I like Ford. They make great trucks and are certainly the most viable of the big 3. Might be worth buying some F stock to hang onto for awhile. But I wouldn’t count on it going up to $6 in a couple months … could happen, but I think it’s a good hold for a year or two.

I haven’t been paying too much attention to the markets lately. I’m waiting for the next big “engine” to get started that will drive the market into multi-year bull territory … like I said before, I think renewable energy is a good candidate for this job … there are only so many things big enough to propel the global economy forward and that’s one of them.

Not too much of anything is going to impact Visa or any other stock as much as we’d like until we start seeing the global economy moving steadily forward again.

If you remember the dot com crash, it was the housing bubble that turned the economy around after that. That was a good thing (short term) and a bad thing (long term), because the global economy has to reset …

A lot of the wealth in the world is speculative. It’s paper, it’s not real. The real wealth (real goods and services) in the world can only support so much speculative wealth before there’s a loss of confidence. A crash wipes out that speculative wealth and resets the system.

This crash is big. Short term that’s not good, but long term it is good because there’s a lot more room for wealth (both real and speculative) to build up.

Real wealth builds slowly; think inflation. So a real economic turnaround requires speculative wealth, it requires a hot new sector to emerge. The big question is what will it be? Probably one of the best candidates is renewable energy; wind, solar, biodiesel, etc.

If we start to see a lot of new companies emerge and money pour into this sector (or some sector), creating jobs, etc, then we’ll see the start of a real recovery. Until the next “reset”.

haha … well, you already know my thoughts on Visa. I still think it’s a long term hold … and yeah, I still can’t predict the future.

I think a lot of people are going to get hurt by margin calls in this climate. Luckily, I didn’t buy any shares on margin myself … but I did buy some options and leaps. The options are in the toilet. We’ll see how my Jan 2010 leaps do.

A buddy of mine bought shares at $59 and he sold at $62 when it crashed down. All in all, he’s not too happy, but he got out alive.

There are 4 things we know for sure right now:

1. The market looks like it’s at or near the bottom. But that’s honestly a 50/50 tossup. There’s a lot of things wrong, even though it looks like most of the pain has already been inflicted.

2. Markets go down faster than they go up. We could see some general stagnation for the next year or two very easily. And even if the market doesn’t fall further, time is money, and not going up hurts over time.

3. Visa is still a strong company. In general, I don’t think “bad times” are bad for Visa because people switch from using credit cards to relying on them. They also make smaller transactions on their debit cards, but not necessarily a lot less transactions. That said, consumer credit is tightening up and will continue to do so. The party’s over and that could hurt Visa’a growth for the next year or two.

4. Down markets are buying opportunities. The market will rise again. And taking the first 3 factors into consideration, as well as personal financial needs, I think people have to make a decision on whether they’re going to weather out the storm or cut their losses and run for the hills.

And what is “long term” for holding Visa? The only answer is … longer than it was.

Earning are due out 10-29 after the close. I’m thinking they will again report very positive numbers due in part to 08 Summer games and they have that DFS litagation settled.

I know you can’t tell the future, no one can. I know you say it’s a 1-5 year hold. I know we’ve had very unstable market for about two months now, howeverhave been a little suprised that the stock hasn’t held up better, it’s been awhile since it’s sh

Housing is going to get worse before it gets better. Regarding a target date for it to turn around, that’s harder to predict. And I wouldn’t necessarily tie Visa to housing, but it certainly is tied to the financial sector and to the economy overall.

I would say be careful with leaps/options in this crazy climate. The leverage is incredible, and you can make a lot of money with them, but you can also lose all your money.

With stocks, you have the option to sit on them and ride out the turmoil. But leaps/options start losing time value very quickly if the market is not going in your favor or is stagnant, and although I’ve made a couple bucks with options, I’ve also taken a bath on them a few times.

To give you a general idea of time value … if you bought 2010 leaps today and next summer the stock price is exactly where it is today, those options could be worth 20% of what you paid for them. Time value can be a real killer.