re: Is it buy time?

autigernola....just stuff thats everywhere. I mean throughout history, you've had big market cap companies that crumbled

eastman kodak
bear stearns
Enron

so there's obviously no company that's truly "safe" but I read through alot of balance sheets and from what I'm seeing companies are sitting on mountains of cash and are financially stable beyond anything I've seen in years. When you talk about apple with $175B or whatever gigantic number it is it makes it comical thinking of a company have $1B in the bank, but do you realize what $1B is? That's a ton of cash my god.

Personally I like to buy things that I can't forsee the world not having, I mean, take kodak, the world is surviving just fine without "film", the world is surviving just fine without "enron", and the world is surviving just fine without "bear stearns" bc there are other banks to step in

Whose gonna step in and fill the roles of coca cola which owns so many big drinks? Coca cola has their foot inside every restaurant/nightclub/gas station and I don't really see how it would just vanish overnight, they have an incredible balance sheet and an ability to nominally increase prices every year to generate revenue growth. Coca cola and it's products are basically recession proof.....i mean even an unemployed person can afford what they sell, and when you consider their brand portfolio, every person on earth drinks a coke product even in sub-saharan africa.Everyone is out there searching for a needle in the haystick trying to get rich, when real wealth is simply buying solid companies and holding them for many years.

So I look for products like that will see growth with a growing world population that don't really face competition. See like walmart is nice, but I think they're gonna feel pressure from amazon.

Cigarettes(MO,PM)
Fast food(mcdonalds and yum which owns KFC and taco bell)
Procter Gamble( look what they own, its everything)
general mills(cereal monopoly, are we gonna stop eating?)
Mccormick(spices monopoly)
Visa(credit card market leader, 80% of the world is still cash)

Oil companies are nice, but they don't have the global outreach. Coke sells in china, but exxon/chevron don't china has sinopec, ATT is great until you realize most countries have their own telecom company. ATT has 100M users, china mobile has 700M users, so ATT isn't even the biggest telecom on earth. The big population growth is overseas, not here.

soft drink,cigarettes these are things that transcend borders and are truly global companies. You are essentially buying a mutual fund by purchasing pepsi or coke or phillip morris, I don't think people realize that.

The world population is growing, they will all drink sodas and alot will smoke cigarettes, they will all use oil and cell phones but they wont use companies like ATT,exxon,chevron only a smaller percentage will

So I like to go for global growth with the majority of my holdings. I like companies that can operate anywhere thats why I mention mcdonalds,coke,pepsi, phillip morris they can hit the majority of the 6B+ population. Dont get me wrong I love exxon, I have some and im sure natural gas will be big for them but as with any oil company there's always risk of declining prices or a spill.

I don't see any threats to consumer spending habits on a $1 happy meal or a 75 cent can of soda or cheap cigarettes. To me those are unaffected no matter how bad things get.