In Search of the Perfect Investment

I bought some more Whole Foods yesterday. I eyed the earnings and the report and thought Wall Street had over-reacted.

This strategy worked the last time Boeing got hit with burning battery problems.

I didn’t buy Tesla, despite its burning batteries. (The third?) .Looks like it’s becoming a cockroach stock. I should short it.

My friend says it’s a new company and its stock will fly.

Should I publish my favorite picture of pigs flying?

None of my friends got any Twitter. One reader commented:

Hi Harry. I also asked for some TWTR shares from Schwab. Got zilch. I give them plenty of commissions and still, nada. But let’s go back to 1999. I remember IPO’s pricing at $20-$30, and opening at $210-$240. Now, those are the ones I still think back and wish I got a few there (FMKT, SONS, as examples). Ahhh, the good old days!

Wall Street favs got a $1.33 billion gift yesterday. Figure 70 million shares on sale multiplied by the $19 pop yesterday.

That “investment” in Twitter sucked $1.82 billion out of the market (70m x $26) — which is probably why markets went kafluey (down sharply) yesterday.

Twitter is way overpriced. There are many metrics. Here’s one from CNBC:

Twitter was the classic sliver IPO. Just a small sliver of its shares were IPOed. Twitter has 705 million shares, of which 70 million were available to trade yesterday. That’s less than 10%. That means there weren’t enough to satisfy the Twitter fans (and the institutions) who wanted shares — irrespective. Sliver economics is the reason for the pop yesterday. Thank you Goldman Sachs for the sliver and all the shares I didn’t get.

I’m guessing the brokers made 50 cents on each of the 70 million shares sold — that’s their “normal” commission on IPOs. That’s $35 million, which, as they say so charmingly in Australia, is better than a slap in the belly with a cold fish.

Twitter will fall in the next few months. We’ll watch it and pick some up when it gets to a semi-reasonable level. This strategy worked with Facebook.

Roger McNamee is one talented fellow. He’s chairman of a new company called REVERB. If this video from yesterday’s CNBC doesn’t make you want to rush out a buy a new iPad, nothing will. What a brilliant salesman. What a brilliant product. (Sadly, it’s not available for two weeks.)

For the McNamee video, click here.

The iPad Air (the big, thin one) is now on sale. The iPad Mini with the retina display will be on sale in a week or two. I like the iPad Mini retina because it has the same pixel display as the big one, but fits (with a squeeze) into large pockets, including on some jeans. Try not to sit on it.

Planes as flu traps. Travel by plane, get sick. Planes carry bugs from exotic places. Many of my peripatetic friends are recently sick big-time from plane trips. Try this:

1. Always have the air vent above your seat open and have it aimed towards you. You should breathe the air out of the vent. It’s been cleaned and filtered. It’s the only air that’s been cleaned and filtered.

2. The second someone near you coughs, get up and move to another seat. don’t even count to ten. Do it instantly.

3. Don’t use or put anything in the seat pocket in front of you. Last trip the seat pocket housed a dirty Kleenex from a sick person who had a horrible bug from a charming place like Somalia or Sudan. (My friend recently visited Sudan. He likes the place. He says it’s not over-run with American tourists. I wonder why? Just a little war in the north. No roads. No hotels. Go figure.

4. Take antiseptic handi-wipes with you and wipe your tray table before you use it. Ditto for your arm rests, seat, etc.

5. Don’t touch your eyes.

Don’t dismiss my advice. You gotta be aggressive about protecting your health on planes. A friend is still horribly sick two weeks after his last horrible trip. He emailed me this morning, “I am recovering very slowly…this bug is very difficult.” Being sick is not worth the money you earned on the trip.

My sister has serious neck pain. She spends too long in front of her computer. Harvard Medical School’s HEALTHbeat has this advice.

1. Don’t stay in one position for too long. It’s hard to reverse bad posture, Dr. Isaac says, but if you get up and move around often enough, you’ll avoid getting your neck stuck in an unhealthy position.

2. Make some ergonomic adjustments. Position your computer monitor at eye level so you can see it easily. Use the hands-free function on your phone or wear a headset. Prop your touch-screen tablet on a pillow so that it sits at a 45° angle, instead of lying flat on your lap.

3. If you wear glasses, keep your prescription up to date. “When your eyewear prescription is not up to date, you tend to lean your head back to see better,” Dr. Isaac says.

4. Don’t use too many pillows. Sleeping with several pillows under your head can stifle your neck’s range of motion.

5. Know your limits. Before you move a big armoire across the room, consider what it might do to your neck and back, and ask for help.

6. Get a good night’s sleep. Sleep problems increase the risk for several different conditions, including musculoskeletal pain.

Of course, getting my sister (or anyone’s sister) to listen to sound advice is another story. I don’t have a nice short list. Shucks. I really do love her.

I owe my programmer Matt an apology. He did fix the problem with emailing this column. (It was all my fault.) Now everyone should be receiving a full copy of my column without having to surf  to my site. 

Every brilliance — like getting everyone the full column by email — has its own gotcha. Now no one will come to my site, click on the ads and make me rich (via Google) beyond my wildest dreams.

This gives new meaning to being hoisted on one’s own petard.

Maybe I’ll figure how to include ads in the emails… Forget it. That’s more programming that I do not need or want.

Meantime, if you are not receiving my column by email, you should. Sign up on the top left. You can easily unsubscribe if I get boring, or worse, wrong. (I’ll understand.)

I won’t share or sell your email address to anyone — for the simple reason I don’t know where WordPress (which runs this site) stores the database of email addresses. It’s somewhere in the cloud. Somewhere.

Harry Newton who is rushing to his country estate for another weekend of bliss. This is what our backyard looked like at sunset last weekend:

I did not Photoshop the photo. That picture is about as close to reality as it comes. Nice sunset?