Yeah; GE makes fabulous jet engines, great diesel/electric locomotives and really good power turbines for all kinds of electrical generation. Unfortunately, like Caterpillar, they are vulnerable in the heavy equipment area to whipsawing of infrastructure spending worldwide. Those industries could certainly do better standing alone, as could their capital services arm. There are likely other bright spots that I'm not aware of also. It just seems somehow that good division level numbers get sucked up into the giant mess the company had become and disappear. I held GE previously much longer ago buying in just sub $30 with the strong belief nothing was keeping it from going to $50. A number of years later, when I ran out of patience, I just barely got out of it without loss - selling for just over $30. I consider it one of my investment mistakes, as I invested based on a belief/feeling that was not underpinned by fundamentals
I like the following article from seeking alpha on the potential for a full blown financial crisis, it brings in data from a variety of sources and the interpretation of those and the conclusion resonate for me. I'm older and invest largely in quality dividend paying stocks. I invest in stocks rather than funds because a quality stock with a good reliable dividend history is one of the first things to begin recovering after a correction (because of flight to quality) and is still paying me income at the same rate, regardless. I have no intention of selling unless I'm forced to, so I largely don't care about the underlying price of the stock as I am not leveraged and am predominantly interested in the revenue stream. If I am DRIPping, then lower asset price just means accumulating more shares faster. You need to own the stock rather than a fund, though, to truly buy and hold. A fund manager may sell
quality assets for a variety of reasons unrelated to their long term potential
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4209026-another-financial-crisis-coming-investors-need-know
It takes some time to build a solid position in this type of investment, but it's never too early to start and the Graham/Buffett method gives you a way to determine a target price to buy in at which I find invaluable. For some assets such as GE, which I never considered lifetime holding, I periodically readjust the price that triggers a sale of the asset upward as the share price rises. You want to stop loss/preserve profits but give it some ways to fall on volatility without triggering an unwanted abandonment of the position. In the example of GE, the steady fall generated by the talk around reducing their dividend in 2017 would have automatically triggered the life boats
I apologize if some of this is below the level of your investing acumen, I just really wanted to fully explain my position. I often set up for a full blown bear market buy setting a buy order at a certain level under my sell order so that if the drop is hard enough and I like the investment enough I essentially recreate the original investment and take some money off the table. That usually doesn't work in a correction as the drop isn't sharp enough. And by letting the algorith do the buying and selling at points i've leisurely determined after much thought, I never have to respond immediately to anything short of 2008 level chaos and i sleep much better at night. YMMV
ETA: Keep an eye on the level of corporate 'junk bond' quality debt as well as who is aggregating it and who is buying it. If anything recreates the sub-prime crisis, I believe it will come from that sector of the market. Another worry just barely on my radar would be more irrational market behavior than usual that is algorithm-based, such as a flash crash. With my use of buy and sell orders they could potentially cost me money for no good reason. As a larger and larger part of trading goes algorithm based i expect if someone knows enough about the minute of particular algorithms, and has the right leverage, the entire market could be vulnerable to significant mischief. The P&G flash crash (2010, I think) is a good example of this. If a bad actor knew what was coming and had the right orders in place on a machine/connection that could execute fast enough, they could sell a huge position in P&G, rebuy the same position for around half as much and pocket the profits.
Man I really appreciate you taking the time for that reply. You sound a lot like me in your thinking. I love nice dividend stocks. You are dead on about flash crashes and such. I day trade quite a bit and follow buying groups in chat, there are a few of them guys who create rapid trades on a daily basis, multiple times. They will call the ticker and by the time you put it on scanner it is already heading up, they will run them up 20-30% or sometimes 100% and within 20 minutes it is back where it started. They use $100,000 to trip scanners then computers take over the buying and they dump it as computers are buying. I guess guys shorting works about the same way, I hear of that happening a lot, but I never short stocks. Thanks for the link and for your time.