Call it the Alibaba or the September Effect, or blame it on the Fed’s rumored raising of interest rates.
Whatever it is, the market looks semi-sick. VectorVest has issued a “sell” on the market. Some of my friends are loading their boat with Put options.
Personally, I’m hanging in. I could panic. Or I could go play tennis — my euphemism for bearing the pain. I am checking my individual holdings — see the chart on the right — for a breakdown in profits and prospects. So far, I remain sanguine.
Alibaba is huge. Every institution and their uncle is raising money to get in on it. There’s talk of it coming at $65 and going to $100, which means your favorite hedge fund will need money to buy on the IPO and post-IPO. That will total billions. And it’s what the underwriters want. They don’t want a Facebook IPO fiasco.
Maybe you and I can fluke 100 shares in Alibaba?
“I Used Alibaba to Make 280 Pairs of Brightly Colored Pants.” Neat story on using Alibaba in BusinessWeek. Watch the short video. Click here.
Apple’s Tim Cook’ one-hour excellent interview with Charlie Rose: Watch here.
Apple stock is weakening because they got too many orders and, hence, deliveries of new iPhone 6 and 6Plus will be delayed. Such a problem to have.
Sounds like a good time to pick up a little more Apple.
I do like this headline from the New York Times:
The Ethanol Industry: An In-Depth Primer. I’ve always been fascinated by ethanol, but realized quickly on it was far too dangerous for me. What one young fellow learned from a summer in the industry. Click here.
Favorite New Yorker cartoons this week:
Harry Newton who is increasingly attracted to a password manager — but increasingly afraid that they’ll store all his passwords somewhere out there on the cloud and one fine day they’ll all disappear. On the other hand, Firefox, the browser, does an OK job remembering most of my passwords. An I do have a simple text file where I religiously enter all my passwords.. Most of the time. Any ideas?
It’s probably a horrible idea but I maintain a personal folder in Outlook for passwords. I capture an image of the new username and password with screen capture, email that to myself, and store it in the personal folder. It works for me.
Harry, email me if you want some Alibaba. Just remember the old rule about IPOS.
Password Safe from sourceforge. It’s free, an encrypted database you can store on your own pc (and backup to anywhere). My employer (financial services) uses it, as do I at home.
I use Keepass – Classic Edition is fine.
Keeps your list encrypted with a single, ‘outer-most’ password.
It’s open-sourced, and there are contributed versions for iPhone, Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux. All use the same format.
And, a simple notepad in the desk-drawer is perfect. At least it can’t be lost on-line.
Dashlane works well for me. Stores locally and cloud based.
I use a password protected spreadsheet, which I copy to phone. (Between company computer and personal computer). BTW my Technology Investor computer bag is starting to rip at a seam. You think it would last more then 13 years (with the exception of 2 years when my company gave me a notebook with a 17″ inch screen, it wouldn’t fit.
Harry, I’ll share what I’ve been doing. I take a line from a song that I like and can easily remember and use the first letter of each word as a base for my password. Then I incorporate something from each site into the base in a prescribed way so that no two passwords are the same. The resulting passwords are all different and I can remember them all in my head. Periodically I change my tune (the song I use for the base). I’ve checked the resulting passwords on a site called How Secure Is My Password: https://howsecureismypassword.net/ and it tells me it would take a desktop computer over a million years to crack them using a brute force technique. Of course the NSA’s quantum computer could probably do it in minutes, if not seconds, but I don’t think I’m interesting enough for them to care.
The above method is easier than a password manager and I think pretty safe. To date I haven’t had any problems and as the guy who jumped off the Empire State Building said when he was halfway down….. “So far so good!”
Roboform stores on your computer or you can put it in the cloud. your choice.