Thanks for deconstructing the whole thing.
I did not look at the numbers in details. The suggestion of a safe place to run when sky falls down was interesting. I’d say that non-food and drink retail would sink…but it’s apparently a bomb shelter. Will keep it mind for the next one.
“Everyone has a bomb shelter until Mr. Market punches you in the face.”
— Mike Tyson, after completing CFA Level IV (or so I heard …)
After like a decade of lying around lazy in my portfolio, paying dividends for the privilege, Cisco finally got me a market dividend. A nice one.
Glad I own CSCO as well, even though I cut a tiny slice at the end of last year.
Another slice to be cut soon. No fundamentals at all to support its current valuation.
Is there any way of getting insider news?
He will claim it was his ‘blind trust’ that did the transactions. He knew nothing about it … Plus these kinds of transactions are perfectly legal according to Russian laws.
Any worries about the current market value?
“It’s a market of stocks, not a stock market.”
— Chuck Carnevale
As I am new to this (started in Jan 2022) I used to pay attention and get worried about the headlines.
The professional cancers, sorry meant gossips, sorry meant journos need to have a narrative 24/7. The points about the market being overvalued are being made continuously since at least 2017, then the narrative turns to doom and gloom, then back to boom, then back to Buffett Indicator/Ray Dalio said X/Shiller PE is Y/yield curves/Michael Burry…there’s always a narrative. My position now is to ignore the noise unless my goals have shifted.
I guess there are always worries. Prior to the Iran war, I was expecting this year to be fantastic for stocks as the US was spending like crazy, we have the AI boom and Powell was potentially out and a dove installed in his place.
On top of that you have wildcards of: potential reversal of tariffs and resolution to the Ukraine war.
Now Iran puts more doubts on things since we have oil price issues, inflation concerns which might lead to change in monetary policy. But the massive fiscal spending is still in place.
If we knew what was going to happen to stock prices, we’d be very rich!
FTFY
The “stock market” is always overpriced. The very reason a company goes public is to add price to it’s shares.
Now we tend to sell when it went down and buy more when it went up. Our brains are wired that way. The only thing that helps is a clean (mechanical) strategy that you follow no questions asked!
In my dividend strategy I have two simple rules that do automatically buy low and sell high. First I invest dividends and money from sells only in positions that are worth less than 4% of my portfolio. Once a stock gets to 6% of portfolio value (meaning it did rise faster than the rest) I sell down to 5%. I call that the market dividend. Yesterday Cisco paid a nice one…
Always thought it was to get funding for investment and to expand?
That may be the case on a capital rising (watering down). The IPO is just selling shares that were privately owned before. The company profits from higher share prices for several reasons but does not directly get money from an IPO. That money goes to the old owners… with a big cut for the investment bank doing the transaction.
IMO we buy and sell depending upon how greedy we feel versus how fearful we are. At the moment, would say that investors are feeling pretty confident in fueling their greed desire. But fear can easily come overnight and it may not take much more.
Or is it for nothing that BRK is holding more cash than ever?
I’m not quite sure if you’ve read the replies here. Maybe you have, but perhaps you haven’t yet come across how Berkshire invests?
The fact that they’re sitting on a huge pile of cash doesn’t mean they don’t see opportunities (see the positions changed in the link in the 2nd bullet point above). They apparently just don’t see the point of deploying several hundred billions of cash at current company valuations with their limitation of there not existing several hundred billion market cap companies out there that are fairly valued, let alone undervalued, in their view, plus additional self-imposed limitations, like no retail, or whatever Mr. Buffett shuns.
“Luckily” I don’t have that problem. My cash like positions sums up to below 7 digits. 
I can deploy cash into a company with a market cap of 500M, and it makes a difference to me, while it would be a rounding error in BRK’s books …
Emphasis mine. Maybe you’re speaking in a royal “we”, maybe you mean to characterize “investors” as a whole, but I’ll point it out again: the topic title is “Simply stock trading” (emphasis mine again). I’m here to discuss stocks, not the market.[$]
Of course feel free to continue to discuss markets all day, even in this topic. 
$ I love talking markets, too. Maybe we can have a new topic for that if there isn’t already one.
Exactly!
I know how they operate.
As you wish. But the general market attitude will probably have an influence on many stocks. Especially big caps.
I have no problem discussing anything that has to do with stock investing here. The term “the market” is a bit difficult however.
Usually one means an index by that. But then an index is far away from being the market. The SP500 for example is more like a (badly) managed fund. The guys who choose the stocks to include and exclude did some very bad stock picking in the past. They published some of there rules just to break them over and over again, what makes owners of “the market” in form of SP500 ETF lose money.
The committee who chooses the SP500 companies is anonymous. All of the power and none of the responsibilities.
In addition to that, the sizing is based on market cap. That made SP500 based ETF lose the label “diversified” by the SEC last year, not sure if they got it back. You have most of your money invested in very few companies and almost nothing in a lot of other companies. Not my pair of shoes…
That is a real problem because of “passive investment”. Nobody analyzes companies anymore (except we of course) and just buy “the market”. Overpriced items get more overpriced that way until it all pops.
