In Search of the Perfect Investment

“We buy cheap real estate. We buy cheap because the price you pay is the key, and often only factor determining the success of the deal. Finally cheap real estate is coming onto the market.”

That was his rationale for starting a real estate fund.

The economy may be in a mess. But entrepreneurship is exploding. Yesterday I got pitched one real estate fund, four hedge funds and two new money managers.

Foreclosures are a mess, but not for all the new firms doing all the banks’ outsourced work.

CNBC has a new series “Tales of the Turnaround.” We’re hearing a remarkable number of stories of booming towns and industries. And the inevitable full planes and overcrowded, pricey hotels.

There’s the usual disconnect in the stockmarket. Technology doing great. Banks doing horribly. It’s hard to believe that stocks like Amazon and Netflix are not in some sort of bubble. Amazon closed last night at $164 with a P/E of 66. Netflix closed last night at $171, with a P/E of 68. Neither pay a dividend. And neither are growing anywhere near their P/E.

Amazon and Netflix are in nosebleed territory.

Betting on the FDA’s “timing” sucks. Words of serious wisdom from a reader (JimBobToo) yesterday:

Harry
I made a career in medical devices for 35 years dealing with FDA approvals and clearances and the lack thereof. I guarantee you that if you try to time stocks based on these deadlines, you will lose more often than you win. AND the loses tend to be “down 50-70 percent days right at the open of next day trading”. You can’t even get in to move your position; you are just tits up in a heart beat!

And to cap it off, Mannkind Corporation is down nearly 8% since I recommended it. Here’s the last five days. Mannkind is still a gamble, just a cheaper one.

Economists are a weird bunch. Politicians even more so. While the U.S. tries to spend its way out of the present recession, England is trying the exact opposite tack. Personally, I’d like to see both governments provide more guidance to industries they like — e.g. alternative energy, nuclear power, electric cars, etc. For now what England is doing with its government spending makes for interesting reading.

LONDON — The British government on Wednesday unveiled the country’s steepest public spending cuts in more than 60 years, reducing costs in government departments by an average of 19 percent, sharply curtailing welfare benefits, raising the retirement age to 66 by 2020 and eliminating hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs in an effort to bring down the bloated budget deficit.

Wednesday’s announcement of £83 billion, about $130 billion, in cuts by 2015 represents a big political gamble for Britain’s fledgling Conservative-led coalition government.

Britain’s public deficit is one of the highest among developed economies, running at 11.5 percent of total economic output, compared with 10.7 percent for the United States and 5.4 percent for Germany.

Mr. Osborne said that 490,000 public sector jobs would be lost over the next four years, some to attrition. At the same time, payments to the long-term unemployed who fail to seek jobs will be cut, he said, saving $11 billion a year. Additionally, he said, a new 12-month limit will be imposed on long-term jobless benefits, and measures will be taken to curb benefit fraud.

Mr. Osborne said an increase in the official retirement age to 66 from 65 would start in 2020 — four years sooner than planned — saving $8 billion a year. Britain has already said it will stop paying child benefit payments to people earning more than around $70,000 a year.

But while the government has sought to rein in welfare costs, Mr. Osborne announced that several politically sacred benefits for the elderly, including free eye tests, prescription drugs and bus passes, would remain.

Britain has about six million public sector jobs, about one fifth of all jobs in the economy, according to the Office for National Statistics. But it was not clear what the impact of shedding 490,000 of them — about 8 percent of the total — would have on unemployment. Mr. Osborne has continually said that the private sector will take up the slack, employing more people as the economy emerges from the doldrums.

You can read the entire New York Times piece here. This cutting of government spending won’t do  wonders for England’s economy. But it  may make England a little cheaper to to travel to.

BlackBerry versus the iPhone. Susan’s BlackBerry stopped receiving emails. Disaster of unfathomable proportions. Our marriage was at stake. Call in the IT Department (i.e. me). I called Verizon. It took 45 minutes on the phone to fix the problem. In contrast I did basically nothing to get my new iPhone synced to my PC.  iTunes did it all seamlessly and fast.

Why anyone would buy a BlackBerry with its lousy screen and horrible keyboard with a trackball that always gums up is beyond my tiny brain.

The key to getting both of them synched with Microsoft’s Outlook is to tell Outlook to leave your inbound email on your server. If you don’t, Outlook grabs them and erases them. Hence iPhone or BlackBerry can’t get to them, except when Outlook is turned off. Totally stupid. Outlook’s default should leave the messages  for a few days since everybody these days uses a PDA to read their incoming emails.

You get to this  in Outlook thus: Email settings/Change/More Settings/Advanced and then Delivery at the bottom of the page. Good idea to remove them from your server after 5 days. Don’t leave them permanently otherwise your server will clog and die.

Finally, you’ve learned something useful from this blog.

Riding the big wave in Alaska. A  glacier makes a big wave when it carves. Perfect for surfboarding.

Check this insane video out.  Click here.

Some things are not worth what you paid for them. When I was in trade publishing biz, a friend ran a magazine for the eye wear business. He told me of a trip to Italy visiting factories making eyeglass frames. His favorite story was of the factories making “designer” frames. Zillions of glasses would come of the production line to be dumped unceremoniously into boring boxes. In one corner stood a few ladies with stamping machines. They’d take a few of the generic frames, stamp a designer name onto the frame, then pack it in ornate velvet-lined boxes with fancy lettering. Thus,  “designer” eye glasses, $1.50 frames selling retail for  hundreds of dollars.

Internet to the rescue. Here’s a $15.95 frame from Zenni Optical.

Check them out.  Click here.

Goldman Sachs is rude. I asked for an apology for the huge screwup. See yesterday’s column — How Goldman Sachs “lost” me $142,314.

I received a FedEx envelope from Goldman which said, “I spoke with your assistant today. She asked that I send this information. Call me or have her call me and I can walk through the issue of the one capital call being reflected twice. Thank you. Scott Russell.”

Notice how their egregious, incompetent, dumb mistake of third-grade addition and subtraction has now become an “issue.” And no apology. The paperwork he sent was simply copies of monthly statements that we already had.

Another old person “joke.”
An older gentleman had an appointment to see the urologist who shared offices with several other doctors. The waiting room was filled with patients. As he approached the receptionist’s desk, he noticed that the receptionist was a large unfriendly woman who looked like a Sumo wrestler. He gave his name.

In a very loud voice, the receptionist said,”YES, I HAVE YOUR NAME HERE; YOU WANT TO SEE THE DOCTOR ABOUT IMPOTENCE, RIGHT?”

All the patients in the waiting room snapped their heads around to look at the very embarrassed man.

He recovered quickly, and in an equally loud voice replied, “NO, I’VE COME TO INQUIRE ABOUT A SEX CHANGE OPERATION, BUT I DON’T WANT THE SAME DOCTOR THAT DID YOURS.”

The room erupted in applause!

You probably can’t use it but:
Did you know that the Polish Sex Manual has only one page?

It says “In, Out, repeat as necessary”

Harry Newton who wonders why the family dog gets more attention from Susan than he does. This is Winnie on her new bed, bought for her by Susan who hasn’t, sadly, seen Winnie in months. Winnie lives in Portland, Oregon with Michael and Anne. I live in New York with Susan in another bed — an older one.  Winnie is cute?