In Search of the Perfect Investment

Old ways of picking stocks: Value; dividend, cash flow, products you like (viz Peter Lynch), breakthrough products (e.g. biotech).

New ways of picking stocks: scaleability and buzzability. My new theories. Explanation:

+ Scaleability means can it grow fast. In the old days to grow you needed factories, retail stores, warehouses. They all took time to build. We don’t have time. We have impatience. The only way to grow ultra-fast today is the cloud. That’s a big reason for my love for Amazon. It leads in the cloud. Salesforce (CRM) does its thing in the cloud. When Microsoft embraced the cloud, it took off.

+ Buzzability. What’s got the media’s attention. What is Cramer and others (like me) obsessed by? What can they fill time on air talking about? What I can write about in this blog? Technology that’s going to change the world — the Internet, the cloud, cell phone apps, etc.

I make exception to “single” hot technology companies — like Dropbox, Box, Survey Monkey… Unless I can see the possible explosion of products on their platform, I typically pass. This is my call. And I agonize over it a lot.

There’s a third element:

+ Management Charisma and Creativity. There are some CEOs that play well on TV — Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Tim Cook, Reed Hastings.  There are some that don’t.

Yesterday was beautiful. Today is shaping just fine. I’m guessing Square will shortly hit $100. Amazon is already over $2,000 again.

Honeywell does well for us

Here’s the last two years:

Honeywell just declared a 10% higher dividend at 82 cents a share. HON has done well for us. It’s a very dynamic technology company with a lot going for it, including the upcoming spinoff of Garrett, which will be listed as GTX.

You can read more on Honeywell here and here. 

Don’t do stupid

+ Don’t fall backwards off a treadmill. A friend did, destroying his shoulder, which can’t be repaired. It’s hurt his tennis.

+ Don’t walk across the road when the lights change in your favor. Some idiot will run the red light. I watch idiots every night run red lights outside our building. There are no police, no tickets, nothing. Just accidents.

+ Please change all your passwords today — those for your email, for your bank and for your credit card accounts.

Don’t forget to change your passwords every six months. Your email address and my email address and their passwords are all available for purchase on the Internet’s so-called “dark web.” That’s the place crooks go to buy email addresses they can use to blackmail you.

I’m the victim of a blackmail attempt. Yesterday I received a long email asking for $3,000 in bitcoins or they’d release an incriminating explicit video of me doing something awful. The threat is disconcerting because they have my email address and an old password.

I did my usual thing. I panicked. I dropped everything and checked around. The consensus is that the blackmail threat is spam. But I’m not certain. And I don’t like being blackmailed. Anyone had this problem?

Here’s a piece on the web  that addressed Is the porn blackmail scam real? Click here.

The article contains these words :

We strongly recommend a password manager like Dashlane or 1Password , which will automatically check your passwords to see if they have been revealed in a breach and help you create unique, secure ones for every site.

Here’s another later one. Click here.

China is catching up

Five years ago China had only two of the world’s largest publicly traded tech companies, while the U.S. had nine. Today, China has nine of the top 20 — Alibaba, Tencent, Ant Financial, Baidu, Xiaomi, Didi, JD.com, Meituan and Toutiao — and the U.S. has 11.

Twenty years ago, China had none.

Email is suddenly messing up

Some of my blog doesn’t get delivered to gmail addresses. An email from my banker took two days to go from mid-town to me on the upper west side — a 30 minute walk.

I am checking reasons. But, so far, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.

Suffice, follow my motto: CHECK. CHECK. CHECK.

Good news: The phone still works. Even some cellphones.

I get robocalls on my iPhone.

I block the number each I hang up on them. That does me absolutely no good. They call from another number.

My friends answer “Unknown” calls, then immediately hang up on them.

Here’s a PC Magazine article that might help. Click here.  

My favorite weekly read

It’s the obituary in the Economist. The column is written by Ann Wroe, the Economist’s obituaries editor and arguably the best writer on that wonderful magazine. She has an amazing knack of assuming the voice of the person she is writing about; she always writes the obit from their point of view. This can be controversial (e.g. when she did Osama bin Laden, and people complained it made him seem human). But it’s super great in this obituary of Johnny Kingdom.

This is her latest column, which I especially love:

You can read her obituary on Johnny Kingdom here.  Enjoy.

Harry Newton, who doesn’t write on this blog about the charities he supports. Assessing their effectiveness is very complex. Hence, the expression, faith, hope and charity. Just remember my Number One Rule; Nobody listens, unless you write the checks. And even then you’d better have an ironclad written agreement. Or run your own charity.