In Search of the Perfect Investment

Brexit is overblown. Nohting will change the day after the election. Stop panicking.

The weather here is gorgeous. Good biking and tennis.

It’s the summer. And everybody is nuts. It happens every year. and each year I look for Why?. I find cars and trucks blocking the box on Manhattan’s busiest intersections. I see bike riders texting with one hand and steering with the other. I see pedestrians walking into the road checking Facebook. No one is paying attention to their miserable live. I hear drivers honking and honking.

My right wing friends send me emails “Let me count the ways Obama has tried to destroy the US” — one of which pins the Orlando massacre on him. My left-wing friends rant about Congress and guns. Friendly discourses are out.

Stockholm’s Grand Hotel answers its phones “All our lines are engaged.” Then promptly hangs up on you! This is the hotel and this is where you eat. Trump would be proud of the gold crap on the ceiling — if only they would answer their phones. I need a room reservation.

All my friends are sitting on the sidelines, frozen, fearful for the upcoming summer disaster. Whatever it is. The doom and gloom newsletter merchants are out in force. My friends are not enjoying the volatility of the last few months.

Here’s the S&P and the VIX over the last three months. If the charts are too big for your screen, click on them.

I have no idea why Microsoft bought LinkedIn, my least favorite company. And why Microsoft spent a gargantuan $26.2 billion on the “deal.” It hasn’t been a good year for Microsoft. They’re desperate for growth and sex appeal? (Panic, corporate-style? Wait, it gets worse.)

Jeff Gundlach is “the bond king” of hedge funds. He recently published (i.e. to make public) a bunch of his slides. He’s not horribly optimistic. He also believes Trump will become president. Here are two slides I pulled out of his 64-slide presentation:

Our Yankee dollar is strong because you can earn something with our treasuries — not much, admittedly. But more than in most places overseas where they charge you to hold your money. I prefer BSV — one of my better investments of the last few months.

Should you buy a new laptop? There are two appeals:

First, it may go faster, though Intel is bumping against speed limits. Your new machine won’t be much faster.
Second, it will have a brighter, more pixely screen.
Third, it may have other advantages, like a longer-life battery – which seems to be Intel’s thrust these days in laptop microprocessors.

But, your new machine may also have significant negatives: The manufacturer may have arbitrarily changed commands, changed software and the extra pixels on your new, more dense screen now messes up your old concepts of how things looked. Hence today’s weird looking blog.

I bought a new Lenovo ThinkPad X260. The keyboard is smaller, much harder to type on. Every one of my critical commands — like F3 — has changed. It’s now Fn-F3. And the higher pixels — 1920 x 1080 — versus my old 1366 x 768 on my trusty ThinkPad X230 has messed the chart sizing. You can see the awful results in today’s blog. Yuch!

Once I finish this diatribe about “If it’s not busted don’t fix it.” — I’m going straight back to my trusty old X230. Pick one up on eBay for under $500. Worth every penny. Newer is not better.


Harry Newton bought a little FEYE, MBLY, and SQ. All three tech companies could bounce a little with takeover talk. The big tech companies like MSFT and AAPL are loaded with cash and need somewhere exciting with oodles of growth to put their idle cash. Hence Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn. And now it’s doing something with marijuana! (I don’t make this stuff up. And I’m not smoking anything.) Apple is having difficulties in China. That place is obsessed with promoting its own home-grown smartphone companies. They just stopped Apple from selling some of its older iPhones. China is a nice place to source from, not a great place to do business in.

The Economist is saying NO to Brexit.

The world goes nuts during the summer. Better to play tennis, go biking and ignore those ridiculous computer screens. Unless you’re watching tennis on the Tennis Channel, which is showing some pre-Wimbledon tournaments.