It’s been gruesome in the last few days. But then, I assure, myself, stock prices don’t go up in a nice steady climb. And it’s often better to play tennis (or whatever) than flagellating yourself by watching your stocks decline by the minute.
After all, we’re up over 10% already this year (at least the Dow is) and I should be grateful.
Our U.S. economy and its housing segment is definitely coming back which suggests that Lennar (P/E = 13.3) and Toll Brothers (P/E = 11.9) have appeal.
Deutsche Bank spends a day with Qualcomm. Their new price target (also called PT in Wall Street gibberish) is $78 — about 21% higher than where it is now. Their report is here. The stock has done awfully, as of late. I don’t know why. But I remain optimistic.
Big comparative testdrive on SSDs in the latest PC World. Conclusions:
1. An SSD (solid state drive) is the easiest, fastest and cheapest way to speed up your present laptop / notebook.
2. Their fastest SSD is the Samsung 840 Pro. It costs $240 at Newegg. click here. I love Samsung SSDs.
When buying an SSD,
+ Make certain the physical size is right. Newer laptops need smaller SSDs.
+ The capacity is right. I like increments like 64, 128, 256. But there are weird sizes, like 120 and 240. They make cloning difficult. For cloning you need the exact size.
Be careful traveling. A friend is in Nice, France on a bike trip. She left her hotel room in the morning and returned in the evening to find her cash, her passport and her medicines all stolen. She had stupidly not put them in the hotel’s supplied safe.
Favorite recent New Yorker cartoons.
Harry Newton who has done a lot of rejecting in the last few days. You got to kiss a lot of frogs in this business before you finally find one prince. These days there are a lot of frogs.
My Kingston Hyperx 120GB SSD lasted for 4-5 weeks then began to slow down so badly it took more than 1.5 minutes to just access the internet…then it began to fail completely. The SSD also failed to copy anything to my back-up hard drive connected to it. After several exchanges with Kingston they provided a RMA number and FedEx both-way shipping. After 11 days I have just received a same size replacement SSD…will now install it and hope for the best. I has requested an upgrade replacement to compensate for all my troubles…no deal!
I have had good experience with Kingston. But presently, my favorite maker is Samsung. As I wrote below, these things break. You have to keep a backup/clone from day one. Just in case.
Replacement Kingston SSD installed and working great (lightening fast)…also working much cooler than the first one which I suspect was the problem all along. This one should last much longer, sure hope so.
Your SSD advice helped me previously. I put Samsung 830’s in our two Lenovos last year, brought ’em both up on Win 7 and we’re doing well. Thanks.
>Brad B
Make sure you have clones of your drives. And make sure you clone your drives regularly. These SSDs are fast and reliable. But they also crash from one minute to another.
Yes – I clone over to Hitachi drives hooked on to USB every week. Once in a while, I’ll put the mechanical drive in to assure the clone will come up OK. Thanks again ………..