In Search of the Perfect Investment

My first (and last) attempt at predicting geopolitics — namely that Putin would invade Ukraine during our Labor Day weekend — failed miserably. I’ll dump my dumb small purchases of SDS, SH and UBT this morning. I’ll chalk the money I lose to “hedging doesn’t work.”

I bought a little TEVA on Friday.

VestorVest assigns high VST numbers to stocks it likes. The top five presently are REX, NHTC, GILD, PLNR and CTP.

I love GILD.

I researched REX, an ethanol producers with booming earnings and a booming stock price:

But then I eyed big insider sales, especially by CEO Stuart Rose. Funny thing about his sales: Had he hung around longer, he could have sold at a much higher price.

 Another reason to be wary of the Cloud. Someone hacked into Apple’s iCloud, stole a bunch of nude celebrity photos and posted them on the Internet for all to see. Careful what you back up to The Cloud. It’s not as secure as it’s cracked up to be. It does have benefits that local backup storage doesn’t have — ability to share, ability to access your data on all manner of devices, etc.

You should sign up for this MOOC course. One of my key questions when assessing startups is “Will it scale?” Two Stanford professors wrote a best seller on the subject. They’re now teaching a free course on the Internet — which you or your children ought to sign up for. I bet they’ll never give a free course again.

From TechCrunch:

Stanford Professors Want To Teach You How To Scale Your Business Without Screwing It Up

Huggy Rao and Robert Sutton, the authors of “Scaling Up Excellence: Getting To More Without Settling For Less,”

To buy this excellent book, click here. Or better yet, get the cheaper Kindle version here.

 will bring the lessons they learned from their research to the virtual classroom. When their five-week, free MOOC launches on Sept. 15, it will feature interviews with prominent investors like Ben Horowitz and Michael Dearing.

Normally Rao and Sutton teach the book in their executive education classrooms, but true to their research, they found the MOOC to be a scaling tool that could help them reach more readers.

“They can not only consume the book as in reading it, but more importantly they can actually apply it to their own venture or startup idea,” said Rao, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Sutton, a professor at the Stanford School of Engineering, said the pair has experience in teaching for-credit online courses in the past. He said this is most likely the only time that the course will be offered in the free MOOC format.

“It will particularly be helpful to entrepreneurs trying to scale their ventures […] because when people think about scaling they think about the footprint,” Rao said. “The footprint won’t survive and it certainly won’t thrive unless you have a mindset to sustain it.

The stock pushers are getting really good: This email is pushing me to buy a penny stock Inspiration Mining, selling  most recently for six cents. There are three ways you can tell this is garbage: 1. The return email address is weird — from @safety.it. There are awful grammar and spelling mistakes. You should know the Wall Street Journal doesn’t send out stock-pushing emails.

US Open Tennis continues. It’s live on ESPN or ESPN2 on later this week and weekend on CBS. Re-runs are on The Tennis Channel, which moved to 803 on FiOS. I was up to 2:28 AM this morning watching Nishikori/Raonic. Tennis is a game of skill, stamina, self-discipline and grind. Lots of grind. Nishikori hung in — a key skill.

Latest favorite New Yorker cartoons:

Harry Newton who upped his 1 1/2 hour regimen to two hours on Monday morning against an 18-year old who hits the fastest ball I’ve ever experienced. My whole body aches. But what a wonderful ache. I gotta keep pushing or I’ll end up like all those 70-year olds with pot bellies and hobbling around on gimpy knees. Federer plays tonight, according to IBM’s awful iPhone app.

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