Stock market corrections and panics are easy to spot and usually the safest because they don't tend to change the earnings of the underlying business. That is, unless the company is somehow tied to the investment business, in which case a market downturn tends to reduce general market trading activity, which means brokerage firms and investment banks lose money. Otherwise the underlying economics of most businesses stay the same. During stock market corrections and panics, stock prices drop for reasons having nothing to do with the underlyng economics of their respective companies.
This is the easiest kind of situation to invest in because there is no real business problem for the company to overcome. If you let the price of the security, as Buffett does, determine whether or not the investment gets bought, then this is possibly the safest "buy" situation there is. Buffett began buying The Washington Post during the stock market crash of '73 - '74 and Coca-Cola during the crash of '87. While everyone else was caught in a state of panic, Buffett began buying these companies' shares like a man possessed with a deep thirst for value. He eventually acquired 1,727,765 shares of The Washington Post and 200,000,000 shares of Coca-Cola.
A market correction or panic will more than likely drive all stock prices down, but it will really hammer those that have recently announced bad news, like a recent decline in earnings. Remember, a market panic accents the effect that bad news has on stock price. Buffett believes that the perfect buying situation can be created when there is a stock market panic coupled with bad news about the company.
Any company with a strong consumer monopoly will eventually recover after a market correction or panic. But beware: In a really high market, in which stock prices are trading in excess of fourty times earnings, it may take a considerable amount of time for things to recover after a major correction or panic. Companies of the commodity type may never again see their bull market highs, which means investors can suffer a very real and permanent loss of capital.
After a market correction or panic, stock prices of the consumer monopoly type company will usually rebound withn a year or two. This bounce effect will often provide an investor an opportunity to pick up a great price on an exception business and see a dramatic profit within a year or two of purchasing the stock. Stock market corrections and panics have made Buffett a very happy and a very rich man.
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