In Search of the Perfect Investment

Stock prices rising today. Hence, A good opportunity to dump stocks you don’t want to keep.

Considerations:

+ If you’re old, dump more. The markets will eventually recover. They always do. But you may not want to sit the wait out. You should have enough cash to live for three to five years. If you’re older than me, you’re in big trouble.

+ If you’re young, stick it out. Sell broken stocks, like Apple. Don’t stick with stocks that don’t have a constant flow of new products.

Neil Irwin wrote a piece in the New York Times.

What Should You Do About a Falling Stock Market? Nothing
If you had a perfect ability to predict how far the market would fall and when it would bottom out, it would make sense to move money in and out. But you do not.

The article (here) is boring. But the 373+ reader comments are fascinating. Some show disgust with the administration and said they’d sold out months ago, e.g.

Tim Hunter

Investors may have noticed that the USA is in the middle of a genuinely unprecedented national disaster. A relentlessly destructive fool in the White House is bound to deeply damage the economy, no matter how “pro-business” his party may claim to be.Who knows, perhaps there will be some surviving “bargains” in the wreckage.

Some are more nuanced:

Chris Manjaro

I agree that timing the market is mostly a fool’s errand, but there are times when it’s possible:

In the last cycle, the Fed made their final increase in June 2006. By the summer of 2007 there was talk about a cut and in September, they made their first one. Stocks topped out about a month later.

The bottom was reached in March 2009 after Bernanke went on 60 Minutes and announced the Fed was ‘electronically’ printing money, which in my view was the biggest Fed ‘put’ in history.

No one on BubbleVision — CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, etc — push the idea of selling and getting out. That would loose them viewers and advertising.

Today, with prices higher, is a good day to sell.

Next week, when stock prices are lower, may be a good time to buy.

ACH can be a seriously bad idea.

Good idea: Automatic payment of a monthly bill, e.g. rent.

Bad idea: Often impossible to stop.

What’s amazing is that your bank can’t (or won’t) block an ACH transaction. Telling the vendor to stop taking money via ACH is not easy, either. A vendor called Clickpay which handles monthly apartment bills has a confusing web site with no cancellation option (surprise, surprise) and an unhelpful customer support department (surprise, surprise).

I’m battling. But it’s time-consuming and frustrating.

In short, when in doubt, send a wire, pay by check. Talk to your bank.

Why I’m not longer an Apple shareholder

I use an iPhone 8 plus. All my family has iPhones. No one wants to upgrade. They can’t think of one reason. I’m the only person in the family who has an Apple Watch. I upgraded to the latest version, because it has significant hardware improvements — chiefly health based.

In a nutshell, there’s Apple problems: No new products. No reason to upgrade the old products.

Meantime, Apple is a closed shop. I once sent a letter to Tim Cook suggesting some minor, useful improvements to Apple’s iPhone software. I got a letter back saying they couldn’t even read outsider suggestions for fear they would get sued. It was the last time I sent Apple anything.

In total contrast, I regularly email Jeff Bezos (of Amazon). I receive intelligent, thoughtful responses. I own shares in Amazon. I don’t own shares in Apple.

How can anyone feel anything but disgust for Washington?

… When it stops paying 800,000 employees who may default on their rent, will have trouble paying for food, can’t pay for gas to get their kids to school, but will pay huge interest bills on their credit cards as a result, etc.

Even, worse, these people will eventually get paid for doing no work. Right now they have a forced unpaid vacation. And the trash doesn’t get picked up in the national parks. The public gets nothing for its tax dollars!

Beefing up home monitoring

I installed two of these in our country home. They let me check temperature and humidity via my iPhone from anywhere. If I get a water leak, Lyric will tell me.

Worth every penny. Several of my friends have had bad water leaks, causing tens of  thousands of dollars of damage.

Click here.

The only intelligent toilet paper holder

It’s this design:

Get yours here or any of a million online places.

Favorite cartoons

Redneck babies

Two good ol’ boys in a Alabama trailer park were sitting around talking one afternoon over a cold beer after getting off work at the local Nissan plant. After a while the 1st guy says to the 2nd, “If’n I was to sneak over to your trailer Saturday & make love to your wife while you was off huntin’ and she got pregnant and had a baby, would that make us kin?”

The 2nd guy crooked his head sideways for a minute, scratched his head and squinted his eyes thinking real hard about the question. Finally, he says, “Well, I don’t know about kin, but it would make us even!”

Harry Newton, who warns that top loading washers are a disaster. Our Whirlpool top load often gives an “oL” error message and stops working — meaning that the wet heavy towels in it are causing the bowel to swing wildly. Front loaders don’t have this problem since they turn vertically. Pretty obvious now you know. But who knew when we bought the stupid machine? I bet they market top loaders as big customer improvements. They’re wrong.