The Lemon Fool

I appreciate that this has been covered already, certainly it has by Terry Smith, but it is amazing how all these share pundits now 'have never touched the banking sector since .,...... Fill in your own date but the favourite at the moment seems to be 2008.

We now have Ian Cowie at it in the Sunday Times this morning. He seems to do quite well in general although admits (probably for the sake of balance) to have had a few 'Cowie's Clangers'. It would not be difficult to write a column like his. Just needs a bit of hindsight and a rather smarmey looking photo. I appreciate that he can write better than I can, see his opening paragraph this morning.

'It is hard cheese for global stock markets that a Swiss bank's books are full of holes. On the left hand side of the balance sheet, there is nothing right, and on the right side, there is nothing left.'

Wish I had thought of that. Debit Suisse indeed.

It is actually quite a good article but I have no idea how to access it without a Sunday Times sub. Does Mr Google help?

Dod

Dod101 wrote:It is actually quite a good article but I have no idea how to access it without a Sunday Times sub. Does Mr Google help?

Dod

No, it doesn't for the Times/Sunday Times.
But the archive sites often do:
https://archive.md/GTFTl

torata

I agree Dod, it is rather backward looking. I'm betting he held bank shares into the 2007-9 crisis. So how was it clever to be holding bank shares then, but not now when the banks are fixed and the crash is behind us?

As for Debit Suisse can anyone post his previous articles where he indicated CS would have a problem because "low bond yields"? And apart from having a communist system what does he see as the solution to them? Central banks did their utmost to raise yields. It was the market itself -- pretty rationally in my view -- which drove yields so low. It's the job of smart investors to avoid FI when yields are too low. Was he encouraging bond avoidance three to five years ago? Yields have normalised to a large extent now, fixed interest is not necessarily a bad bet.



GS

torata wrote:

Dod101 wrote:It is actually quite a good article but I have no idea how to access it without a Sunday Times sub. Does Mr Google help?

Dod

No, it doesn't for the Times/Sunday Times.
But the archive sites often do:
https://archive.md/GTFTl

torata

OT. How do you find articles on the archive site? Are they indexed somehow?

Nimrod103 wrote:

torata wrote:
No, it doesn't for the Times/Sunday Times.
But the archive sites often do:
https://archive.md/GTFTl

torata

OT. How do you find articles on the archive site? Are they indexed somehow?

No, it's not designed to work that way as a site.
There are various browser add-ons that can be used.

torata

torata wrote:

Nimrod103 wrote:OT. How do you find articles on the archive site? Are they indexed somehow?

No, it's not designed to work that way as a site.

There is "search" perhaps...

BobGe wrote:

torata wrote:No, it's not designed to work that way as a site.

There is "search" perhaps...

But if I search for an item in, say, The Times, using Google or any other search engine, I just get directed to the Times website - which I cannot access because it is paywalled. This happens even if I know a title or phrase from the article and search for that. The seems no way of knowing what to search on in order to get the archived link.

Getting back on topic, although I hold a small number of shares in 3 banks, I consider them to be basically uninvestable. Firstly nobody outside the bank has a clear idea of what aspects of the banks operations are good or bad, and there may be a lot of hidden liabilities. But secondly and more importantly, I think the banks are sitting ducks for any UK Govt which wants to raise cash by means of an excess profit tax. Therefore at best they will give only mundane returns, while at worst they may just implode financially.

Nimrod103 wrote:

BobGe wrote:
There is "search" perhaps...

But if I search for an item in, say, The Times, using Google or any other search engine, I just get directed to the Times website - which I cannot access because it is paywalled.

This happens even if I know a title or phrase from the article and search for that. The seems no way of knowing what to search on in order to get the archived link.

The Google-search process you're describing above just needs one more step, which is to copy the Times article URL that you can't open, and then simply paste it into the search box on the Archive page.

More often than not, if it's an article that's been live for a while, someone has already archived it and you'll jump straight to the archived page.

If it's not yet been archived, it'll automatically start scraping and archiving the provided URL, and then once it has been archived, you'll be transferred to the new archive URL page, and the archived page URL's can then be passed on as seen in torata's earlier reply to Dod in this thread...

So to answer the issue - the Archive site search box isn't a search box for potential article words, it's a search box for already-archived URL's...

https://archive.ph/

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

Nimrod103 wrote:Getting back on topic, although I hold a small number of shares in 3 banks, I consider them to be basically uninvestable. Firstly nobody outside the bank has a clear idea of what aspects of the banks operations are good or bad, and there may be a lot of hidden liabilities. But secondly and more importantly, I think the banks are sitting ducks for any UK Govt which wants to raise cash by means of an excess profit tax. Therefore at best they will give only mundane returns, while at worst they may just implode financially.

I hold JPMorgan and that is it. Might as well go with the highest quality.

Banks do well if the general economy and markets are doing well, and vice versa, so I see little need to bother with them. They are political footballs, as you note.

Lootman wrote:

Nimrod103 wrote:Getting back on topic, although I hold a small number of shares in 3 banks, I consider them to be basically uninvestable. Firstly nobody outside the bank has a clear idea of what aspects of the banks operations are good or bad, and there may be a lot of hidden liabilities. But secondly and more importantly, I think the banks are sitting ducks for any UK Govt which wants to raise cash by means of an excess profit tax. Therefore at best they will give only mundane returns, while at worst they may just implode financially.

I hold JPMorgan and that is it. Might as well go with the highest quality.

Banks do well if the general economy and markets are doing well, and vice versa, so I see little need to bother with them. They are political footballs, as you note.

It took me a long time to wake up to the idea that Gordon Brown's liking for the big banks, and the general financialization of the British economy, was because they then represented an easy target for much greater taxation, with the advantage that UK banks did not vote in elections. I think that idea still runs strong in the Treasury.

Nimrod103 wrote:But if I search for an item in, say, The Times, using Google or any other search engine...

FWIW, I meant using the search on the archive website 'home page'.