In Search of the Perfect Investment

The Apple Watch didn’t excite the market. But it excited me.

I believe it will excite sufficient number of people to significantly bump Apple’s earnings. Hence I bought a little more Apple stock during yesterday’s presentation, only to watch my brilliantly-timed purchase drop, and then drop again this morning.

I’m excellent at substituting enthusiasm for intelligence.

The Apple Watch tells time, but its primary role is as a new software platform — which developers can create to. For medical research. For ordering limos. For opening hotel doors. For paying for your groceries. Tim Cook said it all:

“Apple’s goal is to give everyone the tools to live better and healthier lives.”

No other organization — not Google, not Amazon, not Microsoft — encourages, and rewards developers like Apple does. No other organization is rewarded by outside developers, as Apple is.

Buy yourself an Apple Watch next month. It will free you (and millions of others) from checking their iPhone every few minutes. You can even answer phone calls on the Watch — a la Dick Tracy. See today’s New York Times story.

Today, Every newspaper and very blog is full of their reporters’ impressions of the watch. Some say it’s far too complicated. Others opine that no one will wear it, simply because no one wears a watch today. Many reporters also believe negative stories “sell,” e.g. “three reasons not to buy the Google Watch.”

To its credit, the Wall Street Journal headlines its story by quoting its reporter,  Geoffrey A. Fowler,  “It might save time and be the device that lets him leave his phone in his pocket and still not miss anything important.”

Apple is down significantly this morning. If I thought it was worth buying nearly three points higher, I definitely think it’s worth buying now. Or perhaps wait a little. It might fall further.

Europe’s Euro is plummeting. On its way to parity with the U.S. dollar. I’ve thought it was overpriced for eons. I never felt comfortable shorting it. .. For now, it’s a good time to think of summer in Europe. The place is on sale.

Quora is neat. You detail your interests, what areas you want to follow.You ask it questions and readers answer them. The topics range all over the map, from angel investing to ancient history. For example, one story today:

Were the Romans right?

Strange question.  Firstly, the US is only 236 years old as a nation and the EU is only 19 years old in its current form.  It’s a bit too soon to be predicting their total catastrophic collapse just because they have been going through a recession for a handful of years.That aside, the question implies that because entities (plural) that traced their political origin to the city state of Rome lasted for “1,300 years” this must mean “the Romans” were somehow “right” about something or other.  Exactly what they must have been “right” about is not made clear, but I assume it’s something to do with how to run a state.

My counter-question would be “which ‘Romans’?”

Rome began as a city state ruled by a monarchy and an aristocracy.  Were these the Romans who were “right”?  Then the monarchy was overthrown and it became an aristocratic oligarchy with a limited form of republican democracy.  How about those “Romans”?  Then it became an increasingly corrupt plutocracy where rich aristocratic powerbrokers shared power while maintaining a façade of republican democracy.  Those “Romans”?  Then it became an effective military dictatorship which paid lip service to a remnant of the earlier façade of republican democracy?  How about those “Romans”?  Then it was ruled by a deeply unstable succession of military juntas.  Those “Romans”? Then it was stabilised by another powerful military dictatorship, headed by an absolute monarch modelled on eastern, Persian-style rulers.  Finally it dwindled into a succession of monarchs often manipulated by bureaucrats, many of whom were little more than puppets.  Which of these “Romans” were the ones that were “right”?

And “right” about what, exactly?

Rome at its height (the “military dictatorship which paid lip service to a remnant of the earlier façade of republican democracy” mentioned above) sustained itself by a constant series of aggressive wars of expansion and conquest, which brought vast quantities of booty and slaves into the Empire’s rather ramshackle economy and boosted tax revenues.  This involved the devastation and slaughter of whole territories and the oppression and usually brutal subjugation of their population.  The Roman historian Tacitus acknowledged that the Empire was little more than robbery and banditry on a vast scale when he put these words in the mouth of a British chieftain:Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant!

(To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname Empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace!)

Any resistance to Rome was ruthlessly crushed.  In briefly mentioning a small uprising and its quashing, the historian Josephus casually mentions that the Roman governor of Syria ended the campaign by crucifying 2,000 people.  During the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, anyone caught fleeing the city – men, women and children – were crucified in the sight of the walls.  The soldiers were crucifying so many people each day that they got bored and so started trying to find new and amusing poses in which to attach them to the crosses.  In the end they surrounded the city with such a vast sea of crucified corpses that they effectively deforested the hills and ran out of timber to make crosses from.

The Roman economy was based on slave labour.  The Empire was so dependent on slavery that any rebellion by slaves was the greatest fear of the Roman elite and slave uprisings were crushed with particular brutality.  The Spartacus uprising ended with a line of crosses from Rome to Capua – a distance of 132 miles.  The life of a slave depended on who bought them and where and how they lived.  The body slave or scribe of a rich man could live a life that was very pleasant.  But for every one of those there were thousands who toiled in misery in mines, quarries and foundries, usually living lives that were dangerous, expendable and short.  A man once invented a mechanical way of hauling heavy marble columns and showed it to the Emperor Vespasian.  He was impressed, but rejected the scheme on the grounds such mechanisms would leave the slaves with nothing to do.  Once founded on slavery, the Romans had to keep their millions of slaves busy to keep them subjugated.

The benefits of Roman civilisation came at a heavy price in taxation.  Studies of peasants in ancient Judea show that they were economically crippled by the weight of the taxes they had to pay – this is why “tax collectors” are depicted as the scum of the earth in the gospels.  Farmers who had previously been able to make a decent subsistence living as freeholders increasingly fell into debt and regularly had to become day labourers just to survive.

The Roman attitude towards religion was tolerant (mostly), so long as your religion conformed to their idea of what was “proper”.  This meant it had to be sufficiently like theirs or sufficiently “ancient”.  Any other form of religion was considered superstitio and was banned and could be ruthlessly crushed.  The druids, the Bachanalians, the Manichaeians and the Christians all suffered savage persecution at the hands of Roman authorities.

The gladiatorial games that were a major part of Roman society – Emperors kept the people happy with “bread and circuses” – were not just entertainments but statements about Roman dominance.  Animals and people were brought into arenas from distant lands to die as a way of demonstrating the power and reach of the Roman domain.  The idea that a strong people should enjoy seeing blood shed was also a key part of the thinking behind gladiator displays, even if they were not all to the death.

So was this culture of plunder, slavery, oppression, subjugation, colonial domination, persecution, murder and death what the Romans were “right” about?  And is the question really implying that somehow this (to us) rather vile and murderous kind of regime would be a recipe for stability?  Because that strikes me as weird and disturbing.  Misty-eyed, romantic images of the Roman Empire as a nice place with shiny buildings and wise rulers reigning over a happy and stable domain of merry peasants crumbles at the first exposure to a detailed study of history.  It wasn’t like that at all.

Harry Newton who eyes a stockmarket suddenly seriously being affected by the drop in Euro — making it far harder for U.S. companies to export. Hence the decline in the market value, today. Don’t look at today’s ticker. Go for a walk. Play tennis. Take your spouse to lunch.