In Search of the Perfect Investment

My friend Howard writes on yesterday’s blog, “An insider price on a handsome new flippable (?) apartment“:

I like this piece and agree with the theory that says “everything is in a bubble” due to cheap money.  They question for me is whether inflation takes off to catch up (some say no because of unemployment and lack of wage growth) or will it just crash again?

To my mind, the crash is most likely. But please don’t lump me with the newsletter purveyors who preach “gloom and doom” as an enticement to get you to sign up to a pricey subscription fee.

Predicting the timing of the “crash’ is another thing. You only have to look at all the money my friends have lost shorting IBM and buying TBT on their prediction that interest rates were about to skyrocket.

Here’s TBT over five years.

But even this year. As employment has picked up, interest rates have fallen. Look at this:

Predicting the market for anything is not impossible, not easy, but almost always fun.From my friend this morning:

Running your own business — the only real way to go:

1. Please visit your own web site. Try to buy something from yourself. Buy something from one of your competitors. Who’s easier to buy from?

2. Put bank wiring information on all your invoices. It is actually easier for me — Harry Newton — to wire you money than to write you a check, stuff it in an evelope and mail it. Thank you to JPMorgan Chase’s Internet wiring app. Really super easy and super reliable.

3. Deal with customer complaints swiftly and with generosity. These days customers have too many tools to hurt you and your products — from TripAdvisor to “reviews” on Amazon.

4. CHECK. CHECK. CHECK. Check that what they sold you works with the rest of what they sold you. Check that your web site has your correct contact information, so customers can reach you. Check that your products are described in detail. Check that you’ve answered all your important emails. CHECK. CHECK. CHECK.

5. Never delay reading something that looks important. Read it now. You’ll never get to it later. And if you do, the opportunity will have past. Trust me on this one.

Favorite recent New Yorker cartoons.

A truly spectacular gift for someone.

The book is an absolute joy to delve into. It’s profusely illustrated. I love it. From Amazon, click here.

My favorite publisher, Felix Dennis. Excerpt from the Economist’s obituary this week:

SOMEWHERE in the hearts of all self-made wealthy people, said Felix Dennis, is a “sliver of razored ice”. He liked being rich, and liked advising people about how to achieve that enviable state. But making money, and then yet more of it, was to assuage inner demons, not to achieve happiness. Indeed what made him happy (and that only occasionally, he stressed) were modest pleasures: “Walking in the woods alone, or deeply ensconced in composing a difficult piece of verse, or sitting quietly with old friends over a bottle of wine, or feeding a stray cat.”

Fun and success, however, were another matter. To say he lived high on the hog would be an understatement. By his own estimate he spent $100m on drugs, drink, women and high living in just one decade. He had 14 mistresses on his personal payroll (“If it floats, flies or fucks,” he once said, it was better to rent than to buy.)

He could afford either. His publishing empire, by his death worth hundreds of millions of pounds, started when he turned up at the office of a backstreet rag called “Oz”. He was penniless, having sold his drum kit to pay for a girlfriend’s abortion. Minds met, and he became co-editor-only to end up in jail, briefly, on an obscenity charge when the “schoolkids” issue featured Rupert Bear, a children’s comic-strip character, deflowering “Gipsy Granny”. The judge sniped that the scruffy youngster was “very much less intelligent” than his two co-defendants.

If so, it did not hold him back. His publishing genius lay in spotting gaps in the market and launching titles to fill them.

You can read the entire obituary here.

Harry Newton, who offers his condolences to Brazil after that humiliating loss to Germany. Today’s New York Times headline says it all: “Brazil, a Nation Left in Despair.” My tennis partner is Brazilian. I sense he may never recover. He emailed me this morning, “No suicide, but no sleep either.”

From today’s New York Times:

The Kodak moments, however, were special: