We did good with DirecTV. It’s been one of my favorites for a while. I pray AT&T doesn’t destroy it.
I skimmed a bunch of annual reports on the weekend. I especially liked companies with very specific market niches:
+ Home Depot (HD)
+ Tractor Supply Co. (TSCO) — though their stock has done poorly, of late.
+ Starwood Property Trust (STWD)
Nike is on the cover of this weekend’s BusinessWeek:
I don’t understand why BusinessWeek found it necessary to fake up the size of the sneakers. I don’t think Nike is a buy at these high prices. But it sure is getting a lot of buzz.
On Friday, I bought a little more SGOL — my favorite gold ETF.
More on watches as investments. I like watches. I’d love to own this “complications” because it’s so beautiful.
These days you can buy a lot of expensive watches with oodles of bling. Some have so much bling you can’t tell the time — but that’s why they made cell phones.
On Friday I schlepp to TimeCrafters, an exhibition of watches in the Park Avenue Armory. There are lots of books written about art and about watches. One draws my attention:
There are a lot of fake watches, it seems. Visit Chinatown, you can buy a Rolex for $20. You know it’s fake by its price, though from the outside it looks pretty real. It turns out the world’s watch counterfeiters are going upscale and making fake old watches. There’s obviously a business in these things, since Christie’s worldwide watch sales reached $134 million in 2013, “reaching,’ said Christie’s “new heights for watch auction prices.” I’m sure Sotheby’s is doing well with its watch sales also. It turns out the counterfeiters are doing such a great job that it’s almost impossible to tell if you have a real or a fake watch — certainly not from the outside. Some fake watches have been making into auctions, sneaking by the auction houses “experts.” I asked the book’s publisher what happens if you buy at auction a fake watch, thinking it’s real. Apparently the auction house will refund your money and swear you to secrecy. Fake watches are not good for business.
For now, I’m sticking with my Timexes, which tell the time and only have value on eBay.
These guys are our friends. Can you believe this? From the weekend’s Economist:
Human rights in Saudi Arabia. An even longer way to go
Political dissent is still being crushed
AS LIFE gets just a little easier for women, another slice of Saudi society is finding it harder. The kingdom has never much tolerated public expressions of dissent. Lately it has tightened the screws.
Consider the case of Raif Badawi, a 32-year-old internet campaigner. In 2008 he co-founded a website as a platform for open debate on religion. Banned from travel in 2009 after criticising the official Wahhabist doctrine, he has been in prison since 2012 under a law that bans the “production, preparation, circulation or storage of content that undermines public order, religious values, public decency or privacy.” On May 7th he was sentenced to another ten years in jail, plus 1,000 lashes. Perhaps he is lucky: the public prosecutor, accusing Mr Badawi of apostasy, had sought the death penalty.
Too bad for brave Badawi
Though he may appeal, Mr Badawi must find a new lawyer. His current one, Waleed Abulkhair, one of the brave few to specialise in human rights, is himself in jail. Already banned from travel for several years and facing a series of charges, including “disobeying the rightful ruler” and “inciting international hostility against the kingdom,” he was remanded in custody on April 15th.
These two cases are among a string of arrests and prosecutions of human-rights defenders, would-be reformers and various other critics. A new “anti-terrorism” law passed in February allows for prolonged periods of arbitrary detention. Vague offences such as “destabilising society” and “offending the nation’s reputation” now count as terrorist acts. So, according to a separate recent government decree, do such things as “calling for atheist thought” or “contact with any group hostile to the kingdom”.
In an adjoining story, the Economist reported:
For every step forward, the kingdom appears to take one back. Last month the local media reported that a woman had been sentenced to 150 lashes and eight months in jail for the crime of driving a car.
How not to raise money for your new startup. My phone rings:
Caller: Are you ready to write me a check?
Harry: No.
Caller: Why not?
Harry: It’s hard to talk on this cellphone connection.
Caller: I’ll buy you lunch when I’m next in New York.
Click.
Harry’s Rule: Never tell why you don’t want to invest. If you do, they’ll argue endlessly with you, waste oodles of your time, but not change your mind.
I instance this phone call, because the first pitch to me was to become an “advisor” to the company, and to be paid options for my brilliance. That’s flattering. But when the time came all they wanted was my money, not my brain. Surprise. Surprise.
Images for old geysers.
This is brilliant marketing. Read the sign carefully.
Comments on marriage.
1. At a cocktail party, one woman said to another,
‘Aren’t you wearing your wedding ring on the wrong finger?’
‘Yes, I am. I married the wrong man.’
2. Just think, if it weren’t for marriage, men would go through life thinking they had no faults at all.
Harry Newton, who had a wonderful weekend. Daughter Claire and husband Ted visited. They really are a joy. That’s a totally objective opinion.
The irony regarding watches is that the fake ones keep better time than the real McCoys because they have quartz movements instead of jeweled ones. Call me old fashioned, but I like a watch that keeps time. Originally the Swiss bragged about the accuracy of their jeweled chronometers. Then Bulova came out with the tuning fork watch that bested them by a wide margin. After that came the quartz movements that cost 75 cents and were even more accurate. I had a Rolex because I liked the way it looked. My wife had a gold/stainless one which she “lost” and we replaced with a gold one (Later she “found” it.) None of them kept decent time and they were forever needing cleaning and maintenance which was a fortune. Now we have cheap quartz watches. My Casio is solar powered (never needs a battery) and resets itself to the atomic clock in Colorado every night (it’s always precise to the second). I’ve asked jewelers how come Rolex, Patek Philippe, Breitling et al are so expensive but can’t keep decent time. Their answer is that they’re beautiful pieces of jewelry. I’m okay with that except that they have a face on them with numbers and hands that move and they call them “watches.” Once you you do that……..I think they should be able to keep accurate time. But that’s just me.