Weekend Watcher: Knowing When a Sector Is Rotted Through
You know, I haven't eaten a syrup-filled fruit-salad cup since elementary school. It's weird how things deemed good for you to eat in the 1980s -- or whenever -- are now considered borderline poison, or so says WebMD. But there I was, at home, reflecting on those simple fruit-cup-eating years in between researching fruit-and-veggie companies for Monday morning's edition of "TheStreet Hits the Street." Then it dawned on me: Dole (DOLE), Fresh Del Monte (FDP) and Chiquita (CQB) are pretty rotten, stinky investments, and have been for quite a while. The reason is the sector in which they operate.
Sector analysis is overlooked by the average investor, in my experience, as folks have been trained like robots to read financial filings and then look at this "multiple" stuff. Moreover, when analysts discuss the key factors of the sector in which their stock picks reside, this kind of study is unlikely to be in the commentary ingested by book-talkers. This is a major problem. It leads you, the potentially unknowing investor, to try and differentiate sector winners that could be dogs with fleas, given a sector whose dynamics are atrocious....621 more words left in this article. To read them, just click below and try Real Money FREE for 14 days.
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