Incredible, nice, wonderful day yesterday. Despite the gloom and doom sayers, I’m staying reasonably fully invested in equities. My biggest equity is Berkshire Hathaway. It’s doing very nicely. I’m also doing well with V, WEN, HON, RWT, NRF and even VZ. I’ll look for some more today. Perhaps also a short? Lululemon?
I hate PowerPoint investor presentations. They never give enough information. Yet, everyone is using them to raise money. The beauty of private placement memorandums is they follow a format. You know where to find answers. Not so with PowerPoints. You get selective, scattered information.
I received a PowerPoint from an aspiring medical device maker looking for money. I couldn’t find the proposed selling price, the cost of making the thing, and any form of marketing plan — like how the heck are we going to sell the thing.
But the good news is that in year one, sales will be $37.4 million.In year 5, they’ll be $320.8 million. All this according to Excel spreadsheets that conveniently bury all the assumptions that went into building the model of financial projections.
What do I know? It’s probably an incredible product.
If they can’t sell me on investing, how will they ever sell their potential customers?
I walked around Portland, OR amazed.
The place is a tropical rainforest of sorts. Because it never stops raining (except for 26 minutes in July), the place teams with flowers and flowering trees. I think this one is a cherry blossom.
I don’t know what this is, except I like it.
Nobody knew what this was, except it was pretty.
Someone said this was a magnolia tree. It covered the grass with the most gorgeous pink petals. They would have looked more pinky, had the sky been blue. — sometime in July.
Most interesting from a business point of view was this supermarket we discovered in Beaverton, the Portland suburb Nike calls home:
It sold a thousand varieties of moochi, an isle full of green tea, the best meat in the world
and duck eggs,
and a zillion varieties of rice.
This supermarket would do really well in New York.
Favorite recent new Yorker cartoons:
Harry Newton who came back to a desk full of K1s and sundry, demanding letters from taxing authorities. I’m actually impressed how fair and logical most of the tax authorities are. It just requires patience on my part. Dealing with them, though, gives boredom a whole new meaning. Nothing seems to get done quickly.
Harry…plants. Top picture does looks like a magnolia (hard to tell without size reference). Second pink flower is a camellia. Third one is a rhododendron – they grow wild in New England forests, are evergreen. Last one is definitely a magnolia. They bloom all at once, fairly early in the season, then drop all the petals (massive cleanup job) and the leaves come out.