Not good yesterday. But drek happens. I’m not concerned.
Picking the bottom, or catching a falling knife? I bought a little NLY and SGOL. NLY’s present yield is 14.4%, which is better than a slap in the belly with a cold fish. Its price is pretty well the lowest it’s been in eons.
Picking the bottom in gold is far more difficult. I bought a little. But I’ll dump it if it turns down, again. I figure a 3% stop loss on SGOL. I’m up 4.2%.
Sleep works. Napping works. From a big weekend piece in the New York Times:
… There is a difference between the kind of fleeting sleep loss we sometimes experience and the chronic deprivation that comes from shift work, insomnia and the like. In one set of studies, soon to be published in The Journal of Neuroscience, the Veasey lab found that while our brains can recover quite readily from short-term sleep loss, chronic prolonged wakefulness and sleep disruption stresses the brain’s metabolism. The result is the degeneration of key neurons involved in alertness and proper cortical function and a buildup of proteins associated with aging and neural degeneration.
It’s like the difference between a snowstorm’s disrupting a single day of trash pickup and a prolonged strike. No longer quite as easy to fix, and even when the strike is over, there’s likely to be some stray debris floating around for quite some time yet. “Recovery from sleep loss is slower than we’d thought,” Dr. Veasey notes. “We used to think that after a bit of recovery sleep, you should be fine. But this work shows you’re not.”
If you put her own research together with the findings from the Nedergaard lab, Dr. Veasey says, it “very clearly shows that there’s impaired clearance in the awake brain. We’re really starting to realize that when we skip sleep, we may be doing irreparable damage to the brain, prematurely aging it or setting it up for heightened vulnerability to other insults.”
In a society that is not only chronically sleep-deprived but also rapidly aging, that’s bad news. “It’s unlikely that poor sleep as a child would actually cause Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s,” says Dr. Veasey, “but it’s more likely that you may shift one of those diseases by a decade or so. That has profound health and economic implications.”
For the full piece, click here.
This week’s New Yorker cover:
Remember my definition of a cockroach stock? Bad stuff just keeps on coming. I wonder if Chris Christie is a cockroach governor?
Quote of the week.
A country is not safe while Congress is in session — Wil Rogers.
Harry Newton who attended Sidoti & Company’s micro-cap investor conference yesterday. I haven’t yet figured out if any of the stocks are worth buying. There seem to be several things about tiny listed companies:
1. No one covers them. Hence no one is interested in them, or buys them.
2. Their finances are weak. Not enough cash to finance their aggressive ambitions.
3. Their “earnings” tend to go up and down faster than a whore’s drawers (second Australian expression this morning). One year a profit, the next year a loss. Very hard often to figure out next year’s profits, or losses.
If I get a few moments today, I’ll check the docs and see if I can find a nugget or two.
Meantime, The Australian Tennis Open is on. Jon Stewart and Colbert are back with new shows. And last night’s Blacklist was really good (though gruesome). You can watch re-runs of all these shows on the Internet. Thank you Mr. Gore for inventing the Internet (!!).
