In Search of the Perfect Investment

No joy in owning retail.

Even Home Depot, the best of breed, is getting pounded — by the market and by the analysts. Here’s year to date:

But there is joy in shopping retail. Everything is on sale — whether marked or not.

Yesterday J.Crew gave me 20% off for opening a new J. Crew credit card. But I already had one, unused and no longer working. So they gave me 20% off using my normal MasterCard. Which gave me enough mileage to make two blocks.

Trump’s appeal explained. 

A web site called American Greatness writes:

Trump’s enraged critics still do not grasp that he is a reflection of, not a catalyst for, widespread anger and unhappiness with globalization, interventionist foreign policy, Orwellian political correctness, identity politics, tribalism, open borders, and a Deep State that lectures and condemns but never lives the consequences of its own sermonizing.

The full article is here.

You can see how this logic is reflected in Trump’s first ad for his presidential campaign of 2020.

I suspect he has a good shot at winning in 2020.  Trump supporters remain adoring. They tell me he’s just getting started, but is held back by Washington!

None of Trump’s financial shenanigans — especially with shady money — seem to concern his adoring base.

But, I find the shenanigans fascinating. Suddenly, much is being revealed, especially sources of financing for his various projects.

Never had the motto “Follow the money” more meaning.

Here are the most fascinating stories of the last few days. First, to Australia:

Trump’s casino application in Sydney was rejected. The reasons were never publicly stated until documents, obtained by News Corp, show the Kern/Trump group was one of three deemed “dangerous” by the police board. “Briefly stated, the Police Board considers that HKMS, Federal/Resorts/Sabemo, Kern/Trump, are unacceptable,” the summary of the police report said.

Trump, in partnership with the Queensland construction company Kern, was one of four groups vying for the casino project. The NSW government dumped it from the review process on May 5, 1987.

“Atlantic City would be a dubious model for Sydney and in our judgment, the Trump mafia connections should exclude the Kern/Trump consortium,” a summary of the police board’s report said.

The cabinet papers also show there were doubts about the viability of the Kern/Trump bid. A report prepared by the independent contractor, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, found the Kern/Trump bid was one of two applicants that were “not financially viable”.

The report found that revenues for the casino were overstated. “Projected casino revenue estimates are not soundly based and the quantum of the potential overstatement is so material that the tender is not financially viable. Also, the tender is not financially viable on the basis of expected returns to equity investors.”

You can read the Guardian’s full report here. 

And now, back in the U.S., there’s Vanity Fair…

That article begins:

Trump SoHo, the gleaming 46-story condominium and hotel that bears the president’s name in Lower Manhattan, was a troubled project even before it broke ground. It was initially marketed to wealthy foreigners enthralled by the Trump brand and the building’s opulent hotel-style amenities, but it never attracted nearly as many buyers as its developers had anticipated. Then, a few years before it was set to open, in 2010, an unusual complication came out of the blue. On December 17, 2007, veteran New York Times reporter Charles Bagli revealed that Felix Sater, managing director of the Bayrock Group, one of the building’s developers, had a hidden sordid past.

In 1991, Sater, then a stockbroker, got into a bloody bar fight with a commodities broker, stabbing him in the face with a broken margarita glass. The resultant wounds caused nerve damage and required 110 stitches. Then, in 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to participating in a “pump and dump” stock fraud. The maneuver, which was tied to the Mafia, involved laundering money, and eventually defrauded investors of $40 million. This checkered history appeared to catch his latest partner by surprise. “We never knew that,” Bagli quoted Donald Trump as saying about Sater’s criminal past. “We do as much of a background check as we can on the principals. I didn’t really know him very well.”

Since Sater’s run-ins with the law had not been previously disclosed to its investors, Bayrock was suddenly in crisis. Given that the company had raised money without revealing Sater’s convictions, could Bayrock be vulnerable to charges of bank fraud? Would its backers pull out? Were Bayrock’s principals and its partners-including Trump-in legal jeopardy? One problem, however, had to be dealt with immediately. Trump and his family had plenty to be unhappy about with Bayrock-budgetary overruns, the article in the Times, a construction disaster at the sales office, vicious internal politics, and more-and, as a result, they had requested a meeting with the firm’s principals. The gravity of the situation was underscored by the fact that all of the Trumps-Donald Sr., Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr.-were to attend.

To read the full Vanity Fair August 13 article, click here. 

Finally, there’s this week’s New Yorker magazine:

Here are couple of paragraphs from the New Yorker’s article:

Several news accounts have confirmed that Mueller has indeed begun to examine Trump’s real-estate deals and other business dealings, including some that have no obvious link to Russia. But this is hardly wayward. It would be impossible to gain a full understanding of the various points of contact between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign without scrutinizing many of the deals that Trump has made in the past decade. Trump-branded buildings in Toronto and the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan were developed in association with people who have connections to the Kremlin. Other real-estate partners of the Trump Organization-in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere-are now caught up in corruption probes, and, collectively, they suggest that the company had a pattern of working with partners who exploited their proximity to political power.

One foreign deal, a stalled 2011 plan to build a Trump Tower in Batumi, a city on the Black Sea in the Republic of Georgia, has not received much journalistic attention. But the deal, for which Trump was reportedly paid a million dollars, involved unorthodox financial practices that several experts described to me as “red flags” for bank fraud and money laundering; moreover, it intertwined his company with a Kazakh oligarch who has direct links to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. As a result, Putin and his security services have access to information that could put them in a position to blackmail Trump.

You can read the full article here. 

Taylor Swift won her lawsuit. 

She convinced the judge that David Mueller had groped her. Taylor was awarded $1.

This story is totally irrelevant, except I have an excuse to run a picture of my favorite singer.

Taylor understands her demographics of her fans — girls between 15 and 25, and men older than 65, like me.

The glasses business is heating up.

You can buy a pair of prescription glasses at your local retail store for $600.

You can buy the same pair with lenses for $30 from eyebuydirect.com or zennioptical.com. 

Latest useful stuff

+ Be especially careful with PayPal. Disputes with them are impossible to resolve.

+ Be even more careful with subscriptions to information services or magazines that automatically renew. Many are impossible to resolve. Many increase their prices, once you’re on auto-renew.

+ Be even more careful with “auto-pay.”

The most important lesson

If it works, don’t mess with it.

This applies to everything technology, including upgrading to Windows 10. A mistake — at least for me.

The best video of Roger Federer’s amazing backhand

This video is magic stuff, especially for someone like trying to copy it.

Courtesy YouTube. Watch it full screen. Click here. 

Harry Newton, whose right shoulder hurts this morning after yesterday’s bout of trying to hit balls as hard as Roger does. No way, Jose.