In Search of the Perfect Investment

This is not a market for high-flying ech stocks. Some are doing horribly, viz:

and

and

Though a handful have caught some favor, including one of my favorites:

It seems much money is dumping out of tech and going into new tech IPOs, like GRUB (parent of Seamless). The idea is that some IPOs will fly.  GRUB did. And you made good money if you had a million shares on the IPO and then immediately sold them. (Not me.) But GRUB performance after the initial buzz has been desultory:

Thinking I was a genius, I bought a little GRUB towards the end of the day on Friday. It kept falling. I should have waited until 3:59 PM. We’ll see today.

This morning, The New York Times had a piece Gravity Hits Highflying Tech Stocks. It talked about highflying tech stocks and biotech stocks like Tesla, NXP Semiconductor and Alexion “signal a potential shift that the time to chase eye-popping growth may be over.” I don’t buy that argument. I do buy the idea that when a stock does go parabolic, it’s time to take your profits — perhaps staying with a little of the bank’s money. hard to do. You can read the NYTimes piece here.

Ironically, simple index ETFs have done well, and steadily well. Everyone should have one of them in their portfolio, if only to ride out emotional craziness of watching tech stocks go up and down faster than a whore’s drawers — old Australian expression — e.g.

Not all S&P 500 index funds are created equally. Bloomberg did a piece on that  and showed that IVV did much better than the most popular one, SPY, even though they allegedly both track the S&P 500 index. The Bloomberg piece is worth reading. Click here.

I nibbled at an old favorite, which I figured had done falling and was paying a handsome dividend of over 12%. I continue to like NLY:

I also like LADR, which I’ve mentioned a zillion times. It came public in February at $17, fell to as low as $16.50 (with me buying) and is now over $19, viz.

As it explains in its February Red Herring, “our primary business is originating conduit first mortgage loans on stabilized income producing commercial real estate properties that can be securitized.” Which it does. Which means it sells those bundles to institutions in need of solid yield.  From the company’s inception in October 2008 through September 30, 1013 it had originated $5.4 billion of conduit commercial real estate loans, $5.1 billion of which it had sold into 16 securitizations, making LADR, by volume the second largest non-bank contributor of loans to CMBS securitizations in the United States for that period. The last I heard, not one of their loans had defaulted. Which is super. LADR is a small, tight operation — at last count,  59 very talented people. I like that.

LADR has said it won’t pay a dividend — it’s not a REIT. But it will at some point, says me. And there will be other rewards for stockholders, like some spinoffs. That I’m convinced of. For now, I can see LADR reading $22.50 — in line with recent research reports from Deutsche Bank, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, JMP Securities, Citi Research, Wells Fargo, and others. LADR is one of my bigger positions.

iPad or iPhone readers When you hit an image — chart, table, cartoon, whatever — that’s cut off on the right, tap once on the image. Bingo, you’ll get the full and nothing else. When you want to go back to my blog, hit the < at the top left of your screen. Try this trick with Friday’s blog. It had some big charts on the performance of various market segments. Click here.

Nice web sites:

+ For gorgeous, tasteful photos, Stefan Grosjean’s photos of women and Venice will take your breath away. Click here.

+ For useful information on housing, Trulia is pretty good. Click here.

Rebooting actually works.
Here’s my Internet speed before:

Then two minutes later, after rebooting my DSL modem:

You can test your own speed here.

Advice needed.
My girlfriend left me for another guy when she found out that I was poor.

Now I have won a big lottery (no joke) and she wants to come back. What should I do?

Medicare Part G. The photo makes this wonderful.

You’re a sick senior citizen and the government says there is no nursing home care available for you.   So what do you do?

Our plan gives anyone 65 years, or older, a gun (G) and 4 bullets. You are allowed to shoot four politicians.

Of course, this means you’ll be sent to prison, where you will receive three meals a day, a roof over your head, central heating and air conditioning and all the health care you need.

Need new teeth? No problem. Need glasses? That’s great. Need a new hip, knees, kidney, lungs or heart? They’re all covered.

As an added bonus, your kids can come and visit you at least as often as they do now.

And who will be paying for all of this?  The same government that just told you they can’t afford for you to go into a home.

And, you can get rid of four useless politicians while you’re at it.

Plus, because you are a prisoner, you don’t have to pay any income taxes anymore.

Is this a great country or what?

Harry Newton who marvels at the chutzbah of it all… Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee South African track star who is accused of murdering his girlfriend, said his shooting her was “a mistake.” Seriously?

Don’t ever think about buying one of them fancy schmantzy clocks that are “radio controlled” and always tells the correct time. I have one on my wall in my country house. It faces West. It’s on a hill. It does everything the instruction manual says it should.. And it’s still wrong. I detest LaCrosse Technology, the manufacturer. I bought some for the tennis club, figuring it would be great not to have to climb up on a ladder to fix them every daylight savings time change. Some changed. Some didn’t. What a piece of garbage.  Even worse than their clocks is their customer “service.” Which is non-existent.