In Search of the Perfect Investment

Employment news was solid this morning. But the market yawned.

Bigger forces are at work; the uncertainty (a polite word) of Mr. Trump.

I don’t pretend to know answers except to be aware of volatile sector rotation and to be diversified. I wrote about all that yesterday. Click here.

Two magnificent prizes for loyal readers

You must be fast. The first two people  who email get them. There are two prizes.

First, The Grand Story.

My super intelligent son, Michael came to visit us in New York. Late one night, he took his Kindle to the bathroom and sat on my toilet.

Ten minutes late there was a huge “explosion.” This is what happened:

I asked him why he would sit on my toilet seat? He said it was my fault for buying a cheap toilet seat.

I tried three times to buy a replacement toilet seat at Lowe’s. But they never had one in stock. (there was a “run” on them?) Though, to their credit, they were always “getting 18 toilets seats in the next shipment to the store,” said the Lowe’s manager. (HD is a much better company.)

I gave up on Lowe’s. I ordered a toilet seat from Amazon, which ordered it from one of its suppliers, which couldn’t fulfill my order (remember the “run?”) and cancelled it.

So I ordered another one from Amazon. In my haste, I ordered the “elongated” seat. Who knew there are two sizes of toilet seats? You live and learn. As you get older you learn a lot of useless facts. Like the size of toilet seats.

I returned the elongated toilet seat to Amazon and ordered a round seat.

Yesterday I received two identical Kohler round Cachet toilet seats — model 4639-0. Turns out they had not cancelled the seat.

Now, I can’t, in all conscience, return another toilet seat to Amazon. They’ll close my account, blacklist me and worse, force me to shop in local stores, like Lowes.

Hence, The Grand Contest.

+ The first reader to email me gets the new toilet seat. Free. No charge. No shi**ing. No nothing. Please include your street address.

+ The second reader to email me gets Michael’s broken toilet seat — the one pictured above. You can place it in your living room as “Exhibit One — why you should never sit on a closed toilet seat.” Grandchildren will appreciate your sage advice.

Weekend reading

+ How two trailblazing psychologists turned the world of decision science upside down

After his book Moneyball became a best-seller, Michael Lewis learned that many of the ideas it presented to the general public had actually been introduced decades earlier by a pair of Israeli psychologists: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In an adaptation from his new book, Lewis investigates their story, and the intense bond between these radically different men. Click here.

+ How to hide $200 million. 

The story about a fortune that went missing when a wealthy businessman set out to divorce his wife. The quest to find it would reveal the depths of an offshore financial system used by the richest people in the world for one main purpose: to make it appear that they own as little as possible. “Dictators use it to loot their own countries. Drug lords use it to launder money,” our reporter wrote. The system “is a darkness that shields the tax-averse businessman and the criminal alike.” Click here.

+ Abu Dhabi Sovereign-Wealth Fund Gets Entangled in Global 1MDB Scandal.

ABU DHABI-A futuristic 35-story tower where doors swoosh open with the wave of a hand houses a little-known firm long used by this emirate to deploy its oil riches around the world.

When Barclays PLC needed to raise capital in 2008, the Abu Dhabi sovereign-wealth fund, known as IPIC, invested more than $5 billion in the U.K. bank. Through a subsidiary, IPIC acquired holdings in German auto maker Daimler AG and Swiss commodities powerhouse Glencore PLC. It helped finance the ultraluxury New York skyscraper One57, nicknamed the Billionaire Building.

Driving IPIC was Khadem Al Qubaisi, a nightclub aficionado with slicked-back hair, a taste for the good life and close ties to princes who rule the emirate.

In June, Abu Dhabi’s crown prince abruptly ordered an end to the 32-year-old sovereign-wealth fund’s existence as a stand-alone firm, saying it would be merged with another state entity.

Mr. Al Qubaisi? He now sits in an Abu Dhabi jail, fired and under investigation for money-laundering, corruption and other possible offenses, according to people familiar with his situation. Click here.

Broadband Internet speeds.

This is the speed Verizon FiOS is giving me in New York City.

This is the speed Comcast is giving Michael in Portland, Oregon on cable.

This is the speed Fairpoint is giving me in Columbia County, New York, on DSL.

There are many homes in Columbia County who can’t get DSL and rely on dial-up — which is typically 56K. Michael’s speed is 4,200 times faster. The huge variance is determined by:

+ The local provider’s quirkiness.

+ Local competition.

+ “Noise” from local constituents.

If you want faster speed, you need to beg, negotiate, work a deal. Or get behind local movements to get Internet service regulated — as phone service is. With regulation, you will get ubiquity, defined speed, and fair price.

Speed matters for your kid’s education. It matters if you’re running a business. It matters for your financial life — banking, bill paying, brokerage etc. — because that’s what the 21st century is all about.

I don’t like regulation. But it may be the only solution for areas lacking anything other than dial-up.

This is beautifully and tastefully done.

Watch the wonderful interview. Click here.

Those little red lights. I’ve long been fascinated with Trump as orator, public speaker. He’s good. Really good. this piece explains all, especially those little red lights…

For Donald Trump, little is more intoxicating and affirming of his own power than creating tornadoes and watching them tear across the landscape.

In the space of just 24 hours this week, the president-elect set off cyclones near and far that preview the drama he seems likely to bring to the White House.

Trump summoned two dozen television executives and news anchors to his offices Monday to berate them as dishonest and disobedient. He sought to strong-arm the British government into appointing his Brexit ally, Nigel Farage, as ambassador to the United States. He dropped his threat to prosecute Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, disregarding his “lock her up” campaign chant and incurring the wrath of some reliable supporters.

Then there was Tuesday’s meeting with the New York Times, the newspaper Trump loves to mock as “failing.” It was scheduled, then canceled, then rescheduled. And once the president-elect settled in at the Gray Lady’s boardroom, he softened his position on climate change, floated the idea that his son-in-law could broker peace in the Middle East, voiced new doubts about the effectiveness of torturing terrorism suspects, savaged Republicans who wavered on his candidacy and left unresolved concerns about how – or even whether – he would dissociate himself from his global business holdings to avoid conflicts of interest.

Whew.

Welcome to Trump’s world, a never-ending drama in which the star lives in the moment and careens from controversy to controversy with a dizzying flood of tweets and seemingly off-the-cuff remarks to the media.

This could become Washington’s new normal, as a billionaire who thrives on impulse, defies protocol and lives to entertain prepares to move into the White House. Trump’s presidency will be a striking departure from that of Barack Obama, whose White House operates with the “no drama Obama” mantra.

This is a transformation Trump’s legions of supporters are hungry for.

“People did elect change,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser. “He is a novel character. We’ve never had a magnate – a successful entrepreneur and celebrity who understands the tabloids and media saturation, and who thrives off it – elected. He’s going to be the most open president we’ve had in terms of engagement. He’s a people person.”

Sean Wilentz, a presidential historian at Princeton University, said Trump’s “reality show ruckus” has been striking and without precedent. “No previous president-elect, let alone president, has acted with the high-pitched drama that Trump has displayed,” he said. “Five crises a day – keep ’em coming.”

Through more than four decades in business, Trump has taken pride in seeming to be both unpredictable and a somewhat mischievous rule-breaker. He delights as much in telling tales of misbehaving as a schoolboy as he does in describing how he maneuvered bankers into letting him keep control of his casino empire even after his companies had suffered a series of bankruptcies.

“All publicity is good publicity,” Trump’s mentor, the New York lawyer Roy Cohn, instructed the young real estate developer.

Trump took that advice to heart, providing news reporters with a steady stream of stories about his playboy social life, renegade business style and provocative positions on controversial issues. In 1990, at the height of the tabloid frenzy over the dissolution of Trump’s first marriage, he said, “The show is Trump, and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”

During the campaign, Trump often seemed not so much annoyed as perplexed when news reports pointed out that he had contradicted himself or shifted positions on issues such as abortion or the Iraq War. “Who cares what I said 10 years ago?” he asked in a June interview with The Washington Post. “Nobody cares except you.”

Trump explained that when he was speaking to large crowds at his rallies, he often looked not at the people down front but at the bank of TV cameras, checking to see if the red lights on the cameras were ablaze, indicating that his words were going out live on cable.

“I would say something new to keep the red light on,” Trump said – and if that happened to diverge from what he had said years or even weeks before, that was secondary to keeping the red light on.

Aboard Clinton’s campaign plane, meanwhile, the candidate and her aides would catch up on news and become agog by what they read about Trump’s performances. Matt Paul, a former senior Clinton adviser, recalled in an interview shortly before the election, “People would just stop and say, ‘What?!’ And [Clinton] would say, ‘What?!’ “

Being provocative – being the bad boy who would, as one of his final campaign TV ads put it, “turn Washington upside down” – is central to Trump’s conception of himself and his presidency.

A president who flips positions in pre-dawn tweets is a new phenomenon, but nonetheless one to which the world’s leaders and diplomats could adapt, said Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to six countries in the Middle East and Near East.

“Foreign leaders and diplomats are generally less concerned than many Americans are about the direction of the Trump presidency,” said Crocker, who teaches at Texas A&M University and was a signatory to a letter that 75 retired senior diplomats sent in September opposing Trump. “They say, ‘Don’t worry, you’re a nation of laws, a system of institutions.”

Of Trump’s position flips and overnight tweeting, Crocker said: “Clearly, this is a style none of us are used to. Can you name another president who would come anywhere near how he operates? But personality is policy, and it’s good that he is reaching out to foreign leaders, even if he’s not following the protocol manual. He has a real opportunity to start building some international relations, and people overseas will adapt.”

Every phase of Trump’s career has featured a roller-coaster ride of relations with the news media, from overheated praise and near-wonderment at his successes to searing and embarrassing reporting on his personal flaws and professional failures. And each chapter of his life has led to basic questions about who he really is underneath the bluster and showmanship.

Trump himself often says that he is perplexed by such questions: He is, he says, simply a businessman, in it to win. And the path to winning, he consistently says, involves crushing his opponents, calling out the “losers” who criticize him, and saying what it takes to get where he’s going.

In one of his best-selling books, Trump called that methodology “truthful hyperbole” – his term for statements that sometimes reach beyond the facts or contradict his previous positions.

If some people thought he would tamp that tendency to become, as he puts it, “absolutely presidential,” his activities in the two weeks since the election indicate otherwise.

How will President Trump govern? Throughout his career, he had kept only his own bottom line in mind: “I was representing Donald Trump,” he said. If others lost money, that was not his concern.

Now, Trump says, he will work not for himself, but for the country. He has never done that before, he said in the June interview, but will simply make the necessary pivot. “I’ll just do it,” he vowed.

The Cheapest time to travel

According to data that airfare research firm Hopper.com ran for MarketWatch, airfare tends to be cheapest for people who fly on a Tuesday or Wednesday. On a Sunday (the most expensive day to fly), you may pay nearly 10% more to fly than you would on a Tuesday or Wednesday, according to the Hopper analysis, which looked at flights over the last year that were planned at least two weeks in advance.

“Sunday tends to be expensive both because it’s a weekend, which is popular with leisure travelers, and because it’s often favored by business travelers looking to get where they’re going for a Monday start,” explains Patrick Surry, the chief data scientist at Hopper.

Harry Newton, who guesses the next telecom company in play will be Dish. It’s the last one left. Here’s DISH this year:

Cast your eyes over to the right hand column — on my web site . click here. SQ (Square) is doing really well and continues to climb.