September 26, 2008
Ranking Among My Biggest Failures
JPMorgan Chase May Acquire Washington Mutual After FDIC Seizure
“As many as five banks had considered bids for WaMu without making an offer, balking in part because the lender faced as much as $19 billion in mortgage loan losses.”
A little wiser (maybe), a lot poorer (definitely).
(Unfortunately) Related:
Off the Charts: Washington Mutual’s Dividend Yield (November 14, 2007)
Tip the Chairman and Discover His 10 Favorite Financial Stocks (August 1, 2007)
Cat: | Time: 3:07 pm (utc+8)
September 26th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Ah too bad, a learning experience. What is the wiser part for you? Considering no more buy and hope and letting fuzzy do the work?
btw, I’m not getting email notifications of replies to posts I commented on. They’re not in the spam folder either.
September 26th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
@eyal: Looking at the historical, superficial numbers (like earnings, dividends, etc. :) ) is no good … you have to dig deep (lots of time) and think hard (lots of effort) if you want to invest in individual companies. It probably doesn’t make sense for small investors to take this route.
I shut off the email noticfication after someone told me that it’s insecure and easily hacked (which will lead to the theft of email addresses).
September 26th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Interesting. Thanks.
Well the whole wordpress project is riddled with security holes from what I read somewhere. Too many new versions and features and architecture changes. I think I’ll keep the notifications on for now on my blog, I find them extremely useful.
September 26th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
eyal: Yes, it’s a must-have feature when you think about it (no one wants to come *back* to read replies to comments left on a blog). I know nothing about tech (as you know) but ever since this blog was compromised (recall the wp-footer exploit), and no one could precisely explain to me what happened, I’ve been leery about Wordpress specifically and online security in general.
September 27th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
You are one of the few people that focus on your mistakes instead of conveniently forgetting them. That is impressive. I find myself coming to your blog almost everyday. Thanks for the effort.
September 27th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Eric: I focus on my mistakes because they’re all I’ve got. :-) (Thx for visiting)
September 28th, 2008 at 6:27 am
Would it have been possible to find out about Wamu’s bad mortgage debt back then? I don’t think Wamu was aware of it.(or willing to admit it) Thats why I stick with 70% TA and 30% fundamentals-hard to trust the numbers put out by the companies as you well know.
September 28th, 2008 at 8:23 am
@Hudson: Yes, in fact I wrote a post in March 2007 about WM, Market Leader in Subprime, Alt A, and Option ARM Loans, which I said made me “leery.” I obviously wasn’t thinking hard enough (and said some dumb things in the comments to that post). It would have paid to watch the chart closely (as it always does).
October 3rd, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Failures are a really big thing right now. I found 2 great statistics on failures right now that really caught my eye. Here they are. Its really something like we have never seen before
http://www.gotoguy.com/?p=330
and
http://www.gotoguy.com/?p=329#comment-159
October 4th, 2008 at 7:41 am
@Brandon: Aren’t a lot of LEH’s listed assets actually customer funds which were pulled? (They used old numbers for the 600BB+ figure.) Bloomberg had an article recently about how 400BB was pulled from LEH in its final weeks (just like BSC) — classic run on the bank.