I bought a little SLB and HAL on Friday. By the end of the day, they’d jumped a little. Here’s five days with SLB.
Normally I don’t like catching falling knives.
Another knife to catch may be gold. Here’s its movement over the past ten years:
Actually it’s up slightly in the past 12 months — The ETF SGOL is up slightly from $122.74 to $124.97.
There is talk (subdued for now) that gold will rise this year. Worth monitoring.
I’m not excited by Amazon nor Google for the same reason: Too much on their plates. No one can focus on the vast panoply of projects these two companies are undertaking.
From a recent Fortune magazine piece on Amazon:
Fortune ended an adulatory piece on Google’s Larry Page:
Page looks at Google’s projects as a portfolio, a “bucket of investments.” Some are short-term, others are medium or long-term bets. He says he is fairly certain some will pay off. And while the investments are sizable, they are also gradual. “By the time you know you want to put a significant amount of money into something, you’re pretty sure you’re going to make money from it,” says Page. “It’s not that the risk is so high.” To the most ambitious CEO on the planet, clearly the bigger risk is in not trying to conjure the future.
Larry is spending Google shareholder money on curing cancer!
Read the entire Fortune piece here.
BlackRock says the Australian dollar could fall another 15%. The end of the commodity boom is hitting resource-rich Australia hard, and investment management giant BlackRock believes the Australian dollar has further to fall, down another 15% to about $0.70, according to Bloomberg.The Australians will not try to stop the fall. Their Reserve Bank has been encouraging the fall since the Aussie dollar was over $1 and Australian manufacturers were being priced out of export markets.
Australia is becoming a super cheap (and wonderful) place for Americans to visit. For more Australian girls, click here.
The Australian Tennis Open started yesterday. It’s playing on The Tennis Channel.
Weekend “insights:”
+ New Balance makes the best shoe laces:their “bubble” nature keeps them tied when you’re running of playing tennis. Finally, shoelaces that don’t open.
Buy laces here.
+ The big four online travel companies are Expedia, Priceline, Orbitz and CheapOAir. But always try your chosen airline and negotiate with them on the phone. Twofers in business class are common. For twofers, call on the phone. Check on the phone with American Express Platinum for their deals.
+ AmazonBasics has great cheap stuff. Like HDMI cables and stands to hold your iPad.
The greatest ad ever for a whiskey ever:
A joke for the times.
A little Muslim kid is crying. He can’t find his mother in the supermarket.
A store attendant tries to help, “What does she look like?”
I have no idea.
The sickest joke ever.
A seriously depressed woman stands at the edge of a cliff, trying to get the nerve up to jump.
A passing hobo stops and says, “Since you’re about to kill yourself anyway, would you mind if we had sex first?”
The woman said “Hell no! Get away from me you sicko!”
The bum turned to leave and muttered, “Fine, I’ll just go wait at the bottom”.
Harry Newton who read too much “sage” writing this weekend on Islam and Europe. And got depressed because he’s convinced that the path Europe is on will only make things worse, and lead to more terrorist acts. Two small quotes:
+ Those who speak officially in the name of the French Muslim community explain that Islam is not the threat, that the real culprits are those who “insult Islam,” and that “the main victims” are Muslims.
+ Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, was initially not invited to the big Paris march. He came anyhow. French officials let him know that he was not welcome and not to speak. He spoke anyhow. As a sign of disapproval, French officials left the Grand Synagogue of Paris during the ceremony for the dead Jews, before Netanyahu’s speech. (Six the 17 killed in Paris were Jews.) Anti-Semitic acts nearly doubled in France in the first seven months of 2014, compared with the previous year.
Is it really safe any longer to visit Paris as a tourist?
You last bullet point re Paris conflates anti-Netanyahuism and anti-Semitism. One can assess Netanyahu as being a hate-filled bigot, and not wish him to attend your unity party, without being anti-Semitic.
Thanks Harry for getting my Down Under in overdrive.
I post some content here with the full realization that the “typical” American is the willing victim of propaganda, misinformation, and while believing that Muslims are fanatical religious reality deniers, he himself is a dogmatic reality denier.
Fox News Becomes the Unwilling Star of a French TV Satire
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/world/europe/fox-news-becomes-unwilling-star-of-french-tv-show.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth®ion=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below
“On Saturday, Fox News apologized four times on the air for its reports about the no-go zones, acknowledging that there was no reason to believe that they existed. It called the reports an “error” and apologized to “any and all,” including “the people of France.”
…Their comics confronted Fox News correspondents when they spotted them reporting live in Paris. In one video, two of the show’s correspondents pretended to be American journalists venturing into supposedly forbidden areas and, in slapstick fashion, cowering by a Turkish kebab shop and a couscous restaurant and falling to the ground at the sound of a jackhammer.”
But no worries, because this stripe of American is not only blissfully ignorant but also irony-free.
We are all set to summer in France this year…we always avoid Paris, hate driving in Paris…I checked the “Don’t go Zones” and there are none in the areas we will be living, South on the med near boarder of Spain, then a week on the Loire Canal, finally a farmhouse in Burgundy…all are our favorites. I think we will be safe enough. Love the new euro exchange rates.