Skip to content
 

My friends panicked after five down days. They forgot Amazon, Microsoft, Square and Facebook.

Now they feel stupid. Yesterday was awesome.  This morning looks pretty good, too, especially in tech stocks.

I feel pretty good. I am proud of calling this one. Remember the headline on my April 19 blog?

AmazonHeadline

Today Amazon is up 5%. Last night’s earnings were delicious.

Every wondered what the Amazon swoosh meant?

AmazonSwoosh

It means we sell everything from a through z. Neat?

And they do. Here’s their sales. Up 43% year over year:

Amazonsales

Now, back to my friends who took this  headline from yesterday seriously:

themarketwillcrash

John G., A reader, commented:

I have been reading stockman, Rickards and other hard money advisors and they have always had the same prediction.

Like a broken clock they will eventually be right and say they “called the crash” so they can sell more newsletters.

The problem with these and other advisors is they make more money selling advice than investing.

They eventually become whores to their marketing and cash flow needs.

Someday when we are together I will explain how this also is why political and nonprofit fund raising scare tactics to raise money poisons their policies and has gotten us into the political drama we now live in.

For instance, the DNC suit is about raising money and keeping the narrative alive to raise money as DNC newbie bosses incompetence has left them far behind GOP except in local campaigns where they are doing better.

“It’s about the fund raising, stupid!”

Not the issues except those created to support what will raise the most money.

You can’t time the market.  My feeling: You should always be in it.

You can time stocks. Buy good ones. Sell bad ones.

Look at AMZN, SQ and MSFT this morning. You really want to sell them?

But there are stocks you really do want to sell (or not own) like Whirlpool (see below), 3M  and others I’ve mentioned unfavorably in recent month.

You need to choose carefully. My friend, Peter, likes Visa and MasterCard. But not Square. Look at the last two years:

SQuarevsVandMA

The market this year — 2018 — is different to 2017.

Last year was straight up. This year is up and down. A little more up. (Though we’ll see.)

This year’s volatility brings two opportunities:

+ To buy cheaply and hold. I’m doing that with Amazon, Square and others.

+ To buy on a dip and sell on a bounce-back. This is called day-trading. I have one friend who has an uncanny ability to buy low and sell 25 cents higher. Sometimes he buys into earnings and often hits the jackpot. He does this trading in his IRA account — to escape the tax on ordinary income. I am in awe of his uncanny feel for the market. I don’t have it.

Amazon is raising the price of prime from $99 to $119. Amazon has got 100 million plus Prime customers. That means it just gave itself $20 x 100,000,000. That’s $200 million for the stroke of a pen.  I bet they won’t lose a single Prime customer. They won’t lose me. Check out my safe. It came for free, yet weighed 35 lbs and would have cost $28.55 if sent through the mail. Probably more through UPS. I saved my annual Prime membership with one package.

The problems with Harry’s new, cheap $80 safe.

Safe

+ It’s not strong. You could drill through it. With effort.

+ You can open it with a powerful magnet. Maybe. A reader sent me a link to a YouTube video.

+ It’s not fire-proof at high temperatures. I haven’t tried that either.

But it’s fine to house valueless papers (like house deeds and college graduation certificates). And it’s a lot easier to get to than searching all over town for my errant bank safety deposit box. Moreover I’ve scanned all the important stuff and have that backed up on multiple cheap drives — which are even cheaper than safes. How the world has changed.

In favor of obsession

My life is a series of rolling obsessions. The present one is clean-up. Get rid of all the paper in my office. My groaning bookshelves have penned me a Thank You note. My BIG throw out today is this:

faxmachine

It’s called a fax machine. It still works. But I haven’t sent a fax in years. It’s also a copy machine. But I haven’t copied anything in years. I scan and save. I can put zillions of sheets of paper on my laptop with its 500GB hard disk. With my laptop, I can find things. I can’t find anything on my bookshelves or in my handing folders.

Messing with tariffs can backfire

+ The U.S. imposes tariffs on imported washing machines. Prices rise. Good for domestic maker Whirlpool.

+ The U.S. imposes tariffs on steel and aluminum. Prices rise. Bad for domestic maker Whirlpool which uses metal to make washing machines.

+Now overseas washing machine makers are talking about building plants in the U.S.  Bad for Whirlpool.

Whirlpool’s stock performs not well. Here’s the latest year:

Whirlpoo

Bill Cosby is guilty

Which is boring. But I love this:

Kevin R. Steele, the Montgomery County District Attorney, requested that Cosby’s bail –- set at $1 million –- should be revoked so that he does not flee the U.S. on a private plane.

Cosby shot back, “He doesn’t have a plane, you asshole.”

That earned a rebuke from Judge O’Neill: “Enough of that.”

Still, Judge O’Neill ruled that 80-year old Cosby could be released on bail. He faces thirty years in jail.

Wonderful, beautiful foreplay.

After nearly 50 years of marriage, a couple is in bed. The wife feels her husband massage her in ways he hadn’t in some time.

It almost tickled as his fingers started at her neck, and then began moving down past the small of her back. He then caressed her shoulders and neck, slowly worked his hand down, stopping just over her stomach. He then proceeded to place his hand on her left inner arm, working down her side, passing gently over her buttock and down her leg to her calf. Then, he proceeded up her thigh, stopping just at the uppermost portion of her leg. He continued in the same manner on her right side, then suddenly stopped, rolled over and became silent.

As she had become quite aroused by this caressing, she asked in a loving voice, `Honey that was wonderful. Why did you stop?’

He responded: ‘I found the remote.’

HarryNewton
Harry Newton. My life is full of useful mottos:

+ CHECK. CHECK. CHECK.

+ Don’t do stupid, like fall on the last step going down.

+ Keep moving. A huge percentage of people 60 and over have stopped moving. No exercise. No biking. No tennis.

+ Use it, or Lose it. A friend just lost 45 lbs walking five miles a day and eating less.

Have a great weekend.

 

3 Comments

  1. Carl A. Wright says:

    Good to hear about your friend losing 45 lbs. He didn’t lose any of it by walking. It was entirely by eating less.
    A 150 lb. person would have to run 11 hours to lose just one pound. Exercise is good for other reasons, but not weight loss.

  2. pop says:

    harry – bit of math checking here. 100 million Prime customers x $20 = $2 Billion, no?

  3. Lucky says:

    Harry…position your safe on an outside wall…in the event of fire the outside wall is the coolest. The outside wall of a clothes closet may be best…clothes smolder rather than burning hot. You can probably fasten it to the floor with lag bolts…not foolproof but discouraging.