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One day there won’t be any more FANG or Square.

ne day there won’t be any more FANG or Square. But meantime, feast your eyes on these numbers which I just scanned from Square’s latest annual report. This is huge growth:

square.pdf1

The real estate biz is exploding in new areas:  including: shared temporary office space (a la WeWork), warehousing and retail medical offices. Here are two REITs of interest. Prologis is the king of warehousing:

PrologisYTD

Here’s CHCT, Community Healthcare Trust, paying a 6% dividend yield. It dropped just this week because it just announced a sale of shares:

CHCTOneYear

Not to forget FANG, Netflix just reported huge subscriber growth and its stock popped big time. Thank goodness it’s on our “to buy” list, as is Square:

Here’s Netflix (in blue) compared to Amazon (in pink) over the past year.

NFLXvsAMZN

Here’s the best health stock (UNH) compared to the best online retailer Amazon.

UNHvsAMZN

Vistaprint prints stuff you need for your business — from business cards, to memo and mouse pads, from mugs to pillows, from crossword puzzles to

Three things impress:

1. The high quality of their work. I’ve been using them for years.

2. The brilliance of their online software. You can design complex products with great ease.

3. The persuasiveness of their own marketing. I went online to buy some business cards, but I was persuaded to buy mugs, pillows, mouse-pads, and all manner of stuff which more tripled what I had intended to spend.

They’re owned by a Dutch company called Cimpress which is listed on Nasdaq as CMPR. This is it over the last year. Let it come down a little.

CMPR

No end to IBM’s decline.

21 consecutive quarters of declining revenues and no end in sight.

IBMsDecliningRevenues

Watson would not be proud.

I see little real innovation from IBM. To me, they look like a gigantic Asian outsourcing IT firm. They bid on jobs which they outsource to cheap labor overseas. The quality of the resulting work is not good, according to what I hear. Hence they’re losing clients.

Why anyone would own IBM is beyond me. Here’s IBM year to date:

IBMYTD

Things I recently love:

+ Crazy glue in all its form — Super Glue, etc. The best is probably Gorilla Glue. Fixes everything.

+ Amazon delivered me new Crucial/Micron computer memory yesterday. Same day delivery. There was no way I was going to schlep to Best Buy in 95 degree heat. One day delivery is perfect. Thank you Amazon.

+ The National Geographic Channel is my present obsession. I wish I had discovered them before I went twice to Africa or once to Australia’s outback. NatGeo does a better job explaining animals than I’ll ever see in the wild. NatGeo is addictive.

+ Quora.com is great. Get on their free mailing list. Learn what it was like to do business with Donald Trump, among other insights.

+ This is called the Ergon GP1 Grip. It’s the most comfortable grip for an upright bicycle.

EgonHandlebars

Buy them here.

+ The fact that my local Whole Foods in New York’s Time Warner Center stays open until 11 PM.

+ A new keyboard for my laptop. It makes working easier and more pleasurable.

I’m too dumb to understand bitcoin.

But I am on Coinbase ‘s mailing list. They’re one of the bigger web sites to trade bitcoin:

coinbase.2

I just received this:

coinbase

It makes no sense to my tiny brain. Yours?

Remember Todd’s motto: “When in doubt, stay out.

Coinbase’s web site says they have “served” 8.7 million customers. I have no idea what that means either. Here’s Bitcoin over the last year:

BitcoinChart

From an Amazon review, courtesy Readers Digest:

“What can I say about the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer that hasn’t already been said about the wheel, penicillin or the iPhone? My husband and I would argue constantly over who had to cut the day’s banana slices. “You think I have the energy to slave over your $@%& bananas? I worked a 12-hour shift just to come home to THIS?”

The minute I heard our six-year old re-enacting our daily banana fight with her Barbie dolls, I knew we had to make a change. That’s when I found the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer. Our marriage has never been healthier.”

BananaSlicer2

You can buy your very own marriage saver banana slicer at Amazon for $5.99. Click here.

The maid asked for a pay increase.
The wife was very upset about this.
“Now Maria, why do you want a pay increase?”
Maria: “Well, Senora, there are tree reasons why I wanna increaze.”
“The first is that I iron better than you.”
Wife: “Who said you iron better than me?”
Maria: “Jor hozban he say so.”
Wife: “Oh yeah?”
Maria: “The second reason eez that I am a better cook than you.”
Wife: “Nonsense, who said you were a better cook than me?”
Maria: “Jor hozban did.”
Wife, increasingly agitated: “Oh he did, did he?”
Maria: “The third reason is that I am better at sex than you in the bed.”
Wife, really boiling now and through gritted teeth.
Wife: “And did my husband say that as well?”
Maria: “No Senora…. the gardener did.”
Wife: “So, how much do you think would be fair?”

HarryNewton
Harry Newton, who wonders why anyone would want to work for President Trump, given how miserably he treats his people. From this week’s interview with the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Wednesday that he never would have appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions had he known Mr. Sessions would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation that has dogged his presidency, calling the decision “very unfair to the president.”

In a remarkable public break with one of his earliest political supporters, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Sessions’s decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel that should not have happened. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.

In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, the president also accused James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired in May, of trying to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job. Mr. Trump criticized both the acting F.B.I. director who has been filling in since Mr. Comey’s dismissal and the deputy attorney general who recommended it. And he took on Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel now leading the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election.

Mr. Trump said Mr. Mueller was running an office rife with conflicts of interest and warned investigators against delving into matters too far afield from Russia. Mr. Trump never said he would order the Justice Department to fire Mr. Mueller, nor would he outline circumstances under which he might do so. But he left open the possibility as he expressed deep grievance over an investigation that has taken a political toll in the six months since he took office.

Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family’s finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, “I would say yes.” He would not say what he would do about it. “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.”

Read the rest of the remarkable interview. Click here. 

Fortunately, our economy and our stockmarkets are moving nicely ahead, despite Trump’s total ineptness. Health care? Tax reform? Infrastructure? We’re six months into the Trump Presidency and nothing promised has been accomplished. But business is booming. And our stocks are gaining. Hallelujah!

7 Comments

  1. Happy, but extremely nervous says:

    Yes, the stock market just keeps rocketing ahead. But is it sustainable? Are we in this huge bubble? Will it all come crashing down at any time? At what point should we bail out, or cut back?

    • harrynewton says:

      Impossible, as usual, to predict. They safest key is to set yourself a percentage drop below which you can’t take it any longer. 8% — 15%. Call it a stop loss.

  2. gerryb says:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9tZ3pmHKzs — the best commentary on the election you will hear

  3. JimBobToo says:

    Harry, if you love those glues you should pick up a tube of five-second fix. I find it even handier than those you mentioned for some of the really light simple jobs. It is the simplest to use and you are literally done with the fix in seconds. Not for heavy duty stuff though…

  4. Don Verlench says:

    I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party. I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”

    The above is a quote from the below link which I agree with.
    https://townhall.com/columnists/evansayet/2017/07/13/he-fights-n2354580

    • bruuno says:

      Harry was talking about the current president.
      I have rarely screwed up at my current job, but if I do again, shall I bring up the shortcomings of my predecessor and see how far that gets me?