Harry Newton's In Search of The Perfect Investment
Technology Investor. Harry Newton
Previous
Columns
9:00
AM EDT, Monday, August 31, 2009: Nice to come back to a dividend check
from a commercial real estate project that's still solvent and a stockmarket that
still seems to think we're in good shape. My friends have a new theory: Fast forward
a year. You won't even remember the 2008-2009 recession.
What a nice thought
to begin the week.
Spied
on the Boulder's main street: A
store selling ... hammocks. Yup, they have a month-to-month lease while the
landlord looks for a long-term tenant, preferablhy a restaurant. Meantime, the
rent is cheap and the hammocks sell, albeit slowly.

There's a big
opportunity to assemble temporary space and lease it out to short-term tenants,
likie clothing consignment stories, Halloween and Christmas junk, etc.
Hertz
is not cheap: On the Internet, the bill came
to $586.83 for 8 days. The actual bill came out to $778.40 -- 33% higher because
of Hertz' creative additional charges, including "concession fee recovery","
facility use fee," "energy surcharge, "road safety prog fee"
and tax. And this was after declining all their various insurance add-ons. The
bottom line: To rent Hertz's car cost us $1.85 a mile. Renting outside the airport
is clearly cheaper.
The
best photojournalism on the Internet is from the Boston Globe. It's
gripping stuff -- a village of heroin addicts in Aghanistan, Cuba 31 years after
Che, Indian Hindus celebrate Holi, daily life in Karachi, the Sichuan earthquake
one year later. See them at Boston.com.
Everything
is marketing - Part 1: Spied at a Denver restaurant
called WaterCourse Foods. They're called plugs. This was a waiter there. He
had plugs in both ears. He told me the cook had ones that were twice as large.
items on the menus
included veganaise (a vegetarian version of mayonnaise, milkshakes made with
Chicago soy dairy temptation and seitan (pron SAY-tahn) which is "a low
fat, high protein, chewy, firm textured meat substitute." Sounds positively
delicious.
This is a breakfast
vegetarian taco.

It was large.
How large? My son -- the one with the worm -- didn't even finish his.
There is a serious
shortage of vegetarian restaurants in the U.S. You can see WatterCourse's menu.
Click here.
Everything
is marketing - Part 2: My favorite recent book,
Born To Run, rants about the evila of running in traditional running
shoes (like the kind Nike makes). The book argues (very persuasively) that running
bare foot will lead to fewer injuries, faster speed and great distances. Barefoot
can be painful. Hence the industry's latest product... Vibram's FiveFingers.

They have a Vibram sole which is sort of contoured to your feet. Running in
these things allegedly is like running bare foot. And only $80 for the pleasure
of feeling you're wearing nothing.
We found them
at a Boulder shoe store. Ted, my son-in-law, tried on a pair. Our women thought
they were the ugliest shoes they'd ever seen.
From left, Susan (my wife), Claire (my daughter) and Anne (my son Michael's
girlfriend).
Despite their
ugliness, the shoes are flying off the shelves. Vibram, which makes them, is
a private Italian company. (We checked.)
Movie
reviews. Check out RottenTomatoes.com.
2009
U.S. Open Tennis Schedule: It starts today.
TV coverage of the US Open will be virtually around the clock -- presently on
ESPN2 and the Tennis Channel, and then later on CBS. The full schedule is on
USOpen.org. Here's today:

Burning
Man is on this week. It's the most famous and
most popular annual festival out west. Spied on a shop window in Boulder:

For more on Burning Man, click here.

This column is about my personal search for the perfect
investment. I don't give investment advice. For that you have to be registered
with regulatory authorities, which I am not. I am a reporter and an investor.
I make my daily column -- Monday through Friday -- freely available for three
reasons: Writing is good for sorting things out in my brain. Second, the column
is research for a book I'm writing called "In Search of the Perfect
Investment." Third, I encourage my readers to send me their ideas,
concerns and experiences. That way we can all learn together. My email address
is . You can't
click on my email address. You have to re-type it . This protects me from software
scanning the Internet for email addresses to spam. I have no role in choosing
the Google ads on this site. Thus I cannot endorse, though some look interesting.
If you click on a link, Google may send me money. Please note I'm not suggesting
you do. That money, if there is any, may help pay Michael's business school
tuition. Read more about Google AdSense, click
here and here.
|