In Search of the Perfect Investment

No one got this right. Some of us got elements of it. Like my warnings about staying away from banks, owning some gold and a short-term bond fund like BSV.

In hindsight, we should have figured the groundswell of unhappiness from people in the center of England who’d lost their jobs to technology, outsourcing, and immigration from EU countries like Poland.

It’s the same groundswell that’s been helping Trump here.

Here’s an email from a Yorkshire, England resident who voted for leaving the EU.

“Please, please, do not listen to the distorted views of the mainstream media. Yes, immigration is a major problem. But not THE REASON why the we voted to leave the EU. We as a people have demanded our country back from the unelected elites which have become our masters. An unelected EU government with no opposition, with the power to make our laws and determine how we live our lives. Immigration is a secondary topic, the economy is secondary, if we are worse off, we will live with our decision. If we suffer, so be it. Our freedom and the freedom of our children is much more important. People have died in the millions to fight for this basic right. We have given a shining example of democracy to the world. We have put our country and our future above our individual interests. The British lion has awakened from a long sleep. Today I have never been more proud of the silent, decent Briton who stood up to be counted.”

In early May, Robert Shiller, professor of Economics at Yale, wrote a piece “Listen Carefully for Hints of the Next Global Recession.” He concluded with:

We don’t know whether any specific event – say, an unexpected spike in oil prices or a decline in the stock market — will help transform any of the current social stories into a truly virulent economic disruption. We don’t know what is coming or when. But history does tell us that human imagination can spontaneously transform discrete events into world-shaking narratives of unexpected color and force.

 No knows where Brexit is going. The only sane prediction is uncertainty. And uncertainty which will lead to choppy stockmarkets, i.e. mostly down. Which is why my friends tend to day trade. In and out the same day. No overnight surprises. (Like Brexit.) They eye the stock movement patterns and play their favorite stocks for a ten to twenty cent movement.

For those who followed my “Buy. Buy. Buy.” blog of Friday, let’s hope we didn’t buy too much and can loosen up in coming weeks, without too much pain. There should be relief rallies.

The next few months are not going to be fun, or pretty. If you’re uncomfortable, take some of your losses now. Or sell some calls on stocks you want to own. Or close your eyes. Turn off bubblevision (CNBC). Go play tennis.

All Dow 30 stocks are lower this morning. This makes no sense since some of them have no exposure to Europe. Business is all about confidence and certainty.

My favorite laptop just blew up. It’s a ThinkPad X230 running Windows 7 and it came down with a “black screen of death.” Total lockup. Total loss of unsaved work. I had to reboot and recreate what work I hadn’t saved. I have no idea what happened — a virus, some malware… The Internet was useless. No explanation. No nothing. Microsoft denied all responsibility (as usual). Neither Norton Internet Security nor Malwarebytes Anti-Malware caught it. 

Solution: Copy all my working files to another identical ThinkPad X230 machine. And move to that machine, hoping that the working files don’t carry the nasty. So far, so good.

Another (cheaper) solution would be to move the working files to a backup hard drive of my main mahcine I’d made a coouple of months ago — before the nasty appeared.

There are two lessons:

1. Don’t try saving your infected hard disk. You don’t be able to fix it. Most likely an “expert” won’t either. But everyone will waste a lot of time and money trying to fix it.

2. You’d better make regular backups — a clone of your working machine and a copy of your working files. Flash drives work for the working files. An SSD (solid state drive) works as a clone. Amazon has them both.You’ll be surprised how cheap.

Greatest toy ever. Sophie is visiting. here’s her favorite toy.

It’s called the VTech Sit-to-Stand Learning Walker. It teaches them to walk. When they walk you remove the play panel and you have all manner of noise-making, button-pushing wonders. Only $29.99. Sophie loves hers. She’ll be two in August. Click here.

Harry Newton, who bought a little Twilio (TWLO) because it has just gone IPO. And I didn’t want to miss it like I missed Facebook early on. And wonder of wonder TWLO is up a few pennies. So was MBLY until today. Meantime, stop reading “learned” pieces from Brexit “experts.”