In Search of the Perfect Investment

Yesterday, I bought AIG, VMED, FRO and a little more GOOG. I am disappointed with ORCL, CG and BMO — less because they’re losing a few shekels, but more because they haven’t been skyrocketing, like everything else.

I do my Best Buy analyst store visit. I walked every inch of the large BBY store on Columbus Circle. I found nothing to redeem it. Their “new” strategy — low prices and The Samsung Experience –sucks. It’s hard to see it justifying The Big Runup:

Three things have plagued BBY.

1. Showrooming. People visit the store, check out the stuff, then buy it cheaper on-line. BBY says it’s reduced its prices to compete with online. I checked some of the prices for cameras and TVs.  BBY was higher, and in some cases significantly higher than Amazon. What really annoyed me was Best Buy’s prices for cheap stuff like HDMI cables and SD memory cards. The prices were off planet X. They were a rip-off.

2. Lack of merchandise. I’m in the market for a Nikon D7100. BBY didn’t have one to show or sell me. In fact, I couldn’t find anything of interest to buy. And yesterday, the stockmarket was soaring. I was rich. I could have bought the store.

3. Lack of expertise. The kids who advise you on what to buy at BBY are children. Dumb, unknowlegeable kids. They’re trained to ask dumb questions, like “May I help you?” I want to answer: “Yes, please floss my teeth.”

What bothered me most at Best Buy was: First, the store was half-empty. Second, the store was a mess. Don’t believe me? Visit the B&H camera store in New York and be blown away. They have everything. Every model. Every brand. They have unbelievably knowledgeable salespeople. Even the customers are knowledgeable. I talked with several Best Buy customers yesterday. Most couldn’t find anything to buy. One did. He bought Wrestlemania for $27+. He knew it was cheaper on-line, but admitted he didn’t have a computer and, hence, wasn’t on the Internet. That’s the customer profile you want: A poor black teenager who can’t afford a computer!

And yes, there’s the “new” strategy: Partner with manufacturers. Samsung is the first. They had a couple of tables with a handful of phones and computers. The phone were locked down, so you couldn’t fee how light they were. The phone didn’t work well because “too many people have been playing with them,” the Best Buy salesman told me.

I’m naive. What do I know about retailing?  I always thought store windows were for window shopping — displaying neat, hot stuff to entice you in. Not so with Best Buy. They’re in the customer motivation business. I photographed these two windows yesterday with my trusty iPhone.

What moron at Best Buy came up with these signs? I wonder if they’ll sell them to me for my bathroom?

I hate to recommend a short in this market. But this one is screaming.

P.S. The Motley Fool did a piece on BBY called “Best Buy on The Right Track.” I get the impression they never visited a store, but wrote everything from BBY press releases. Sad. For The Fool’s piece, click here.

How to reach a cell phone. Call twice. Call their cell phone. Reach voice mail. Hang up. Wait ten seconds. Call again. This time they’ll get to their phone.

WiFi is always slower than wired. I did tests with my Verizon FiOS Internet. With wired, I can get 40 megs plus download. With WiFi, sitting right next to the antenna, I’m lucky if I can get 5.5 megs download. Hence: don’t rely on WiFi. Get wired, if you can.

Michael and Anne buy a 2014 Subaru Forester Limited. They love it:

Nice handling, interior and exterior looks and overall well designed. Driving is tight and fun. Engine feels bigger than it is. Good gas mileage (getting about 28 mpg on the highway)
The new continuously variable transmission is smooth and easy. It’s quiet. Comfortable front and back seats. Getting in and out is easy (important because she is 6 foot; he is 6 foot three inches. Huge sunroof. Good stereo with Bluetooth, to pair our cell phones. Could go on and. All in, we paid $27,395 for a Limited model with leather, backup camera, x-mode transmission  etc. etc. All the bells and whistles.

Angelina  Jolie is one impressive gutsy lady. We can all learn from her philosophy of life is , as she expressed in the last paragraph of the piece she wrote for yesterday’s New York Times:

My Medical Choice
By ANGELINA JOLIE

MY MOTHER fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

We often speak of “Mommy’s mommy,” and I find myself trying to explain the illness that took her away from us. They have asked if the same could happen to me. I have always told them not to worry, but the truth is I carry a “faulty” gene, BRCA1, which sharply increases my risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.

Only a fraction of breast cancers result from an inherited gene mutation. Those with a defect in BRCA1 have a 65 percent risk of getting it, on average.

Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex.

On April 27, I finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved. During that time I have been able to keep this private and to carry on with my work.

But I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.

My own process began on Feb. 2 with a procedure known as a “nipple delay,” which rules out disease in the breast ducts behind the nipple and draws extra blood flow to the area. This causes some pain and a lot of bruising, but it increases the chance of saving the nipple.

Two weeks later I had the major surgery, where the breast tissue is removed and temporary fillers are put in place. The operation can take eight hours. You wake up with drain tubes and expanders in your breasts. It does feel like a scene out of a science-fiction film. But days after surgery you can be back to a normal life.

Nine weeks later, the final surgery is completed with the reconstruction of the breasts with an implant. There have been many advances in this procedure in the last few years, and the results can be beautiful.

I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy that I made. My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.

It is reassuring that they see nothing that makes them uncomfortable. They can see my small scars and that’s it. Everything else is just Mommy, the same as she always was. And they know that I love them and will do anything to be with them as long as I can. On a personal note, I do not feel any less of a woman. I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity.

I am fortunate to have a partner, Brad Pitt, who is so loving and supportive. So to anyone who has a wife or girlfriend going through this, know that you are a very important part of the transition. Brad was at the Pink Lotus Breast Center, where I was treated, for every minute of the surgeries. We managed to find moments to laugh together. We knew this was the right thing to do for our family and that it would bring us closer. And it has.

For any woman reading this, I hope it helps you to know you have options. I want to encourage every woman, especially if you have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, to seek out the information and medical experts who can help you through this aspect of your life, and to make your own informed choices.

I acknowledge that there are many wonderful holistic doctors working on alternatives to surgery. My own regimen will be posted in due course on the Web site of the Pink Lotus Breast Center. I hope that this will be helpful to other women.

Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live. The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.

I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options.

Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

Obsessed with my health. Andrew C. Revkin, an environmental journalist, shares what he learned after a stroke forced him to interrupt his nonstop career. From yesterday’s New York Times, also:

My Stroke of Luck
Twenty-two months ago, I interrupted my nonstop reporting about paths toward a sustainable future for our species to focus on sustaining myself. The hiatus was not by choice, but was mandated by a stroke – the out-of-the-blue variant, the rare kind of “brain attack” (the term preferred by some neurologists) that is most often seen in otherwise healthy, youngish middle-aged people.

It’s Fourth of July weekend, 2011 – a beautiful, if hot, morning for a run in the Hudson Valley woods with my son Daniel, back from brief service in the Israeli army. I’m eager to be pushed hard. I’m not even a lapsed middle-aged athlete; I’m truly negligent when it comes to exercise.

We’re jogging up a steep path, and my breathing gets deeper and faster. At a particularly tough turn, I pause, hands on knees.

“Come on, keep it up, Dad.”

I’m panting but don’t want to disappoint. We press on. But I stop again, this time insisting that Daniel run ahead. I rest in the mottled shade and sunlight of the woods until he returns. Then I realize that through my left eye, the world appears paisley – as if I were looking through a patterned curtain. Something is really wrong.

We make it back to the car. Daniel takes the wheel. Back home, I take a shower, thinking that cooling off will help.

For the first time, a thought flickers. Could this be a stroke? Almost unconsciously, I take half a dozen baby aspirin. I know enough about aspirin’s blood-thinning properties to think this can’t hurt.

I call my doctor’s office and the receptionist says I should go to the emergency room.

We head to the hospital. Although it’s a designated stroke center, there is no stroke neurologist around on this holiday weekend. A CT scan shows nothing. Vitals are normal. But I realize something is still wrong when I get an eye test in a hallway. I can see the letters on the eye chart, but not the hand of the nurse pointing to a particular row.

Also, my pupils are different sizes, a condition that I later learn is called Horner syndrome and can presage a stroke.

Nonetheless, the hospital plans to release me. I push back, recalling that months earlier my doctor, as a midlife precaution, had recommended ultrasound scans of my carotid arteries to be sure there wasn’t any buildup of plaque. Maybe they should try this?

Preparations are made for an ultrasound of my arteries. But the technician holding a gel-covered probe against my neck has a puzzled look. She can’t find my left internal carotid artery. She asks for a second opinion.

I vividly recall hearing the words, “There’s no flow in your carotid artery.”

My first reaction: How can that be the case while I’m sitting here conscious and listening to you?

I would later learn that my left internal carotid artery had no flow because of what is known as a “spontaneous dissection.” The artery lining had peeled away and blocked the vessel.

This kind of injury can result from certain yoga moves, painting the ceiling, tipping your head back for that soothing shampoo at a salon, possibly a chiropractor visit (research is equivocal), even a coughing fit. Or, evidently, a tough run on a hot day.

In hindsight, all I can think about is the doctors’ mantra about stroke: “Time is brain.” More accurately: Time wasted is brain lost. It seems to me the hospital staff ramped down their concern about my case just when they should have been swinging into high gear. The ultrasound, at least, confirms there is a serious problem.

The doctors arrange a transfer to a bigger regional hospital. My wife, who had been at a job interview, has caught up with me, and we have an ambulance-and-Prius parade to Westchester Medical Center.

I haven’t had a stroke yet; stroke is loss of brain function. But it is coming. At the hospital, there are more tests and tubes. Finally, I get intravenous heparin to prevent blood clots, but probably too late.

I’m sent to the neurology ward, which is a deeply unsettling experience from the start. The man in the bed next to mine, an actor with an aneurysm, alternates between saying he’s dying and calling nurses to insist that he needs to leave to get to the set of “Boardwalk Empire.” Late that night, I fall asleep to the moaning and howling of an unseen old woman down the hall.

If you can avoid the neurology ward, do so.

Sometime that night, blood clots break away from the damaged artery lining and flow up the middle cerebral artery into my brain. I awake to a bad headache, a throbbing left eye socket and the realization that three fingers of my right hand aren’t working.

Now M.R.I. scans do show damage. I’ve had a stroke. I learn I have to remain in the hospital for a week as I’m put on warfarin, a blood thinner also used as rat poison.

A week in the hospital. What to do?

Blog, of course. I hunt and peck, writing a post for my blog, Dot Earth, on the need to sustain your health if your broader goal is sustaining the a thriving planet. I also get focused on building stroke awareness on Twitter.

Tapping on my laptop with unfamiliar fingers, I learn that stroke kills 130,000 Americans a year and is the leading cause of disability. Horner syndrome, I find, is often the first sign of carotid dissection. Recent studies have found the mean age of stroke occurrence is declining, with 19 percent of strokes in people younger than 55. Some stroke specialists who have studied misdiagnosis in stroke victims younger than 50 have proposed a push for “young stroke awareness” in staff in hospital emergency departments. The American Academy of Neurology has created a task force on stroke in young adults.

And I learn of a solution for hospitals, like the one in my suburb, when they have no stroke specialists on duty: telemedicine.

Through something like Skype on steroids, any stroke specialist could provide virtual care in any emergency room. The technology is most developed in places like Arizona, where it connects big urban teaching hospitals to dispersed rural health care centers that will never have a stroke neurologist. Most of the signs of stroke are visual, meaning an expert diagnosis and swift application of the right medication are possible without laying on hands.

I interview Dr. Yulun Wang twice, first using his technology – with me at a Long Island hospital and Wang in Santa Barbara – and then when I visit his company, InTouch Health, a few months later. Here’s Dr. Wang describing these tools and the hurdles to wider adoption of the technology:

The merits of telemedicine seem utterly obvious, but I learn that Medicare and insurers don’t reimburse for this sort of care, with a few exceptions, because the doctor is not physically at the bedside.

Well, there was no living, breathing stroke specialist at my bedside to bill in those first vital hours. Give me a virtual doctor any day.

There are other impediments to what’s called telestroke technology, including licensing roadblocks preventing doctors from practicing across state borders.

You can learn more about research showing the cost-effectiveness of telemedicine for stroke and the hurdles to its adoption in my Skype chat with Dr. Bart Demaerschalk, the director of the Mayo Clinic Telestroke Program in Arizona and an author of an important 2012 paper on telestroke cost-effectiveness.

After my week in the hospital, I dive into my physical and occupational therapy. I also make lots of vows.

 I vow to write a hard-hitting print article about stroke care.

 My wife gives me a card for a personal trainer. I start working out.

 In the interest of not torturing my neck, I vow no more red-eye flights.

 I’ve played guitar since I was 17, but never with much discipline. I start doing scales.

So how am I doing? I’ve stuck with almost none of those commitments.

Run-ins with the reaper cut in two directions. Part of you swears to slow down, to smell the roses, to get closer to loved ones. But part of you – me, anyway – says life is short and tenuous. Get everything done now!

I posted 322 times to Dot Earth in 2012. The flow of news on my beat pushed my stroke article to the far back burner. My workout routine and guitar scales faded. I’ve taken several red-eyes, with more coming. I’m on the run, in many ways, more than ever.

But I am humbled by one thing that I learned. I was pretty smug, once I recovered, about having scarfed down those aspirin early on. Experts tell me that act probably did mitigate the effects of my stroke. (My fingers and vision are fine.)

In my later research, however, I realized that if I’d had a bleeding stroke, the kind that almost killed Jill Bolte Taylor – the neuroscientist who wrote “My Stroke of Insight” – the aspirin might’ve killed me. Roughly 1 in 10 strokes are of the bleeding variety.

So yes, this was my stroke of luck. As it turns out, luck played a bigger role in my being here today than I’d like to admit.

A video of his brain scan accompanies the article. Click here.

I love you sweetheart.
A group of women attended a seminar on how to live in a loving relationship with their husband.

The women were asked, “How many of you love your husbands?”

All the women raised their hands.

Then they were asked, “When was the last time you told your husband you loved him?”

Some women answered today, some yesterday, some didn’t remember.

The women were then told to take their cell-phones and send the following text: “I love you, sweetheart.”

Then the women were asked to share the responses from their husbands. Replies:

+ Who is this?

+ What now?  Did you crash the car again?

+ I don’t understand what you mean?

+ What did you do now?

+ Don’t beat about the bush, just tell me how much you need?

+ Am I dreaming?

+ I thought we agreed not to drink during the day.

+ Your mother is coming to stay?

Harry Newton issues an invitation. One of his favorite commercial real estate syndicators is in town (new York) tomorrow meeting with investors (like me). It’s 2pm. If you’d like an invitation, email me. I’m not making anything on this. I simply like what they’re doing. And I’m returning a favor.

A bunch of savvy investors — including Tepper, Birinyi, Damodaran, O’Neill, Ritholtz — remain bullish. See this Business Insider piece.

After yesterday, life is wonderful — not just because the market did spectacularly well, but I also played tennis well, felt healthy and talked to the kids.