In Search of the Perfect Investment

If you like what you own, you can make a few shekels by selling covered calls.

They’ll “reduce” the cost of the shares you own.

You can also buy them back if your feelings change.

More about this later.

From my friend currently visiting China:

Driving around China does make it appear that there is a massive debt bubble crash coming. High rises everywhere with no occupants. It is crazy.

Useful stuff.

+ Good idea to interview your parents to document the family history. The iPhone’s Voice Record app works like a charm.

+ The best Fathers Day present is a coffee table book with photos of all the family. Google “coffee table picture books.” You’ll find a million suppliers. Hint: Buy a large size one with a heavy duty hard cover and wrap around cover.

+ Close the toilet seat before flushing.

+ Everything seems hard until you do it. Everything takes five minutes — the second time.

+ A friend asked for a “under $300” camera recommendation for an upcoming trip. My idea: the Canon PowerShot ELPH 360 HS with 12x Optical Zoom. Click here.

+ If you email is with Yahoo, please change it to gmail. Yahoo email is increasingly unreliable.

+ Save your work every minute or so — especially if you’re operating in the unreliable “The Cloud.” Always keep a local backup. Here’s the cheapest insurance you will ever buy. Use it save your work, not your software.

Available here.

Sad reading.

+ Venezuela’s Coca-Cola bottler has stopped production of regular Cole because of a shortage of sugar. Venezuela is a disaster: Shortages of food, baby formula, gas, power … basically everything except an nsane president called Nicolás Maduro. From the Economist:

 VISITING a supermarket in Venezuela is like entering Monty Python’s cheese-shop sketch. “Do you have any milk?” The shop assistant shakes her head. Sugar? No. Coffee? No. Soap? No. Cornflour? No. Cooking oil? No. Do you in fact have any of the products that the government deems so essential that it fixes their prices at less than what it costs to make them? No.

This is hard cheese for the masses queuing outside in the hope that a truck carrying something, anything, will arrive. Yesenia, a middle-aged lady from a village near Caracas, got up at midnight, rode a bus to the capital, started queuing at 3am and is still there at 10am. “It’s bad, standing here in the sun. I’ve had no breakfast, and no water.” Why does she think there are such severe shortages? “Bad administration.”

That is putting it mildly. The Venezuelan government spends like Father Christmas after too much eggnog, subsidising everything from rural homes to rice. It cannot pay its bills, especially since the oil price collapsed, so it prints money.

Cash machines in Caracas spit out crisp new bills with consecutive serial numbers. The last time your correspondent saw such a thing was in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s. The IMF predicts that inflation will be 720% in Venezuela this year, a figure Zimbabwe hit in 2006. By 2008 Zimbabwe was racked by hyperinflation so crippling that beggars who were offered billion-Zimbabwe-dollar bills would frown and reject them (see chart).

I actually own this bill. I bought it on eBay for $14. It’s totally worthless, except as a teaching aid for my grandchildren:

+ Hedge Funds That Choked on Momentum Stocks Taking Another Bite. From Bloomberg. Click here. 

The French Tennis Open continues on The Tennis Channel.

This week’s favorite New Yorker cartoons:

Harry Newton who finds TUMS work. My gastro says TUMS is harmless, and won’t give me dementia, which Prilosec will.