Europe is up. Futures are up here.
Sour grapes in today’s New York Times (so what’s new?):
The United States stock market looks very expensive right now. The CAPE ratio, a stock-price measure I helped develop — is hovering at a worrisome level…nothing I’ve come up with is a slam-dunk explanation for the continuing high level of valuations. I suspect that the real answers lie largely in the realm of sociology and social psychology — in phenomena like irrational exuberance, which, eventually, has always faded before. If the mood changes again, stock market investments may disappoint us.
I figure Mr. Shiller’s ability to predict the stock is as good as mine — about zero.
He sounds like a man who’s pissed that he personally missed the run-up in stocks since 2009. And he now wants to spoil our fun.
Mr. Shiller is an economist, which reminds me:
+ If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.
+ The good news is that the economists were able to predict 12 out of the last five recessions.
+ There are three types of economists: Those who can count, and those who can’t.
+ They call economics the dismal science, for a very good reason.
But at least I own some stocks.
Two quotes from two men I admire:
+ A pessimist Winston Churchill once said, “sees the difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.– Winston Churchill
+ An optimist could be described as an ant crawling up an elephant’s leg with rape in mind, Bill McGowan told me in the very early days of MCI, when MCI had six employees and no money, and AT&T had over a million employees. A few years later, MCI has 30,000 employees and AT&T was broken up by government-mandated Divestiture.
Obsession. I spent the weekend finishing the 28th edition of my ginormous 1400-page Newton’s Telecom Dictionary. Three observations:
+ Oodles of missed opportunities. Western Union was the worst. They even rejected the telephone back in the late 1800s because they thought no one would use it. AT&T missed the cell phone, the Internet, the communications satellite and fibre optics. When they finally got broken up, they choose to keep Western Electric, the manufacturing arm, because someone in Western told AT&T’s chairman that they had invented a spectacular new computer which would put IBM out of business. Then they bought NCR and wrote off $8 billion plus — when $8 billion was worth something. Remember those days?
+ At one stage the telecom industry defined “open” standards, but never opened them. Then never bothered using those standards themselves. It was only when the Internet came along that we got really open standards. And Apple’s AppStore allowed us to write communications apps, like Whatsapp, which singlehandedly destroyed the billions of dollars of revenues the phone companies were stealing from us in instant messaging. Couldn’t have happened to nicer people.
+ This stuff will never stop and will only get better. When I first entered telecom, a NY to LA call was 35 cents a minute. Now it’s free. Fiber is the best. Nobody knows what it can really carry. Google is delivering one gigabit of data to households in places I don’t live. (Shucks.) That’s 1,000,000,000 bits per second — 143 times as fast I’m getting this morning. Speed really matters. Every time we’re notched speed up, someone has figured a creative way to use it. And not just watching old movies on Netflix.
I bought this darling little $27 modem.
Now I can send faxes directly from my laptop. It’s from Amazon. Click here.
People keep asking why Europe is doing so well?
I just read that the European Union spends nearly 40% of its total budget on subsidies for its farmers. Makes sense to me!
Favorite New York Times sentence:
Hedge Funds Give Quarterly Snapshots of Their Portfolios Four times a year,
Create a System-Repair Disc. this useful information from a computer magazine (I don’t remember which one):
Before you do one more thing with your PC, dig out the box it came in. Do you see a Windows 7 disc or a system-recovery disc? They’re less common these days, so chances are it falls to you to create your own. And it’s vital that you do, because if your system ever becomes unbootable, a recovery CD or DVD might be your only recourse.
Thankfully, Windows 7 makes the task exceedingly easy. Just pop in a blank, recordable CD or DVD (you’ll need a burner, natch), click Start, type repair, and choose Create a System Repair Disc. Follow the instructions from there, remembering to label the disc when you’re done.
If you ever run into trouble, boot your system with the repair disc. It includes a variety of recovery and diagnostic tools, and also lets you choose a System Restore point to help get your PC back to a previous, working state.
Make this disc now. If you wait until after you encounter a problem, it’s too late.
Jimmy Fallon honors Robin Williams with a spot-on impersonation, vintage clip.
Click here.
Harry Newton. Can you believe this? It’s August 18, grey skies and 58 degrees. Perfect tennis weather. Guess what I’m doing this morning? I bought a little ZOES and PX late Friday. Everyone needs a little speculation in their portfolio. They’re both up this morning. I’m a genius.
Harry,
I need to send a fax about once a month to my financial institution. I travel alot around the world and don’t have access to phone lines … I used to use Skype … but then they discontinued the fax service
I now use some Windows software called Voxox to send fax from my laptop. Its something similar to Skype but also has the ability to fax. You have to sign up and purchase a minimum credit (I think it was $10) .. and then you are able to send unlimited fax to USA numbers over the internet. It works great for me. I’ve been using it for a couple of years with my original credit purchase. No hardware required! It also has the ability to make phone calls over the internet … but I don’t use that … i use google voice.
For the life of me I cannot see any advantage to your Trendnet device since it apparently will only work over a dial-up telephone line…if you have a telephone line you do not need anything else to send a fax on…just a fax which you can buy at any yard sale now for 5 bucks. Now…a device to use a FAX over the internet would be most useful.
For What its Worth… The Street dot com just hit AGNC (in your portfolio) with a strong “Sell” recommendation. http://www.thestreet.com/story/12848702/1/what-to-sell-3-sell-rated-dividend-stocks-agnc-pbf-hts.html
Harry, I’m a little disappointed that you didn’t use todays column to make a funny statement about Al Gore suing Al Jazeera……something along the lines of Al vs Al…..I just needed a laugh I guess.
I didn’t even know about it. What’s he suing them about?
What do you think of this portfolio? http://www.j3sg.com/Reports/Stock-Insider/Generate-Institution-Portfolio.php?institutionid=4240&DV=yes (he made out well on Dollar General today)
I’m mtg with the hedge fund manager next week. Any thoughts/questions…
“…Europe doing so well”? Huh? Not so you would notice! This from the WSJ 4 days ago:
“”The euro-zone recovery never really got going, and now it appears to be petering out,” said Simon Tilford, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform, a nonpartisan London think tank.
“The gloomy numbers out of the euro zone join a litany of similarly sour reports this week from Asia, all pointing to signs of sudden weakness among many major economies.”
http://online.wsj.com/articles/french-gdp-fails-to-grow-in-second-quarter-1407994573
Can’t anyone read sarcasm? Please. I was being sarcastic about Europe….40% on subsidies to farmers???? Are they crazy? Yes.
Oh, indeed. And sarcasm is much loved. But the big blue headline buried the bite … and the bite had too much of a potentially “true” ring.