"I believe that you are right about sales being flat due to the economy."
The economy and much higher prices on many things I've looked for. No wonder so many of the vendors aren't restocking.
I recently rearranged my tackle storage and needed a few more Plano (a Pure Fishing company) 3670 CUSTOM DIVIDER boxes. I thought they'd be more than $8.99 due to inflation, but everywhere I looked they were $14.99 (@TW and Tackle Direct), $16.99 (@Amazon), and $12.99 lots of places that were and still are OUT OF STOCK.
It's sort of sad seeing some Wall Street types once again spending a lot of money, not making enough to stay afloat, and have to scramble to find a new leader to bail them out somehow while they refinance debt and try to stay out of bankruptcy.
And we get higher prices. You would think they could make some big bucks from their high prices, but then again they have executive salaries and benefits to cover, and the interest payments on all those big loans.
After 60 years of investing I have to admit that most of the bigwigs aren't as smart as I would like them to be or as smart as they think they are. It's hard to pick the winners from the losers.
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Not fishing related, but a prime example of how being smart and well educated isn't always good enough. Good reading if you like the topic.
Anyone familiar with the rise and fall of Long Term Capital Management? They were among the best and the brightest and they collapsed and nearly took the country down with them.
www.businessinsider.com/the-fall-of-long-term-capital-management-2014-7
"Twenty years ago, one bond-trading hedge fund grew from launch to over $100 billion in assets in less than three years. It saw yearly returns of over 40 percent. It was run by finance veterans, PhDs, professors, and two Nobel Prize winners. Everyone on Wall Street wanted a piece of their profits."
There is a wonderful book about them.
www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Management/dp/0375758259
"Praise for When Genius Failed: <great title btw>
“[Roger] Lowenstein has written a squalid and fascinating tale of world-class greed and, above all, hubris.”—BusinessWeek
“Compelling . . . The fund was long cloaked in secrecy, making the story of its rise . . . and its ultimate destruction that much more fascinating.”—The Washington Post
“Story-telling journalism at its best.”—The Economist"
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Warren Buffett's involvement in the bail-out and his lessons learned. His offer was turned down.
https://novelinvestor.com/buffetts-lessons-long-term-capital-management/
"The whole Long Term Capital Management – I hope most of you are familiar with it – the whole story is really fascinating because if you take John Meriwether, Eric Rosenfeld, Larry Hillenbrand, Greg Hawkins, Victor Haghani, the two Nobel prize winners Merton Scholes… If you take the 16 of them, they probably have as high an average IQ as any 16 people working together in one business in the country, including Microsoft or where ever you want to name. So an incredible amount of intellect in that room. Now you combine that with the fact that those 16 had had extensive experience in the field they were operating in. These were not a bunch of guys who had made their money, you know, selling men’s clothing and all of a sudden went into the securities business. They had in aggregate, the 16, probably had 350 or 400 years of experience doing exactly what they were doing. And then you throw in the third factor that most of them had virtually all their very substantial net worths in the business. So they had their own money up. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money up, super high intellect, working in a field they knew, and essentially they went broke. That to me is absolutely fascinating."
