Is now the time to go value hunting for individual stocks?

[Joubert[$]]

Big brands like McDonald's, Disney and Ford are battered. Delta is at a 22 year low although airline stocks may be an entirely different matter. SBC, even as it churns out new deals, is also selling bad news. Everywhere on Wall Street, some big companies are taking big hits.

Are you buying at all? Have any of your favorite stocks dropped to ridiculous lows?

I'm still accumulating Ford -- have been for months -- and am also looking hard at GE. What about you?

[hypotenuse]

Did you know that Wal-Mart has over 50% of the retail market in it's pocket? Saw that stat in my economics text. Did my eyebrows ever raise.


Lynne

[frazzledspice]

The war with Iraq is the big question mark.

If it is won easily and successfully, the economy will get a big boost, despite the temporary problems with oil supplies, etc.

If it drags on, a 7700 Dow will just be a pipe dream for a long time to come, according to the articles I read.

I do believe in Wal-Mart, Lynne.

Out here they've even gotten into re-registering cars!

They've been in the supermarket business 5 years and already have 25% of the market cornered. If their neighborhood markets opened in other states, they would really move up.

(Lots of people, especially seniors or people with disabilities, are just intimidated by the size of the supercenters.)

Wal-Mart is the value stock I've been getting. I figure that no matter how bad the economy gets, Wal-Mart will keep chugging along, and may even increase its business.

WMT on NYSE. It is down about $3 since the most recent bloodbath

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

I've never bought individual stocks because I don't have the time or expertise (or time/desire to gain such expertese) that one should have to track, buy, and monitor individual stocks. I haven't changed my 403(b) mutual fund purchasing, although I probably should, and ditto for my pension investment choices.

Meanwhile, Prudential is changing the terms/management of a mutual fund plan I had via a former employer, and I'm probably cashing my $4500 out of there for our house fund. It was over $8000 when it was high, and I know it's bad timing, but we have got to get out of the renting rut no matter what's going on with the economy right now.

[erik_kosberg]

FWIW, I’m leary of trying to catch a falling knife — CNBC has been calling the bottom almost every week for the last two years, yet we go lower and lower. I’ve made no new stock purchases in the last few months, but my most recent ones (which I still hold) are very defensive, all of them precious metals stocks: DROOY, SSRI, and PAAS. I’m not totally bearish (I still have money in a S&P 500 fund in both my taxable account and my IRA), but I think that there’s another big shoe waiting to drop — unfunded pensions. The Fords and General Motors and General Electrics of the world that have defined benefit obligations coming due over the next few years have built some rather rosy assumptions into their investment’s projected rate of return. It seems to me that that’s got the potential to develop into a huge problem. If those assumptions are wrong and the benefits still need to be paid out, the money is going to come from the bottom line.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Dow goes down a few thousand more points from its current morbid level. There has yet to be a full-blown panic-selling washout. In a few years when the Dow is at 4,000 or so, I might start looking at stocks like LU, LVLT,and ERICY (assuming that they haven’t gone belly-up by then) and maybe some biotech, fuel cell, or nanotechnology stocks.