What I really like at present — DXJ (great Japan play), BRKA, GOOG, VZ, V, and BX. And eventually, I like QCOM, CG and PG. But those three look like a longer haul.
Why it’s hard to short stocks in this rising market. From Business Insider:
Lots of traders were shorting electric car-maker Tesla ahead of its earnings announcement last week. And those traders have since seen their positions get obliterated.
Tesla is up a whopping 51% since May 8. It’s also up 142% in the past six months.
The short interest as a percentage of TSLA’s total float stands at a remarkable 41.4%.
We wanted to see which other stocks with heavy short interests were frying their doubters.
Below is a list of 11 stocks with short interest greater than 30% of float, who’ve seen rallies top the S&P 500’s 18% returns over the past six months.
Other stocks that have been “ripe” for shorting:
Searching for a reason. We went to Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda. We stayed to build a country. The first worked. The second failed miserably, costing lives and money.
The hardest lesson to teach anyone is sunk cost. Whatever you spent before has no relevance to your spending going forward.
In the stockmarket, I preach Newton’s Inviolate Stop Loss Rule. It’s down 8%. Get out. Many investors hold their losing stocks for years — until they finally get back to even and then they sell. That’s totally the wrong time to sell. At that stage, since the company’s prospects have finally improved, the stock should be held. Maybe even buy more.
In politics, the concept of “sunk cost” doesn’t work. What works is The Careerist. Everyone devotes their career to solving the wrong problem. Instead of getting out of Afghanistan five years ago, thousands of people devoted their careers to analyzing all the various strategies for Afghanistan — except the one that would have destroyed their careers — i.e. getting out. Think The Stop Loss Rule.
Eienhower warned against the growth of the Military Industrial Complex in his famous farewell address. No one in Washington heeded the warning. We had a bunch of wars since, and of course, the countless strategy expensive (lives and money) changes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I visited Afghanistan once. It was actually a safe, interesting tourist attraction in 1966. I loved the place. But that was before the Russians, before us, before the Taliban, etc.
This piece comes from a recent New York Times. It made my cry.
Where’s my Ghost Money?
An Afghan girl carried canisters to a water tap in Kabul’s Old City, Afghanistan in 2011
Where’s My Ghost Money?
By Qais Akbar Omar
I WAS very excited to read, last week, about the “ghost money” that the C.I.A. is paying to the president of my country, Hamid Karzai. I’d like to know: would it be possible for the C.I.A. to give me some, too?
We do not know what President Karzai has done with this cash that arrives each month in suitcases and plastic shopping bags. Not even the C.I.A. – which every Afghan believes knows everything – can say.
But I will tell you exactly what I will do with mine: I will do the things we thought the Americans were going to help us do when they came to Afghanistan nearly 12 years ago.
First, I will use some of it to dig deep wells in all our villages and create modern water systems in all our cities. Fewer than a third of Afghans living in rural areas have access to clean drinking water. In one village I know in Balkh Province in the north, the people must walk more than a mile to reach the nearest well, and its water is salty. They rely on infrequent rain for drinking water and use it sparingly. They asked me to help them get a new well that is nearer and deeper. Now, with my ghost money, I can.
Even in Kabul – where I lived until nine months ago when I came to study in the United States – most people still get their water from wells. Afghan children must carry heavy buckets of water from the wells to their homes several times each day. I did this for years. On the bright side, in Afghanistan, we do not have the problem of childhood obesity.
I will use another part of my ghost money to build sewers. Afghans, like Americans, use toilets every day. But what we leave in our toilets either stays in an open pit or is flushed into open drains in the streets. The mosquitoes are happy with this situation, but the children they bite are not.
When the Americans first came, building sewer systems in every community would have been a good way to put millions of Afghans to work and to help us get back on our feet after three decades of war. Afghans helped destroy the Soviet Union and free Eastern Europe, but in the process many of us lost everything. A few months’ work digging trenches and laying pipes would have helped everybody.
Instead, they spent millions on teaching farmers in Helmand Province how to grow hot red peppers that Afghans do not like to eat, and making cobblestone roads that our donkeys cannot walk on, and searching for water in the desert near Mazar-i-Sharif, where any camel driver could tell you there has never been any.
I do not want to make Afghans sound like complainers or beggars, but since the United States has spent more than $100 billion in Afghanistan since Sept. 11 on development projects, and five times that on its military activities, we would have been very happy to have had sewers.
And electricity. Only about one-third of the country has reliable electricity. And that has only been for the past two years, since we have been importing power from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
There are many places in our high mountains where hydroelectric dams are waiting to be repaired. Afghanistan could be producing so much power, we could be exporting our surplus. Our unhappy neighbor Pakistan desperately needs some. Perhaps if Afghanistan were sending its electricity to Pakistan, Pakistan would stop sending its terrorists to Afghanistan.
I have one last use for my ghost money. Let me tell you about a suicide bomber named Nematullah, a bomber who failed. He was 17 years old. He was stopped by security forces a few years ago at a place called Company, just at the edge of Kabul, before he could detonate a minibus loaded with explosives. After the police separated him from his bombs, he asked if he could go home. The next week were his school exams, he told them, and since he was still alive, he’d like to pass them.
Boys like Nematullah become suicide bombers for one reason: their families will be given some money in return for their lives. They will be able to buy some rice and flour and maybe a sheep.
Imagine if I had been able to give some of my ghost money to that boy. Or to all the other ghost boys who have blown themselves up to support their families, or the others who have joined the Taliban to earn a couple of hundred dollars each month.
I know what they would have done with it. They would have started businesses. We are Afghans; this is what we do. If I have one dollar today, by tomorrow I will find a way to make it two. Those kids only want a chance at life, like every other young person anywhere in the world.
If ghost money were going to the people who needed it, Afghanistan would have a lot fewer ghosts.
I would like the C.I.A. to know they can start delivering the money to the carpet shop my family owns on Chicken Street in Kabul any day this week. My father will be there to hold it for me. But, please, no plastic bags. Kabul is choked with them. The goats eat as many as they can, but still the Kabul River is filled with them, waiting to be washed down to Pakistan, where they have enough problems of their own.
Qais Akbar Omar is the author of the memoir “A Fort of Nine Towers” and a co-author of “Shakespeare in Kabul.”
Favorite recent New Yorker cartoons.
Harry Newton recommends against seeing Macbeth, the Broadway play starring Alan Cummings. the man is an awesomely brilliant actor. He performs all the characters in Shakespeare’s play — which makes the play impossible to follow.
My friend, age 66, will die today because he never had a colonoscopy. His bowel cancer has now spread everywhere. No one knows why never had one. He’s ultra-stubborn, and stupid. don’t be stupid with your health. Get your bowels and your skin checked. And do a stress test — just to check those ageing, clogging arteries.
