In Search of the Perfect Investment

It opened up this morning after a miserable Friday.

Volatility is good for day traders. Bad for us normal people.

Task for this morning: List your ten favorite stocks and put a Good Till Cancel order in at 20% below today’s price. My list would include:

NFLX, FB, AAPL, AMZN, GILD, LMT, SBUX, UNH, V, and GOOG.

At 20% below where they are today, these would be seriously good buys.

You never know. One day — when you’re playing tennis or on a plane going someplace boring (and delayed, and have no WiFi) — you might pick them up at bargain prices.

 Only buy your airline tickets from the airline. Don’t buy them from Expedia, Priceline, or any discount broker, etc. If you need to change your ticket, the airline will hit you with a whopping “change” fee. They will say, “it’s not our ticket.” The airline is far less likely to upgrade you. Worse, if your flight is delayed, you’ll be treated like a third class citizen.

Worst, you probably paid more than if you had booked directly with the airline.

“We can get to it about three months.”  That’s the response I’m getting from local contractors (Columbia County, New York State), when I ask them about a job I have. That’s from the contractors who bother to even return my calls. Most don’t. Plumbers, electricians, deck guys. Two morals of this boring weekend story:

+ HD will continue to do well. Here’s five years of HD:

+ Why would anyone work  for a company when you can earn a handsome living working for yourself? All you got to do is to return my phone calls and take half up front.

Saudi King Salman offers to build 200 mosques in Germany for the Muslim refugees. Saudi Arabia itself is not accepting any refugees. So sweet of them. Mosques not people. Read more in the Daily Mail. Click here.

Your heart rate? The Apple Watch measures it. So does your iPhone, with a little free app, called Instant Heart Rate. It’s fiddling. But this morning, my watch and my iPhone showed my resting heart rate of 58 bpm — probably beats per minute. Yippee, I’m alive. As I wrote about King Salman, my heart rate went to 68 bpm. That man is a disaster.

I installed another one of these on the weekend.

As I wrote last week (click here), these things bring TV wirelessly from one place to another, either in the same room or in different rooms. Don’t need a second cable box or more ugly cabling.

In Unit Stalked by Suicide, Veterans Try to Save One Another. On Sunday, the New York Times published a Special Report on suicides among military veterans in a battalion that served in Afghanistan. It’s sad, heartrending, and powerful.

Members of a Marine battalion that served in a restive region in Afghanistan have been devastated by the deaths of comrades and frustrated by the V.A.

Of about 1,200 Marines who deployed with the Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment in 2008, at least 13 have killed themselves, two while on active duty, the rest after they left the military. The resulting suicide rate for the group is nearly four times the rate for young male veterans as a whole and 14 times that for all Americans.

When the battalion’s members returned, most left the military and melted back into the civilian landscape. They had families and played softball, taught high school and attended Ivy League universities. But many also struggled, unable to find solace. And for some, the agonies of war never ended.

Read the full piece here. Please do. You’ll begin to understand what our Vets are going through. It’s not pretty.

Add this to my list of Fortunes in Small Containers that made someone a LARGE fortune.

Others include NewSkin, GooGone, ChapStick, CrazyGlue, WD-40.

Small amounts of liquid, sold at high prices with a great name.

What can you think of?

Look who’s on the cover of today’s New York Magazine?

New terrorism threat in Canada. Stupid, but funny.

Having a bad day? Stupid, but funny, also.

Yom Kippur begins tomorrow night and ends Wednesday night. That means it’s OK to buy stock on Thursday.

Harry Newton who found a nice tenant over the weekend for a small cottage Susan and I own in Columbia County. Our new tenant gave me a check and moved immediately in. Being a landlord is better than not being one. Certainly better than a slap in the belly with a cold fish.