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2012 opens with a nice gain…

The gain means little.

Gold has bounced a little, but still looks weak.

I’m not sure what to make of it. I’m out of gold. Cramer’s technical whizzes thinks it has to rise a little to break out of its present malaise. (Something about support levels and Fibonacci formulae.) Otherwise gold could fall further. I’m waiting. He’s recommending buying immediately, if not sooner.

I learned one miserable thing about “trading.” When you have a nice profit, take it. I sold RIMM and DELL short. Then a bunch of stories appeared — “6 Reasons Dell is a buy now,” “Dell is a value play for 2012,” “Fast Cloud Growth leads to Dell,” and ditto for RIMM – and I quickly covered. I made a profit on both. I would have made a bigger profit, had I had not been greedy  and assumed Dell and RIMM would fall further. the spare of positive articles surprised me.

Today’s New York Times story —  “Analysts See Performance Issues Behind RIM’s Delays” — may cause another drop. Too late for me. Click here.

Need to look for more shorts. Ideas?

Meanwhile oodles of positive Apple stories in the financial blogs, including iPhone 4S will be available in China beginning on Jan. 13. CEO Tim Cook says customer response in the nation of 1.3B people has been “off the charts.”

Fascinating cover story on the difficulties of losing weight. The Fat Trap by Tara Parker-Pope, medical correspondent for the New York Times. Click here.

Dan Good has been my technology tester  and contributing editor for eons. I need to mention his name to thank him for all his  hard work. Thank you.

Baird’s Tech Trends for 2012.


+ The Cloud. We continue to view the move toward cloud architectures and technologies as a long-term trend, and expect enterprises to accelerate build-outs of efficient and automated pools of IT resources (private clouds). Picks:

+ Social enterprise. The explosive success of consumer social networks has spurred innovation in enterprise collaboration tools. We believe corporate social networks will see broader adoption as successful case studies with positive ROIs emerge.

+ Connected TV. We believe that the combination of lightweight operating systems, low-power processors, and high speed broadband will further disrupt the living room in 2012.

+ Smartphones. We view the smartphone market as ripe for a third entrant. Microsoft is betting on a comeback, as is RIMM, though Amazon, Facebook, and others could bear watching.

+ Tablets. After owning the market in 2011, we expect Apple to face more heated competition from Amazon and others in 2012.

+ LTE 4G. Verizon and AT&T are enjoying an early lead in LTE over Sprint and T-Mobile. LTE could be a catalyst for Qualcomm and other well-positioned vendors in 2012.

+ Windows 8. Although we don’t expect it to be a catalyst for enterprise PC refreshes, Microsoft’s next iteration of Windows represents its first entrant into the tablet space and could also be the future of Windows Phone.

+ Mobile Internet. In 2012, we see an acceleration of these trends, with mobile as a platform increasingly taking center stage, alongside the PC. We expect mobile to increase its share of online advertising and e-commerce, but more importantly, to accelerate the secular shift from offline to online.

+ Display advertising. We view an increasingly robust battle between Google and Facebook in the display market, as likely to accelerate in 2012, with the competition providing a healthy injection of new services and technology.

+ LED lighting. LED lighting is staged to see substantial growth over as the cost of LED bulbs continues to decline and demand for “green tech” grows.

Good technology trends. Hard to pick beneficiaries that will do well. Read the entire report here.

Refinance your mortgage. Borrowing rates are ridiculously low. Friends are finding local commercial properties are suddenly affordable. The Wall Street Journal writes today on rates as low as 4.05% — the lowest in 60 years. Click here.

Favorite recent New Yorker cartoons.


Harry Newton who wonders why his dentist’s income is dropping, while Harry’s dentist bills are rising. I bought a Water Pik yesterday. My dentist says it will help with my growing army of implants. Will I  pass airline security? Reader Pam Long suggests that I’ll have to put my head in a plastic bucket along with my shoes and underwear.

5 Comments

  1. Bishopcraven7 says:

    Aw, jeez, as if the terrible advice on this site isn't bad enough, now there's a comment urging people to read Kevin Trudeau's book. Ouch!
    Harry is always “out” of everything almost – he's out of gold, out of stocks, out of this, out of that. A good economic forecaster/blogger is in lots of things. He Has confidence is several things at once. He's not in cash, as Harry always seems to be, when cash is paying 0.4%. Cash is not king when there is no return, Gilligan!

  2. Pahowley says:

    I run daily, do Pilates and the Daily Method one/three times a week and eat sensibly: little/no meat,white bread, potatoes, rice and sweets, so my happy discipline does not fit most people. But in the best selling book I co-authored, “TrendSetters: The World's Leading Experts Reveal Top Trends to Help You Achieve Greater Health, Wealth & Success”, there is a chapter (#41 by Tiffany and Linda Prinster) by two ladies on the “revolutionary HCG Diet Protocol” that promises to lose 20-30 pounds in about a month while completely reshaping in the right places your body. They point out there is good fat and bad fat and getting rid of the bad without losing the essential good is the key. And all this without exercise. HCG = Human Chorionic Gonadopin, but you knew that! For more (but not for me) see Kevin Trudeau's 2006 book “The Weight Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You to Know About”.

  3. BB says:

    “The Paleo Solution” is all you need to read or reference on weight loss, a healthy functioning body, and being able to cut out prescription medicine. Feed the system with the right fuel, and the output is as close to perfect as it can be.

    • HarryNewton says:

      Apparently it's not that easy for many people. Read the piece. You'll be impressed with the ongoing research into this huge growing problem.

      • BB says:

        I read it. Twice. It is that easy for people but people are not doing what the body needs them to do. The overwhelming “consensus” on these diets that they put people on is that fat is bad and caloric restriction is the key to weight loss.  That is wrong and has been proven wrong time and time again. We need and have to have fat to be healthy. In fact, there has never been a single study showing a diet rich in fat and real food that correlates with weight gain. In fact it is the opposite. Think about when “low fat” came into mainstream thought processes. Then think about when you started to notice the general population getting much heavier and out of shape and needing medication and not being able to lose weight. Low fat + grains and carbs = insulin spikes. High levels of insulin in the body trick the body into storing fat. This video is short and worth every second http://journal.crossfit.com/20
        I think you will be posting that one on your site tomorrow morning if you watch it. Think about caloric restriction, or the thought of “if I burn more calories than I eat I will lose weight”. As an intellectual, think about that for one second. How in the Hell can you track your caloric output. None of the machines you get on at the gym can effectively do it – and I bet if I asked you you could not get remotely close to how many calories you burn playing tennis. Why? Because there is not a single effective way to measure that. If you play for one hour today and you play for one hour tomorrow, you and I both know that the caloric output will be different as you cannot work just as hard on both days – impossible.

        You said you would read the book – it will stack the deck high in your favor on this topic – guaranteed. Too many people I have turned on to eating Paleo (as in ALL of them) have changed their lives by just changing their diet to REAL food.