In Search of the Perfect Investment

Favorite (and updated) chart.

	Trends	Stocks
	Air travel boom	BA, HON
	Huge oversupply of all commodities and minerals	Gold (SGOL, GLD) and gold miners
	Big year for the barbarians as they sell assets. Big dividends coming in Q1, 2014	BX, APO and KKR
	Energy from solar panels has reached par with coal and is falling	Solar stocks — FSLR, CSIQ
	Energy from solar panels has reached par with coal and is falling	Electric utilities, especially those in sunny states
	Obamacare	UNH, XLV, GILD, JNJ
	Interest rates low	The mortgage REITs — NLY, AGNC,
	The Internet	GOOG, AMZN, AAPL, PCLN, NFLX, OPEN, QCOM, SFTBF
	3D printing	DDD, SSYS, VJET
	Desktop design to manufacturing	ADSK
	Housing recovery	HD,
	TV’s re-emergence	DTV, CCV
	The Cloud	AMZN, GOOG
	Tech recovery	MU
	Alibaba and Sprint	SFTBF (Softbank) and YHOO. Click here.
	High speed cellphone data explosion	QCOM
	Falling knives to watch	CCV, AGNC, NLY
	Consumer icons	NKE
	Healthy eating	WFM, WWAV

Favorite headline:

Fed’s Plan to Taper Stimulus Effort Is Not Expected Until Next Year

WASHINGTON – Federal Reserve officials are in no hurry to retreat from their bond-buying campaign to stimulate the economy and are likely to postpone any cuts to the program until next year, according to public statements by Fed officials and interviews with some of them.

Read the full New York Times story here.

Favorite mountain top hotels.  I love mountains. Here are Business Insider’s favorite 15 mountain top hotels. My three favorites:

Amangani, Jackson Hole, Wyoming

Salto Chico, Patagonia, Chile.

Wildflower Hall, in the Himalayas, near Shimla, India

For the full BusinessInsider list, click here.

Favorite story on collaborative manufacturing:

NEW YORK CITY was once the capital of manufacturing in America, with more than 1m people working in the sector in 1950. Today that number has shrunk to a mere 80,000, and they are employed largely by specialist producers in areas such as furnishing, food processing and the cluster that makes up Manhattan’s vibrant garment district. Yet nourished by the city’s entrepreneurial spirit, a new industry is emerging. It might be called social manufacturing.

One of the firms involved is Quirky, which is as trendy as its name suggests. Its new design studio in a converted warehouse near the Hudson river includes a small factory complete with a couple of 3D printers, a laser cutter, milling machines, a spray-painting booth and other bits of equipment. This prototyping shop is central to Quirky’s business of turning other people’s ideas into products.

With the help of a growing online community, Quirky comes up with two new consumer products a week. It works like this: a user submits an idea and if enough people like it (as on Facebook), Quirky’s product-development team makes a prototype. Users review this online and can contribute towards its final design, packaging and marketing, and help set a price for it. Quirky then looks for suitable manufacturers. The product is sold on the Quirky website and, if demand grows, by retail chains. Quirky also handles patents and standards approvals and gives a 30% share of the revenue from direct sales to the inventors and others who have helped.

Quirky’s most successful product so far is called Pivot Power. It is a $29.99 electrical extension lead with adjustable sockets, which makes it easier to plug in different chargers.

Jake Zien of Milwaukee came up with the idea when he was at high school, submitted it to Quirky and was helped by 709 people to bring it to market. By early April, with over 200,000 of the gadgets sold, Mr Zien had made $124,000 from his invention.

 

To read the Economist article, click here. To buy a Pivot Power (I bought one on the weekend),  click here. Don’t forget about ADSK. I wrote about them a couple of days ago. Super vision.

Favorite quote:

+ “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” —  Ronald Reagan

Favorite corporate culture: From a New York Times interview with the head of HubSpot, Brian Halligan:

Q. Anything else unusual about the culture?

A. There are a bunch of little things. At noon three times a week, a bunch of people do push-ups in our lobby. It’s very odd. Sometimes there are three people; sometimes there are 50.

Another unusual thing is that I’m a huge nap guy, and so we have a nap room at HubSpot. I have this new initiative in my life, and I’m trying to push my colleagues to do it, too, where I want to work less and think more. In a given month, I do a lot of very mediocre stuff, but once in a while I come up with a really good idea. Maybe I’ll come up with two in a month. Those two inevitably happen when I’m either falling into a nap, or coming out of a nap, or waking up slowly on a Saturday morning. I’m trying to engineer more of those in my life. I’m trying to encourage more people to have naps because, hopefully, more people will have these brilliant ideas.

You can read the entire interview here.

Stanley Druckenmiller on shorting IBM. Click here.

Technology for you and me.

+ Everyone’s goal is to make a YouTube video that will get several million views and then retire happily on the advertising royalties that roll in. Fine. You’ll no longer need a pricey $100,000 video camera. You can use a $2,000 DSLR and — my latest discovery — a $199 Listec teleprompter.

These things used to cost a fortune. Now only $199. Amazing. Click here.

Drop one of these into your smartphone. Bingo, you can now accept credit cards as easily as Apple does at its brilliant retail stores. It’s called a Square and it’s lately been made smaller and better.

You can pick one up for free (no less) from Square’s web site. Click here.

Favorite Christmas cartoon:

Harry Newton photographed out in the California desert, where it’s sunny and warm — not like New York City where he is today.

Poor BlackBerry: Will they hit $0? Will no one put them out of their misery?

Did this week’s BusinessWeek just hammer the final nails into their coffin?