I sold VW again short yesterday. Must have been my brilliant instinct. VLKAY will be down today after announcement of yet another government investigation into yet another alleged VW fraud. I can’t imagine why this stock won’t plummet to close to nothing.
But it could also be worth $200 a share like Tesla:
No one ever said there was any relationship between value and stock price. To illustrate this, I give you a chart from a piece in Seeking Alpha today arguing that Tesla is way over-priced on the simple metric of price to book — compared to other, larger car companies.
Promotion counts. Which brings me to my favorite promotion today:
This bra costs $2 million. It’s a nice bra, though I prefer the model. I’m guessing Victoria’s Secret thinks it will get $2 million of publicity from creating this bra.
The bra has 6,500 precious gems, including diamonds, yellow sapphires and blue topaz, and is set in 18-karat gold. It sounds uncomfortable.
If you can’t afford the bra, maybe this nice impossible-to-read watch will suffice:
Only $324,000. It’s contains not one, but two tourbillons.” It’s by Antoine Preziuso. According to Wikipedia, a tourbillon is an addition to the mechanics of a watch escapement. Developed around 1795 and patented by the French-Swiss watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet on June 26, 1801, a tourbillon aims to counter the effects of gravity by mounting the escapement and balance wheel in a rotating cage, to negate the effect of gravity when the timepiece (thus the escapement) is stuck in a certain position. By continuously rotating the entire balance wheel/escapement assembly at a slow rate (typically about one revolution per minute), positional errors are averaged out. Originally an attempt to improve accuracy, tourbillons are still included in some expensive modern watches as a novelty and demonstration of watchmaking virtuosity. The mechanism is usually exposed on the watch’s face to show it off. (That’s why you can’t read the time. You’re not meant to.)
If telling time is your concern, this ghastly $13.98 Timex at Walmart is more accurate (and cheaper):
To buy it (if you really must), click here.
I’m in favor of customer reviews. They help me decide what to buy. I especially like this review I found on a Nike site:
When lacking jokes, run one old, bad lawyer joke. (That’s today’s mantra.)
If you think lawyers don’t have hearts, read this. The Salvation Army discovered that it had never received a donation from the city’s most successful lawyer. So a volunteer SA Officer paid the lawyer a visit in his lavish office.
The volunteer opened the meeting by saying, ‘Our research shows that even though your annual income is over two million dollars, you don’t give one cent to charity. Wouldn’t you like to give something back to your community?
The lawyer thinks for a minute and says, ‘First, did your research also show you that my mother is dying after a long painful illness, and she has huge medical bills that are far beyond her ability to pay?’ Embarrassed, the rep mumbles, ‘Uh … No, I didn’t know that.’
‘Secondly,’ says the lawyer, ‘did it show that my brother, a disabled Veteran, is blind and confined to a wheelchair and is unable to support his wife and six children? The stricken rep begins to stammer an apology, but is cut off again
‘Thirdly, did your research also show you that my sister’s husband died in a dreadful car accident, leaving her penniless with a mortgage and three children, one of whom is disabled and another that has learning disabilities requiring an array of private tutors?’
The humiliated rep, completely beaten, says, ‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea.’
And the lawyer says, ‘So, if I didn’t give any money to them, what makes you think I’d give any to you?’
Harry Newton who today is voting in a local election for members of our local town council in Spencertown, NY (or is it Austerlitz?) They didn’t answer their phones this morning, so I’m not sure which. My vote will be important. The place is tiny. Interestingly, the Spencertown Fire Department also did not answer its phones this morning. Thank the Lord, we’re not burning down.
Yesterday the market went up. Today’s it’s going down. And so is gold, which remains a really awful hedge:
Harry, there are really only three attorney jokes. All the rest are true stories.