Favorite tech stocks continue to be SQ, AMZN, FB, GOOGL, NFLX, and BABA. That’s an old cracked record. There’s a full list in the right hand column on my web site. Click here.
From CNBC this morning:
What blew me away was the order level. Figure Prime “Day” went on for 30 hours. Multiply 6,000 x 60 x 30 and you have that Amazon processed 10.8 million orders yesterday. That’s an amazing number. A real testimony to the robustness of their computer systems — all of which I’m guessing are running on AWS (Amazon Web Services), the leading provider of cloud services in the world. I wish I owned $20 million of Amazon stock. I could afford to play tennis every day. Wait there… I do that anyway.
I don’t like retailers — especially those with nothing proprietary. My Macys short is now “up” 11.2%. It’s my only short. I should have shorted Abercrombie, Kroger, Gap and others. But it’s hard to turn one’s focus from rising stocks to falling stocks. Moreover, everybody and their uncle knew retailers were dead for years, but timing is so important with shorting. Look at Gap. You had to have nerves of steel to sit with shorts through the big bounce in early May.
My friend wants to buy Costco when it hits $140. It’s getting there:
I wouldn’t touch it because it has nothing proprietary. Wrong, says a reader:
Costco does have proprietary products in its private label Kirkland brand.. Try their wine, it’s unbelievable and cheap and the Vodka is 11 bucks for a big bottle.. Not sure what vineyards or distilleries they are using but the product is excellent for the price point. Also people rave about their golf balls versus Pro V1’s. Also gasoline is a good deal at Costco.
What people don’t get about Costco is that they have already been competing with a lot fewer SKUs than most retailers and an average 15% markup for years so Amazon is nothing new to them and I don’t think the Whole Foods customer is going to affect Costco in a meaningful way. They use groceries to get people in the store and Walmart is far more exposed as a percentage of sales.
Close to 85% of Costco’s pre tax operating income is the recurring membership fees and If you have an exec membership you get cash back if you use it a lot. The problem with Costco right now is P/E to growth not earnings risk. I will be looking soon to add to my long term position that i have owned for years.
When I asked Susan, my wife, about Costco, she quipped “I don’t want huge amounts of anything. I don’t like their paper goods.”
She let her membership lapse.
She did suggest that hearings aids for me might be interesting. I don’t think she understands that she has to speak louder. (Joke.Joke.)
Make things run faster, cheaper and quieter when they’re clean
+ I vacuumed the inside of my laptop. It’s now faster and cooler. Much faster.. Much cooler.
+ My AC runs cooler when I put in a new filter.
+ My car’s AC runs better now they replaced the filters.
Stuff learned
+ All engines and brakes need to be used regularly.
+ Google’s Chrome is a great browser. It’s easy to sync your bookmarks and passwords across all your computers.
+ My lights run cooler and use less electricity when I replace them with LEDs.
+ You need to update all your iPhone apps. Easy to do. Log into AppStore and hit “Update All.”
+ LLBean has the best casual clothes these days. Someone up there is paying serious attention to design and fabric. I couldn’t be happier with what I’ve bought from them recently. Pima cotton and lakewashed are great.
+ Google XYZ instruction manual. You’ll be rewarded with a PDF of the instruction manual of your shiny new thing. A lot easier to store a PDF on your laptop’s hard drive than in paper in your bulging manilla folders
+ Please download all your Windows updates. Go into Windows Updates and download all the important ones.
+ Your laptop’s camera doesn’t work because its software drivers are corrupt. Easy to download new ones.
+ Nobody listens. Don’t bother telling anyone what they should do, or offering help. Waste of your time. Go play tennis.
+ For tired eyes: You can make browser pages bigger with Ctrl +.
+ Higher Internet speed is crucial. For your business. For your job. For your pleasure. For your children. There is good news: Your provider has a way of giving your higher speed, if you beg, cajole and ante up a few bucks. Magic can happen. Here’s my “before” DSL speed. Before I begged.
Here’s after I begged and got them to switch cables:
But it’s still not as good as I get in New York City on Verizon FiOS:
Or as good as my friend Dan Good gets in suburban Illinois from Comcast on normal coaxial cable (the type that brings in TV channels):
You can test your own speed. Click here.
If you can’t get these speeds because all your phone company has is tired copper pairs, there’s technology called Bonded DSL which works like this:
Each ADSL line is a normal pair of copper wires — the same ones you get your dial-up phone service on.
The Economist ran a Special Report:
Observers of Donald Trump’s presidency who hope that politics will eventually return to normal will have a long wait, says John Prideaux, author of the Report.
An excerpt:
Palm Beach is about as different from rural Kansas as it is possible to be, yet the way the president’s supporters talk about him in both places is much the same: he’s a businessman, he’s trying to do the right thing, Congress is getting in his way, the media are painting him as a bad man which he’s not, and anyway the country was a disaster under Obama. In the time your correspondent spent in West Virginia, Kansas, Georgia, Alabama and Florida talking to mayors of small towns, local Republican Party bosses and ordinary folk who voted for the president, nobody spontaneously raised the lingering scandal over Russian meddling in the presidential election, and hardly anybody showed buyer’s remorse.
Go back 50 years, and if you knew someone’s income, you could predict, with reasonable accuracy, how they would vote. That is no longer true (see chart). From Florida’s golf courses to rural Appalachia, from Midwestern blue-collar suburbs to California’s bougainvillea-lined driveways, where some of the most prominent pro-Trump intellectuals grew up, the tribes that make up the president’s support are bound together by something powerful that has little to do with their economic fortunes.
My favorite graphic from The Economist’s Report:
You can read the Economist’s full 12-page report here.
Wimbledon continues to the finals this weekend.
It’s on ESPN and The Tennis Channel and probably one of the networks.
Harry Newton, who’s about to watch Roger play. He’s on ESPN. And later he’ll play himself.
Please don’t do stupid. Watch that last step going down.
Hey, let me tell you one thing about COSTCO – they have really good BIG cakes.
This gives you a way to beat the wedding cake scam. If you havent done this you wont believe it, but getting a wedding cake now involves making an appointment, sampling 6 or so cakes, then designing your own “special” cake, which will cost about $8 per person (or more). So if you are having a wedding with 100 people it will be $800 – for a frickin cake !
So a way to beat this is to get a small fancy cake to feed the bride / groom party of 10 or so people (still $80) and have a $25 COSTCO cake under the table to feed the other 90. And their cake will probably be better.