In Search of the Perfect Investment

My friend is in real estate. He looks at 100 properties. He bids on ten. He bids low. Ends up buying one.

Why should it be any different with picking stocks? It isn’t.

So Cramer, who has ideas, pounds the table for Verifone (PAY). I file PAY away in my mind’s recesses. I read Apple Pay is booming. (See yesterday’s column.) Last night I’m in Whole Foods buying organic apples (the only kind). Whole Foods has Verifone credit card machines. “Does this work with Apple Pay?” I ask the tattooed, ear-plugged checkout clerk? Yes, it does. “Are many people using it?” I ask. Yes, many.

I’m psyched.

This is an opportunity. Spelled with a capital O. The chart is nice. Sort of.

The pretty pictures on their web site are pretty. This is the terminal I saw at Whole Foods last night:

This should be Verifone’s BIG Opportunity. Their day in the sun!

Then I read their Investor presentation. I can’t understand a single word. See if you can. Click here: IR Presentation September 2014 final 2014-10-16

Then I look  at their financials. They stink big-time. From the Wall Street Journal’s site:

Good news, here are the quarterly numbers. They’re losing less money.

In short, the opportunity is there: EMV and Apple Pay will increase the demand for these type of terminals. But Verifone makes too many things and delivers too many “services.” Maybe one day Verifone will figure its place in the sun. The company needs a Steve Jobs.  Kill the bad products. Focus on the ones that make sense.

Back to checking out 99 other companies.

This is hard work.

My favorite traveling monitor: It’s the ASUS MB168B+ 15.6-Inch Screen LED Monitor. It’s wafer thin. Slides easily into a backpack or a roll-on. Lights up into a glorious second monitor to a laptop. With many pixels — 1920 x 1080. The thing is completely powered and driven by one USB cable. No power supply. Nothing extra to carry, except the small cable and it also fits into the flat “pleather” case.

Having two monitors when you travel is a huge productivity boost. The monitor is now available, finally. Click here.

Useful Stuff:

+ WAZE gets better every day. I’m finding my way around Portland with WAZE. It’s a no-brainer.  Best turn-by-turn directions of them all. When you get to your destination, WAZE now offers to remember where you parked your car. For alta kakas like me, that’s huge.

+ Susan used her iPhone, the hotel’s WiFi and WhatsApp to text me from Rabat, Morocco that she had landed safely. A reader suggests we download Viber which lets us text and make free phone calls — so long as both of us have Viber.

+ Public WiFi is dangerous, slow and unreliable. I use Personal HotSpot on my iPhone. You have to tell your carrier to turn it on.

+ If you get a SIM card for your travel phone, please remember to set up voice mail.

 Everybody and their uncle is targeting mobile users. Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Salesforce… except IBM. Who knows why?

Saves him wearing ear buds? Will it fit the bigger iPhone 6, or the iPhone 6 Plus?

Friends visited Australia. Australians take their humor and their signs seriously:

Favorite Dorothy Parker quote:

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

Harry Newton who’s visiting Portland, Oregon to see granddaughter, Eleanor.

Portland has two huge charms:

1. Roses seem to bloom all year long.I photographed this one yesterday, October 28, on a suburban Portland street.

2. Portland has nice blue skies and warmth in the summer. The rest of the year, it drizzles and the skies are grey, like yesterday. The moving mist in the mountains is beautiful to a city boy like me.