Start with the assumption: No one knows. No one can predict.
Here’s UBS. It remains bullish.
Says UBS,
This is a Harry’s “trendline,” which I just drew. Doesn’t look so good. Notice the S&P 500 has just busted through my trendline:
The fears are:
+ Slowing Europe, especially Germany.
+ Slowing Asia, including Japan and maybe China.
+ Irrational Russia.
+ Lower oil prices, and whatever that means for slowing industries that use oil and the industries that make it.
+ Ebola.
+ Slowing US business that does business with the above slowers. (New word)
We’ve learned three things from this downdraft:
+ All stocks go down together. When it’s a bad day, they’re all red. Look at CNBC’s “heat map.” A blaze of red boxes. In short, hard to hide.
+ It’s extraordinarily dumb to own mutual funds. You have to wait until the end of the day to sell the stuckers. By then you could thousands out of pocket. My highly-recommended FMILX has been a disaster. (It’s gone from my list.) I wanted to sell it Friday lunchtime. But I had to until after the close. What an idiocy owning mutual funds when there are a zillion ETFs that do the same thing, charge the same fees and are saleable from one moment to another. So don’t buy mutual funds.
+ All the bad news is delivered on TV by gorgeous women. If I were running a TV network, I’d keep the gorgeous ones for good news and the hags for bad news. How about these two for last Friday, when it was really scary?
Few stocks are “cheap,” yet. Maybe Delta is an exception?
Fidelity tells me Delta’s P/E is 2.6 and yields 1.09%.
I’d like to spend a day at Kennedy Airport and ask everybody getting off a Delta plane how full the plane was? Susan just came back from Portland, Oregon on Delta and she said it was “awful.” There wasn’t a spare seat in the whole plane.
Bad for her. Good for us.
I don’t have the time to spend tagging passengers at JFK. Anyone have flown Delta recently? Anyone had a good, miserable flight?
Bill Gross’s old Pimco Total Return Bond Fund: I hate this mutual fund stuff. Got to spend half your life figuring out which class for you. One for class for Christians, one class for Jews, one class for white people living in green houses. This is “class” stuff with mutual funds is total insanity. Stick with ETFs. One class for all. And easy to sell or buy.
Last thought of the morning:
If you’re running a computer without Norton Internet Security — my favorite virus checker and killer — you’re asking the bad guys to give you a nasty, computer-destroying virus. It happened to my daughter. It happened to my real estate friend.
When you get the virus, the bad guys will want $800 to remove it. Or they’ll destroy everything on your hard disk, which you forgot to back up.
One subscription to Norton Internet Security covers three machines. It is worth its weight in gold. Trust me on this one.
Harry Newton who has three dumb friends:
+ One yanked a heavy kayak and threw out his back.
+ One used his favorite chain saw to cut off his right hand. (And he hadn’t stolen anything.)
+ A third tried to lift the heavy lawn mower attachment behind his tractor and threw out a disc, which is now bulging painfully into his sciatic nerve.
Some of my friends are stupid. But these three give stupidity a whole new meaning.
Don’t do stupid! Ask for help.
Flew Delta, Portland, Maine to Phoenix last Tuesday…Portland departure they ask for 1 volunteer as they were oversold…got to Detroit…11 oversold so they paid us $1000.00 to go through Atlanta…we will apply that to our flight to Europe next summer on Air France…Atlanta/Phoenix every seat filled. Had short connect in ATL and only found out after boarding they do not sell meals after 8pm…our flight left at 8:45 so we “snacked” on the way home. Butt got very tired as we had to sit in the back of the bus…the thousand bucks helped to ease the pain. All flights were on time.
Oh yes, we were flying on Skymiles for ten bucks each and they still gave us our $1000.00 vouchers. We fly on miles at every opportunity, doing it again in February to catch our Southern Caribbean cruise on Celebrity out of Miami. Being retired with plenty of spare time we always volunteer at the departure gate or when we check in online.
My sister just flew Delta from Germany to JFK yesterday and said flight was full. She also got upgraded to first class – having frequent flyer miles/loyalty to one airline does seem to be worth it these days. The nightmare was getting her bags when she got into JFK…
the lesson is stay away from chain stores.