You own stocks. You don’t want to sell them, because you have a big gain in them. Selling them would be a pricey taxable event.
Your stocks are going nowhere fast, or maybe they’re sliding.
Solution: Sell covered calls on them. Sell them on a happy day when stocks are up.
If your stock rises close to the call price, buy your calls back — before your shares get taken away.
Having your stocks taken away from you (i.e. the call options exercised) would be a taxable event.
On a happy day, a friend sold January calls on XOM for $1.50.
On a unhappy, depressed day recently, he bought them back for 15 cents.
That dollar plus he made was his only profit on the stock recently.
XOM has fallen in recent weeks, but it’s still way above what he bought it for eons ago.
My friend emails me: “Just remember that this only works when you don’t want to sell the stock. I’m a long-term holder so I was able to put money in my pocket, hold the stock, and be able to sell my stock at some point in the future.”
Email lessons.
Your emails are permanent. You can “delete” them, but they are always somewhere, some place.
Don’t put anything in your emails you don’t want unearthed in five years by a court, the FBI, the Justice Department, Donald Trump or anyone else.
When in doubt, pick up the phone.
My rules on emails:
1 Never insult or complain.
2. Only confirm, compliment or invite.
Only use email for confirming an arrangement, for complimenting someone or sending an invitation.
When in doubt, just delete the email you just wrote. Take a deep breath. And pick up the phone.
My most useful stuff. All this stuff works flawlessly:
+ My Fujitsu scanner.
+ My ThinkPad X230 laptop running Windows 7. The X230 is old. Lenovo is up to the X260. The battery life has been much extended, but the keyboard has been significantly worsened. You can pick up an X230 machine on eBay for a song.
+ My Dymo label printer. I have the LabelWriter Twin Turbo.
+ My Sennheiser wireless headphones. I couldn’t enjoy TV without these things.
+ Norton Internet Security. That software keeps my machine free of nasties.
+ My PNY 256 gb flash drive. I back up my work at least twice a day. (I don’t use the cloud as a backup since the flash drive is easier.)
+ FreeFileSync is the software I use for backing up my work onto my PNY flash drive.
+ The Aluratek disk duplicator. See the right hand column on my web site.
+ Samsung solid state hard drives. They’re the best. They’re getting cheaper by the minute. See the right hand column.
+ The Netgear Nighthawk AC 1900 router. See the right hand column.
+ My Canon G5X pocket camera — still the best around. I shot a Bat Mitzvah on the weekend with it and an auxiliary strobe. Shooting people in places where the natural light is awry, it’s best to use fill-in flash. Software in the camera does a good job of melding the flash and the natural light. I shot the two pictures below with it.
The Economist explains American policy
What are the candidates’ plans for America’s budget? A short essay.
FOR most of Barack Obama’s presidency, controlling the national debt, which spiked from 35% of GDP to over 70% after the recession, was a priority for Republicans. Democrats were less worried, but still saw the need for America to fix its long-run challenge: soaring spending on Medicare (public health insurance for the over-65s) and Social Security (public pensions). Mr Obama set up a doomed bipartisan commission with the task of doing just that. Yet in this election, the Republican ticket has abandoned its fiscal hawkishness. And the long run barely gets a look-in. What are the candidates’ fiscal policies?
Mr Trump eschews spending cuts: he has promised to protect spending on the aged. In fact, he wants to spend more on infrastructure, the army, veterans, education and child care. But he has adopted other Republican orthodoxies. He wants big tax-cuts for the rich and for firms, which would send the incomes of the top 1% of earners soaring by at least 10%. This would come at great expense: perhaps $7.2trn over a decade, according to the Tax Policy Centre, a think-tank (for comparison, America’s entire national debt is currently about $14 trillion). Fear not, say Mr Trump’s advisors: tax-cuts and deregulation will boost economic growth to 3.5-4%, up from an average of 2.1% since the end of the recession, boosting the Treasury’s coffers enough to pay for both lost revenues and spending increases. But that is a fantasy. America is growing slowly for two reasons: the working-age population is shrinking, and productivity growth is low. If, as he promises, Mr Trump were to crack down on immigration and to shred trade deals, both problems would get worse, not better. For that reason, Mr Trump’s fiscal policy would send the national debt soaring.
Ms Clinton has more sober ideas. She wants new spending totalling about $1.7trn over a decade. Some of this goes on infrastructure; most is spent on redistribution towards middle-earners and the poor. She would subsidise child care, and expand the child-tax credit, which shrinks parents’ income-tax bills. Having been pushed leftward on the issue by Bernie Sanders, she would guarantee that by 2021 households earning less than $125,000 pay no tuition fees at public universities in their home states. A host of other fiddly changes to the tax code would encourage firms to do things like share their profits with workers and hire apprentices. To pay for it all, Mrs Clinton would raise taxes on the rich. For example, she would impose an additional 4% tax on incomes over $5 million, and levy a fee on big banks.
The candidates, then, offer two completely contrasting plans. Mrs Clinton would keep the national debt more-or-less on its current path, raise overall taxes and spending, and redistribute from the rich downwards. Mr Trump would borrow vastly more than currently planned, cut taxes, and redistribute upwards (compared with current law). Neither would do much about America’s longer-term fiscal woes. Because the trust fund for Medicare runs dry only in 2028, and the Social Security fund only in 2034, this issue will only really grab politicians-and electorates-later.
Found in Bottom Line Health
Best election comment
Comey praises brave FBI agents who had to touch Anthony Weiner’s computer
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)-James Comey, the embattled director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, presided over a special ceremony on Friday evening to commend the brave F.B.I. agents who had to touch Anthony Weiner’s computer.
In awarding the commendations to the agents, whom Comey called “the bravest men and women this country has to offer,” the F.B.I. director criticized the political uproar that he said had overshadowed “their selfless acts of heroism.”
“These agents have performed far and beyond the call of duty,” a visibly angry Comey said. “I know we’re eleven days away from an election and tensions are running high, but we shouldn’t let that subtract in any way from what these brave agents did with their own hands.”
“Who among us could look at ourselves in the mirror and say, `I have what it takes to touch Anthony Weiner’s computer’?” Comey asked. “I know I sure as h*ll couldn’t.”
Harland Dorrinson, one of the agents who received the official commendation, acknowledged that touching Weiner’s computer was “the toughest mission I’ve been on” since signing up with the F.B.I. “I spent two weeks undercover in El Chapo’s drug cartel, and this was much scarier,” he said.
Harry Newton, who went with Susan to an exhibition on old Jerusalem at the Met. Here’s an amazing “box”:
Look carefully. There’s a gold bird perched on the top. Amazing:
Is anyone finding that the right hand side of this column is truncated on their email? Please email me if you’re encountering this problem.
Harry, how could you leave yourself so open?
You did it on purpose, no? Okay, I gotta do it.. Ahemm…
“Sir, you HAVE NO “Right” side to your column whatsoever!” Sorry.. I could not pass it up.
And yeah, the “Rich” are just going to sit right there an let Hillary tax them. YGBSM!
Where to start with the Economist “essay”? They got one thing right: social security is indeed public pension for old folks as is medicare public health insurance for old folks. But at the end where they mention “trust funds” related to these two welfare systems proves the writer’s incompetence. There are no such thing as “trust funds” – they are just meaningless journal entries. SS/Medicare is paid out of current taxes and borrowing, always has, always will, there is no magic “fund” from which monies can be withdrawn.
As for the political slant of the piece that is obvious. Just one example: the writer says Trump wants to “crack down on immigration”. That’s total bullshit. He wants to crack down on ILLEGAL immigration. Big difference these leftists never bother to realize because to a leftist there is no such thing as “illegal” immigration. For that reason you have to assume the entire piece is simply leftist opinion and does not reflect reality (just what they want reality to be).