In Search of the Perfect Investment

Several gurus think the market is overvalued. The Trump boomlet is over.

No one knows, of course.

But it’s fashionable to write stories like everyone else. No humble financial reporter wants to be outlier.

I have no idea.

I’m staying invested. But I’m keeping stop losses around 8%, for now. If one or several go crazy down, I’m out.

My friend Lucas dumped all his stocks. He told me he’d made enough money in the last few months.

Remember I told you about Matt Wood who’s young, ambitious and successful and into dollar cost averaging? Here are his favorite index funds: IVV, HDV, IWF, IDV, IJK.

Dollar cost averaging is a silly name for simply taking part of your salary each month and buying your chosen stocks/index funds — irrespective of where the market is or what the “gurus” are saying. It really works for young people: Gives them a retirement cache. Teaches them about investing. Highly recommended for your kids.

Facebook optimism

Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein named Facebook as his firm’s top internet stock pick for 2017 in a note distributed to clients on Monday.

Here are Oppenheimer’s three key reasons to be bullish on Facebook this year:

+ Spending on ads increased during the 2016 holiday season. Oppenheimer sees a potentially “substantial upside to pricing” for Facebook ads, as spend increased 202% year-over-year during the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday in 2016.

+ More people used Facebook leading up to the U.S. presidential election. Oppenheimer cited comScore data that shows Facebook usage increasing by 8% during Q4 vs. a 1% increase in Q3. By contrast, Twitter saw a 30% decline in usage in November vs. its July 2016 peak. “As a result, we now estimate that FB needs to increase monetization by 16% Q/Q to reach 4Q Street estimates, vs. 11% in 3Q, which seems quite achievable,” Helfstein wrote.

+ Instagram is growing. The app reached 600 million monthly active users in December, with 75-80% of those users outside of the U.S. Helfstein attributed Instagram adding 100 million users in six months to its introduction of Instagram Stories and live video.

For the full report from Business Insider, click here.

Prism glasses are a miracle

You get old. Everything starts to go. The knees. The hips.

So far, the main thing going seems to be my eyes. My right eye has a macula pucker, which makes my right eye not too clear. Fortunately, the brain reads my left eye’s better image. The annoying part is that my right eye has a weak muscle and produces double vision. One image from one eye is higher than the other. After much research and several eye doctors, I found I can solve this in one of three ways:

+ Resting/napping. Tired is not good. Being rested is better.

+ Have an operation to fix the muscle. 90% chance of success.

+ Prism lenses for my glasses. I went to the eye doctor, got the prescription and just bought a pair — from www.eyebuydirect.com, my favorite. The result is miraculous. You’re looking at one happy camper. My new prism glasses do not look like the bottom of coke bottles. They look normal. Sadly, the wearer isn’t.

Amazon is doing great. Apple is driving me nuts:

Amazon’s Alexa was everywhere at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the largest electronics show. Yahoo Finance called it CES 2017’s breakout star and noted Alexa-compatible air purifiers, self-driving cars, even refrigerators. Huawei unveiled its Mate 9 smartphone, which it says is the first to come with Alexa pre-installed. Hyundai is integrating Alexa into its self-driving car, the Ioniq, so drivers can turn on their car with a voice command. Mattel introduced Aristotle, a voice-activated baby monitor that answers both parents’ and kids’ questions. And Whirlpool (WHR) announced many of its smart appliances will respond to Alexa commands starting in “early 2017.”

Amazon is encouraging everyone and their uncle to incorporate Alexa into everything.

How useful (or long-lasting) all this will be remains to be seen. For now, Amazon sold zillions of Alexa Echos during Christmas. I bought an Echo Dot, the cheapest way to get Alexa. For me, it’s not especially useful. It tells me the weather and plays similar music to what I asked for. Sadly, it will not access my iPhone’s calendar or contracts. But it does a great job finding nearby phone numbers for the wrong people. My son Michael finds Alexa more useful:

Primarily, it gets us away from our screens when we’re with the kids. As we have it setup in the kitchen / dining room, we use it when we’re all hanging out there (which is often).

So even if I am just selecting music to play through our Sonos, I previously had to go to my phone. I’d often get distracted by other things and just generally be on the phone yet again. I can now do that all with voice, which is awesome. Last night during dinner, I changed the music, changed the volume and set a reminder all without touching a phone or interrupting the flow of dinner. Good stuff. Need less screen time.

Then it has a number of usual features, all of which are great hands-free

+ Getting the weather in the morning

+ Checking our commute.

+ Getting the latest news from NPR

+ Setting timers for cooking.

There are a ton of other things it can do if you have a “smart” house, which we don’t have.  But for what I am getting out of it now, it is worth the $39 no doubt. (He got a deal on the Echo Dot. I paid $49.95.)

In fact, I’d take a second one. If you don’t want to return yours, send it our way. We will use it upstairs.

Also, there is a ton of potential. Amazon is updating it all the time.

I mention all this because he Economist’s latest issue has a big report:

In sum, voice has made great strides. Amazon has Alexa. Google has “OK Google.” Apple has Siri, which does a fantastic job of finding phone numbers and events on my iPhone, which Alexa can’t do. (Shucks.)

Download the app Dragon Dictation to your iPhone. You’ll be surprised at how accurately it turns what you say into text. It’s super useful for “writing” quick notes to yourself, for dictating a memo or email while you’re driving.

You owe it to yourself to try out Siri, Dragon Dictate and Alexa. This whole voice control thing is becoming increasingly important, and actually useful.

I just asked Alexa for the time in Sydney, Australia where my sister lives. Asking Alexa (or Siri) is a lot easier than typing my question into Google.

Life is changing. I’m guessing Alexa is becoming a growing revenue stream for Amazon. Kudos to Jeff.

This is called phishing. It’s what caught John Podesta of the DNC and led to hacking all his emails.

I get an email like this every day.

Please don’t respond to fishy phishing emails like this one. She didn’t know my name or my email address. Two big alarm bells.

I think this is funny. From Conde Nast Traveler:

Emirates Flight 863 from Muscat, Oman to Dubai was canceled on Sunday before a single passenger boarded, after baggage handlers came across an unexpected stowaway in the Boeing 777-300ER’s cargo hold: a live-and seemingly lost-snake. Who knew Samuel L. Jackson was clairvoyant?

The Dubai-based airline was quick to confirm the encounter in a statement shared with local newspaper the Khaleej Times, adding, “We apologize for the inconvenience caused.” Engineering and cleaning teams responded immediately to clear the plane, after which it reentered service. It has not yet been revealed what species the snake is, what became of it, or how it got there in the first place.

We regret that we’re nearly all out of Snakes on a Plane references, because — believe it or not — this isn’t the first time this has happened. In fact, just two months ago, a three-foot-long snake alarmed first-class passengers on a domestic Aeromexico flight when it slithered out of an overhead bin mid-flight, before dropping to the ground. No one was hurt and the snake was taken away by animal control services upon landing in Mexico City.

In a separate incident last summer, another similar crisis was averted when a man was detained at security before boarding a Garuda Indonesia flight in Jakarta for hiding ten baby pythons…in his pants. (I don’t make this stuff up.)

Beijing Hotel Brochure. I have no idea if this is real. But it’s truly great.

Getting There:
Our representative will make you wait at the airport. The bus to the hotel runs along the lake shore. Soon you will feel pleasure in passing water. You will know that you are getting near the hotel, because you will go round the bend. The manager will await you in the entrance hall. He always tries to have intercourse with all new guests.

The Hotel:
This is a family hotel, so children are very welcome. We of course are always pleased to accept adultery. Highly skilled nurses are available in the evenings to put down your children. Guests are invited to conjugate in the bar and expose themselves to others. But please note that ladies are not allowed to have babies in the bar.  We organize social games, so no guest is ever left alone to play with them self.

The Restaurant:
Our menus have been carefully chosen to be ordinary and unexciting.

At dinner, our quartet will circulate from table to table, and fiddle with you.

Your Room:
Every room has excellent facilities for your private parts.  In winter, every room is on heat. Each room has a balcony offering views of outstanding obscenity!  You will not be disturbed by traffic noise, since the road between the hotel and the lake is used only by pederasts.

Bed:
Your bed has been made in accordance with local tradition. If you have any other ideas please ring for the chambermaid. Please take advantage of her.

She will be very pleased to squash your shirts, blouses and underwear. If asked, she will also squeeze your trousers.

Above All:
When you leave us at the end of your holiday, you will have no hope.

You will struggle to forget it.

Harry Newton, who tore up the tennis court yesterday with his new prism glasses. I can feel it in my knees. It took me months to discover prisms. They weren’t mentioned on the web as a “solution” to diplopia (double vision). My obsession and perseverance won out in the  end. I like obsession.