7

Part of Peloton Interactive Inc.’s stock decline this year was funny. But the loss of 73% for the year to date (through Dec. 21) was not so humorous. As shown in the accompanying table, Peloton suffered the biggest loss of all stocks with a market value of $5 billion or...

The Bunny Portfolio is hopping again. It bounced to a 36.6% return in the past year. I named this hypothetical portfolio after the Energizer Bunny of battery-commercial fame, which is “still going” long after you’d expect it to lose its energy. The companies in the Bunny Portfolio have done well...

It pays to keep an eye open when corporate chieftains buy or sell their company’s stock. Here are four dispatches from the (legal) insider trading front. loanDepot Based in Foothill Ranch, Calif., loanDepot Inc. (LDI), is a nonbank consumer lender. Much of its business consists of home equity loans and...

So far, Joe Biden leads all U.S. presidents in stock-market performance. We’re in the early days, of course. Biden hasn’t served a full year yet. And the market slide on Nov. 26, if sustained, could change the numbers rapidly. But through Nov. 26, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has...

Barring a reversal in the last few weeks of this year, growth stocks will beat value stocks in 2021 for the fifth time in a row. These things tend to run in spurts. Value beat growth seven years in a row from 2000 through 2006. For those who don’t know...

Punished for their sins, real or imagined, a few hundred stocks are down this year despite a rising market. Investors are busily selling these unfortunate stocks, establishing tax losses that can offset their gains elsewhere. In effect, the losers get kicked while they are down. Some have fallen to what...

Sure, the stock market’s on the expensive side. But some stocks still are selling for less than book value (essentially, corporate net worth). Why should you care? Because, despite skeptics who say book value is an obsolete measure, buying stocks below book value can be a highly profitable strategy. Beginning...

John Maynard Keynes, a canny investor as well as a famous British economist, wrote in 1936 that the stock market resembles a beauty contest, with a twist. The goal, he said, is not to select the contestants who are “really the prettiest,” but rather those whom the other judges will...

If you’re going to steal, steal from the best,” Woody Allen once said. Once a year, I try to do that. My annual Purloined Portfolio features ideas I lift from other money managers. My Purloined Portfolio from last year returned 45.9%, thanks mostly to gains in Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL, idea...

When clients ask me to emphasize dividends, they usually mean dividend yield. The yield is a stock’s dividend divided by its price. A $50 stock paying a $2 dividend annually has a yield of 4%, and dividend-conscious investors often look for a yield in that zone or higher. I gently...

The stock market came in like a lamb and went out like a hyena in the third quarter. Gains in July and August were followed by a slide in September. When the dust settled, some stocks had been knocked down to what I consider attractive levels. Identifying such stocks is...

You won’t find Facebook or Procter & Gamble in the portfolios I run. But that doesn’t mean I never think about them. Once a year in this column, I give my “buy” or “avoid” opinion on the 20 largest stocks. Here are my latest ratings, from the very largest (Apple)...

Providing after-school online tutoring to students in China used to seem like a good business. Not anymore. For much of 2020, Gaotu Techedu Inc., one of the companies in this field, had been dogged by allegations that it had inflated its financial results. Then in July 2021 came the final...

Ever have a problem with mice or termites in your house? If so, there’s a decent chance you called Terminex. Terminex Global Holdings Inc. (TMX), based in Memphis, Tenn., is the largest pest control company in the U.S. It has 2.8 million customers in 47 states and 22 countries. Brett...

It’s been a great year for stocks with fat profit margins. Five fat-margin stocks that I recommended on September 7, 2020 have returned 78.6% through September 3 of this year. Gamco Investors Inc. (GBL), Mario Gabelli’s investment company, led the way with a 136% return. A year ago, I wrote...

Twice a year in this column, I hunt for stocks that seem to possess both value and momentum. Even though the market has hit records lately, it’s still possible to find stocks that have both qualities. Here are five I recommend. Each of them has beaten the Standard & Poor’s...

If you were invisible, the perfect industrial spy, you could lurk in a company’s headquarters and watch every dollar coming in and going out. That would give you an excellent fix on the company’s cash flow. And cash flow, many investors believe, is a great measure of a company’s health....

Eighty-seven years after he published his seminal work, Benjamin Graham remains the patron saint of value investors. Graham – a hedge fund manager, Columbia University professor and author – believed that a stock’s price orbits its “intrinsic value” the way a planet orbits the sun. It may get further away...

Most of my clients want medium-risk portfolios. A few tilt more to the conservative side. To find stocks for the more conservative ones, a tool I use is the Sane Portfolio. This is a hypothetical collection of a dozen stocks that seem solid to me from several vantage points. To...

In a romantic partner, would you prefer good looks or intelligence? Silly question. Of course, you’d like both. Yet in the stock market, investors often feel they can go for value or growth but not both. Sometimes you can find both in a single stock. And once a year, I...

Clients and prospects often say to me, “With the market at all-time highs, isn’t this a bad time to invest?” They are worrying about the wrong thing. If you don’t invest when the market is at an all-time high, you will miss some excellent returns. A study by J.P. Morgan...

Suppose you had the opportunity to buy a big, lumbering company with huge sales but slender profits. Would you do it? You would if you thought you could turn the company around. Perhaps you could improve the product, raise prices, cut expenses or find other ways to improve those puny...

To call a beautiful woman a “Perfect 10” these days would be considered chauvinistic and outdated. But my Perfect 10 Portfolio is still looking good. This is a hypothetical portfolio of stocks, each of which sells for 10 times the company’s earnings per share. Historically, most stocks sell for about...

You might think only a bumbling company could see its stock decline in the second quarter. After all, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index returned 8.55% for the three months through June. But it isn’t so. About a third of all stocks were down in the quarter. Some are good...

People who are fretting about the Federal Reserve’s latest comments probably never heard of Edson Gould. Gould, a famed stock analyst from the 1940s into the 1970s, tried to devise an answer to investors’ perennial question: When should you take defensive measures if the Fed is tightening credit conditions? He...