In Search of the Perfect Investment

I need to do more checking. Two favorite stocks — LADR and NLY — missed slightly. Where now with them?

Commodities — like oil and gold — continue to fall. The oil decline is rejiggering the economics of many industries, including solar and natural gas. Time to revisit some of those companies, e.g. SUNE ( Sun Edison).

Whole Foods has bounced up 9% this morning after a nice 5.8% profit rise. Qualcomm is down 9%. Not good. I expected better with the mobile boom.

We’re at some of of tipping point — especially with Europe weak and the dollar so strong. The Euro is down to $1.24, which is very low. The cheap Euro should make European products more attractive and boost their exports. But so far, not much. I’d hope to find some “cheap” European stocks — like the way American stocks were cheap in March 2009. But I’m not sure, yet.

Today’s markets are not easy. hard world.

Comments from readers on sending electronic money. I wrote about what’s now called Mobile Pay yesterday:

Lucky
Scotiabank, in Canada, charges me $1.00 to email funds from my checking account, within Canada. All done online from my home in Arizona.

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I too pay for anything I can, online, with PayPal. However, rather than having it automatically deducted from my bank account I have it charged to my credit card (alternative payment). This gives me the benefit of credit card goodies (in my case AMEX Delta Skymiles)…or you might chose a higher “cash back” card than what PayPal pays. You do have to be very careful and “change” the payment method on every transaction or it is automatically charged against your bank account.

guest
The Omaha based company “First Data” is going after the mobile payments market. Privately owned by KKR rumored to be going public maybe next year.

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Look at PopMoney from PNC. I can email you $100 and verify the transfer by text or phone and the recipient deposits it into their account . I don’t need their account infor or anything. Neat.

 What happened with the elections? Do they mean anything to us as investors? This one is another “hard one.” Fact: Voters are fed up with Washington’s inability to get anything done. Washington is gridlocked, the voters say. That’s annoying. My Republican friends blame the gridlock on the Democrats. My Democrat friends blame it on the Republicans. The Republicans used gridlock as a successful strategy to get themselves elected. Get voters annoyed at Washington. Then present themselves as the solution.It worked.

The House and the Senate are now Republican. The President is a Democrat, who hasn’t much vision, doesn’t do much leading, and does even less listening and compromising. So how will happen in the next two years? Probably nothing. As the Republicans gear up to get themselves a Republican President.

Pity Washington seems to have forgotten who’s paying their salaries.

Hard world.

This piece appeared this morning on Bloomberg by our former mayor, who’s now using his fortune to influence politics on issues he feels strongly about. I have difficulty disagreeing with him on his issues. Read his piece and see what you think.

Gridlock Leads Voters Out of Washington

By Michael R. Bloomberg

Here’s the big news from Tuesday’s election: Faced with gridlock in Washington, more and more voters are turning to states and municipalities to do the work that the nation’s capital seems increasingly unable to do.

Let me give you one example: Voters in four states — all of them won by Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race — passed ballot measures increasing their state’s minimum wage. In those states, many local Republicans favored the increases, even as Republicans in Washington have refused to take up the issue. I would have preferred to see Congress pass an expanded earned income tax credit, which is the most effective way of increasing real incomes for low-wage workers. But after it did nothing, voters decided to take matters into their own hands. Waiting for Washington is like a Samuel Beckett play without any of the intrigue or humor — just absurdity. And voters have seen enough.

I share their frustration, and as a strong believer in the idea that cities and states are the laboratories of democracy, I share their determination to act. This fall, I supported state-level efforts on several ballot measures designed to bypass Washington on three major issues that are hurting the country: gun violence, obesity and political polarization.

So how did we do?

In Washington state, an organization I helped found, Everytown for Gun Safety, worked with local advocates to pass a ballot measure requiring a background check for all gun sales, a step 16 states have already taken. In those states, the rates of gun trafficking and gun suicides are half of what they are in states that don’t require universal background checks. The vast majority of Americans support this common-sense step, but the gun lobby has fought it tooth-and-nail — both in Congress and in states.

The gun lobby, however, has an easier time scaring members of Congress than it does scaring voters. In Washington, we worked hard to get out the facts and to bring voters to the polls. The measure passed with 60 percent of the vote, and the state will be safer for it.

In Berkeley, California, I backed local efforts to pass a one cent per ounce tax on sugary beverages. Economists will tell you that if you want less of something, tax it. Hence high taxes on cigarettes. Sugary drinks are a leading contributor to obesity, which contributes to millions of deaths — and untold suffering — every year. Taxing sugary drinks, in addition to reducing consumption, will lead the beverage industry to produce more products that are low in sugar.

The soda industry has successfully fought efforts to tax and regulate sugary drinks in the U.S., and although it spent heavily to defeat the measure, voters weren’t fooled: 75 percent endorsed the measure. If it works, we should expect other cities and states to follow.

Of course, you can’t win them all. I backed efforts in Oregon to switch from a system of closed party primaries — where only party members may vote — to an open “top two” system. Part of the purpose of a top two primary, which voters in California and Washington have adopted, is to push candidates toward the center by forcing them to compete for independent voters — not just party loyalists. The partisan primary process, in which candidates race to the extreme left or extreme right, is a big reason Washington, D.C., is so dysfunctional. Unfortunately, the political parties weren’t too happy with this measure and succeeded in bringing it down.

The hunger for more cooperation in our politics, as expressed through these measures, also came through in governor’s races. Americans elected — and I supported — centrist candidates who promised to work across party lines to effect genuine change in their states. In Rhode Island, Democrat Gina Raimondo won the statehouse after leading one of the most comprehensive pension reform efforts in the country. In deep blue Massachusetts, voters elected a Republican governor, Charlie Baker, who pledged to work with Democrats on education, guns and economic development. In Connecticut, voters re-elected Democratic governor Dan Malloy, who has angered teachers unions; in Michigan, they returned Republican Rick Snyder, who has been a leader on immigration reform.

The story on Tuesday wasn’t just that Republicans won back the Senate or that President Barack Obama lost. It was that Americans made clear they are hungry for bipartisan problem-solving and that they’re focusing on those places where it can actually happen.

I hope the president can begin forging compromises with Republicans. We can’t give up on Washington — there is no substitute for national action on many issues — but we can’t afford to wait for it, either.

By way of explanation:

+ Some days this blog looks weird. That’s not deliberate. I use WordPress to format the column — as does the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But I don’t have the resources to check the madness of different browsers, like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, etc. — which tend to format HTML (the common Internet language) differently. It’s frustrating. Check. Check. Check.

+ Magazines are dishonest. They try to get you to renew your subscription years before your subscription is set to expire. Sometimes years before. Best to keep an Excel spreadsheet of all your subscriptions and when they expire. Don’t fall for the two-for-one deal. That often comes years before you’re due to expire.

+ The plural of Newtons (i.e. many Newtons) is Newtons, not Newton’s. It’s Newton’s car. That’s OK. That’s possessive.  It’s something to be concerned about. Its car. Don’t confuse it’s and its.

+ Email and SMS is semi-useful. If you want your message to get through, pick up the phone. If you want to get something done, go visit the person. Email and  SMS are only useful for confirming an agreement or sending promised material. Never include more than one item in an email. No one reads more than one.

This is funny.

Harry Newton who needs to take a step back. The big lesson is diversification. It usually works.