A key takeaway from the year is that the market always surprises. In fact, I subscribe to the theory that the market is always looking to cause the most people the most pain.
If I told you at the beginning of the year that gold would go from $1400 up to $1900 and then back down to $1600, treasury bonds would plummet to below 2%, Italian bonds would climb above 7%, Netflix would climb over $200 per share and then collapse to under $70, U.S. Treasury debt would be downgraded, but that the general stock market would be exactly flat for the year -- you would look at me like I was kind of crazy.
2011 is a year I will NOT miss, and you've done an outstanding job of illuminating why, @Scott!
Interesting to me how things went so wrong on the global level but for the stocks you highlighted, those macro factors really didn't seem to be the reason for their demise.
Re: 2011 was a rough year
mInvestor
12/24/2011 6:27:44 PM
Value Hiker,
Thank you for providing these links. It's quite interesting to see how things developed. I'd say both Tilson and Hastings had handled the issue properly, though Tilson lost quite big on this bet. But both responded positively. The other example was RIM. That company always responded anthing defensivaly. Maybe that's one of reasons that RIM is doing so bad recently.
Thanks Driven.
Today we are trading at about S&P 1252. 2010 ended the year at 1252. Pretty fascinating how the market seems to gravitate around this number.
I think bonds will be key in the new year. If we are to see any kind of of sustainable economic resurgence/rally, you have to see bond yields creep back up.
Was there anybody that got the bonds right in 2011, other than Mr. Bernanke? The tough part about the bond market is figuring out how much of it is artificial -- i.e. driven by the Fed manipulating the bond curve.
Value,
Nice description of the NFLX battle. I believe Tilson ended up having a rough year, if he had only stayed with his conviction. As you point out shorting is never easy.
--Scott
Nice
driven
12/23/2011 8:53:51 AM
Nice look back at the year Scott
Re: 2011 was a rough year
Value Hiker
12/22/2011 11:07:46 PM
0% also underscores the resilience of the world economy. When you list out the events of 2011, we were hit with a lot of natural and man-made calamity -
- Revolution in many parts of the world
- Tramatic earthquake and Tsunami limiting trade world-wide
- Debt crisis and downgrades in both Europe and the US
If we had known these headlines a year ago, would any of us have predicted the markets would have held value overall?
That zero really underscores the extent of the volatility, up and down, over the course of the year.
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