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Today is Jobs day. Report out at 8:30 shows employment inching better. Slightly more jobs. Slightly more participation. Steady unemployment.
Nothing blown out of the box. Nothing to be overly excited about. Just, nice steady gains.
Friend has cash on hand, wonders where to put it.
My answer (for now):
Keep the money in cash and mull and research and mull some more.
Don’t be stampeded into doing something stupid. I’ve been there, done that.
Cash is just as good as money. Hard to lose cash.
There are some super high quality companies to invest in.
Meantime, put money in an S&P 500 ETF. Read here:
The S&P 500 beat most managed mutual funds last year. It earned over 30%.
Also sell your zero coupon bonds. Many have gotten ahead of themselves.
And buy some Grubhub (GRUB), which is coming public today. It’s the parent company of Seamless, which Susan and I use to order in food at least twice a week. GRUB is profitable. Read more here.
More stuff I learned.
+ Adobe’s Flash is an unreliable POS (piece of sh*t). It will often slow your browser down to a terrible crawl. Solution: Go to your Task Manager and close it. For most browsing, you don’t need Flash. In all these years I’ve never gotten it to work reliably. No wonder Steve Jobs hated it.
+ Don’t get crazy about Microsoft’s threats to disembowel XP. Remember my number one computer rule: If it works, don’t mess with it. You should be worried about security on any Windows machine. But you should never rely on Microsoft’s “security updates,” which it’s stopping for Windows XP. You should subscribe to Norton Internet Security. it’s the best protection for your PC. Trust me. I use it every day. That said, I do like Windows 7. it works for me — about as reliably as XP did. I’m actually still using on one machine running Windows 2000 (it’s older than I am) and it works perfectly fine also.
+ It’s amazing how many web sites simply don’t work well. Heck, if you’ve spend hundreds of thousands on a web site to sell your stuff, you (the CEO) ought to check that your site works. Try buying something from yourself. Then try buying something from Amazon. Much easier? You could learn something. Don’t rely on assurances from your IT people.
Seriously impressed with JPMorgan Chase.
1. They have bank by photo from your iPhone. Works flawlessly.
2. You can send your own wires from your own PC or laptop. No need to go into a branch and spend endless hours filling in stupid forms. Works flawessly.
3. Their tellers have neat check entry machines that count and record the checks you deposit in one-tenth of the time old-line banks do.
4. They don’t charge me for incoming wires.
Chase’s huge presentation on economies and markets. It contains this chart showing the returns you got from various asset classes over the past ten years:
The presentation which is chock full of great statistics looks like this.
You can read it here. Or here.
Neat conversion program available for $1 from Apple’s App Store.
Two fun videos.
+ Russian and European car crashes. Everyone survived, miraculously. Click here.
+ Mountain bike riding in places you and I wouldn’t. Click here.
It pays to make bold (but wrong) predictions. This super piece is from my favorite New Yorker financial writer:
Courtesy my Brazilian tennis partner.
The kangaroo says “Wow. your baby is dead.”
Old people “humor.”
The phone rings and the lady of the house answers,
“Hello.”
“Mrs. Sanders, please.”
“Speaking.”
“Mrs Sanders, this is Doctor Jones at Saint Agnes Laboratory.. When your husband’s doctor sent his biopsy to the lab last week, a biopsy from another Mr. Sanders arrived as well… We are now uncertain which one belongs to your husband. Frankly, either way the results are not too good.”
“What do you mean?” Mrs Sanders asks nervously.
“Well, one of the specimens tested positive for Alzheimer’s and the other one tested positive for HIV.
We can’t tell which is which.”
“That’s dreadful! Can you do the test again?” questioned Mrs Sanders.
“Normally we can, but MEDICARE will only pay for these expensive tests once.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do now?”
“The MEDICARE Helpdesk recommend that you drop your husband off somewhere in the middle of town..
If he finds his way home, don’t sleep with him.
It’s a real Miracle
According to the Bible, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in Palestine, a country where people are called Mohammed, Abdel, Mounir, Aziz, Ahmed, Farid, Omar, Youssouf, Mouloud, etc
And this dude managed to find 12 buddies called John, Peter, Paul, Phillip, Mark, Thomas, Luke, Mathew, Andrew and Simon …. who all drank wine !!!
That’s what I call a miracle!
Bad Jewish humor — dedicated to my dear friend Dan Good, whose birthday it is today:
Q: Define “genius”
A: An average student with a Jewish mother
Q: If Tarzan and Jane were Jewish, what would Cheetah be?
A: A fur coat
Q: What mechanical device causes the most arousal in a Jewish woman?
A: A Mercedes 550SL convertible
Harry Newton. Happy birthday Dan, from an admirer, i.e. me.
My thoughts exactly on XP. My mother’s using Windows 2000, and it’s been fine. Now that a hacked older version of Flash is no longer supported by YouTube, she can’t view her religious videos anymore. IE6 barfs very consistently on quite a few of the web sites. (Opera and Firefox do better.)
But, in order to keep her connected seamlessly, I now have to upgrade her to XP! I will deactivate/reactivate my XP license for her, that I currently use in a VM in my iMac. And, then replace my XP VM with a Windows 7 VM.
What’s your opinion on muni bonds? I’m still waiting for higher yields. Do you own/are you buying munis?