In Search of the Perfect Investment

Time to nibble back on Boeing?

LADR closed on Friday at $17.25. More of its shares are moving into long-term hands, away from “IPO flippers.” I like that. I now have a big position in LADR.

NLY is losing some key executives. Why? It sounds ominous. Need to check more on that today.

Comcast is trying to buy Time Warner Cable. Every reporter is arguing against the merger. The combined merger would give Comcast immense ability to screw content providers and jack up the price of your and my cable service — which has already gone through the roof in recent years — and not give me the Internet speed they routinely get in south Korea. My prayer is that Washington won’t approve the merger. (I wouldn’t go near the stock of either Comcast or Time Warner Cable. I don’t want to own stocks that are at the total mercy of Washington.)

But there is good news: If you can lay your hands on high-speed Internet service — preferably above 5 megs down, you can avail yourself of new services like Aero, which are streaming TV over the Internet cheaply. I signed up for Aereo. I can watch New York TV (plus a few other channels) anywhere in the world. I can also record shows and watch them later. For $8 a month, it’s a bargain. The quality’s excellent. Here’s a full screen image — though I realize you’ll only see the left half.

It’s hard not to feel positive about the onrush of America’s new technology.

Two legislations please. Tom Friedman of the New York Times argues if we’re to keep “Startup America” growing, we need two pieces of legislations: immigration reform and “next generation” trade agreements. Both are in jeopardy while Washington continues its present do-nothing idiocy. Please read Thomas Friedman’s piece here and send a note to your Congresspeople urging the importance of getting this done. Friedman’s piece begins:

PALO ALTO, Calif. – THE most striking thing about visiting Silicon Valley these days is how many creative ideas you can hear in just 48 hours.

Jeff Weiner, the chief executive of LinkedIn, explains how his company aims to build an economic graph that will link together the whole global work force with every job being offered in the world, full-time and temporary, for-profit and volunteer, the skills needed for each job, and a presence for every higher education institution everywhere offering a way to acquire those skills.

Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, explains how his online storage and collaboration technology is enabling anyone on any mobile device to securely upload files, collaborate, and share content from anywhere to anywhere. Laszlo Bock, who oversees all hiring at Google, lays out the innovative ways his company has learned to identify talented people who have never gone to college. Brian Chesky, the co-founder of Airbnb, explains how his start-up has, in the blink of an eye, become one of the biggest providers of overnight rooms in the world – challenging Hilton and Marriott – without owning a single room. Curt Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, which invented Siri for your iPhone, recalls how one leading innovator just told him that something would never happen and “then I pick up the paper and it just did.”

What they all have in common is they wake up every day and ask: “What are the biggest trends in the world, and how do I best invent/reinvent my business to thrive from them?” They’re fixated on creating abundance, not redividing scarcity, and they respect no limits on imagination. No idea here is “off the table.”

Then, after you’ve been totally energized by people inventing the future, you go back to your hotel room and catch up with the present: the news from Washington. Two headlines stand out like flashing red lights: House Speaker John Boehner says immigration reform in 2014 is off the table and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the “fast track” legislation we need to pass vital free-trade agreements with the European Union and some of our biggest trading partners in the Asia-Pacific region is off the table. Forget about both until after the 2014 midterm elections, if not 2016.

Summing this all up, The Associated Press reported on Feb. 9 something that you could not make up: “WASHINGTON (AP) – Little more than a week after Groundhog Day, the evidence is mounting that lawmakers have all but wrapped up their most consequential work of 2014, at least until the results of the fall elections are known.”

What a contrast. Silicon Valley: where ideas come to launch. Washington, D.C., where ideas go to die. Silicon Valley: where there are no limits on your imagination and failure in the service of experimentation is a virtue. Washington: where the “imagination” to try something new is now a treatable mental illness covered by Obamacare and failure in the service of experimentation is a crime. Silicon Valley: smart as we can be. Washington: dumb as we wanna be.

Please read Thomas Friedman’s full piece here and send a note to your Congresspeople urging the importance of getting these two pieces of legislation done.

Definitely time for me to give up Coca Cola? I like the stuff.

But it’s now doing horrible things to my ageing body — like hurting my eyes, making my stomach feel weird and giving me a headache. For more on Coke’s potent nastiness, click here. Read this piece if you drink the stuff. 

The man who broke the Target hacking. 110 million people had their credit card information stolen, when the bad guys hacked Target. Brian Krebs is the guy who broke the story. He writes this excellent blog:

He discusses how the bad guys probably got into Target’s computer systems — through a Target contract called Fazio. He then writes:

There is no question that, like Target, Fazio Mechanical was the victim of cybercrime. But investigators close to the case took issue with Fazio’s claim that it was in full compliance with industry practices, and offered another explanation of why it took the Fazio so long to detect the email malware infection: The company’s primary method of detecting malicious software on its internal systems was the free version of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware.

To be clear, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (MBAM) free is quite good at what it’s designed to do – scan for and eliminate threats from host machines. However, there are two problems with an organization relying solely on the free version of MBAM for anti-malware protection: Firstly, the free version is an on-demand scanner that does not offer real-time protection against threats (the Pro version of MBAM does include a real-time protection component). Secondly, the free version is made explicitly for individual users and its license prohibits corporate use.

 KrebsOnSecurity site is here.

Favorite New Yorker cartoons.

Wrong. It will come out with Coca Cola. Read that article I instance above.

Harry Newton who is sick of winter. It’s Tuesday and it’s … surprise, surprise … snowing again in New York. But… there is good news. Rosie (our cute family dog) has finally learned that snow is actually white grass.