Geoff over at Gannon On Investing is getting back into blogging regularly, and is planning to run some features where he asks questions of different bloggers, and pools their answers. His site is very much worth a visit.

Here are some of the questions he had for me:

Personal Performance:
How have you fared so far in ‘08?
What’s been your greatest success this year?
What’s been your greatest failure this year?

YTD as of 7/18 close, -1.67%. I’m not viewing the individual trade results as being composed of individual successes or failures. I view the process as one of methodology applied consistently, with individual trade results being somewhat randomly distributed over time, around an average result for that system. That holds true for relative value traders, GARP traders, cigar-butt traders, special situation traders, and other types of system traders. Sticking to a chosen system is the “success.” Currently I trade one of the four systems I track; in time, with a larger account, I’ll probably trade two simultaneously.

Are stocks cheap, expensive, or fairly valued?

How you look at “stocks” depends on how you aggregate the index, how you weight the components, etc. If the question is, “how is the S&P 500 valued?”, I dunno. I haven’t done the math on it, and don’t really care. Certainly some individual stocks are fairly valued, some are cheap, and some are dear, by methods that I would consider using.

Where are oil prices headed?

The sarcastic answer is “they will fluctuate.” I think we saw a blow-off top in oil prices just now. Long-term, I think the cycle of gasoline prices is topped as well, and GM’s boneheaded too little, too late moves probably marked the top as well as any capitulation ever could.

For the rest of the questions and answers, keep an eye on Gannon On Investing.

[EDIT: The post is up now at Geoff’s site: Blogger RoundTable July 2008.]