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Are Analysts’ stock recommendations any good?. Boeing’s new competitor. This one will blow you away.

A hedge fund manager visited yesterday. He has studied analysts’ stock recommendations.

He found if you followed them, you would have earned 3% a year.

If you had done the exact opposite of what they recommended — sold when they said buy, and buy when they said sell — you would have earned 8% on your money.

The hedgie was “value” driven. As a result, he hasn’t done well in the last three years because the stockmarket switched to “momentum” (chiefly tech stocks). He said we’re still in a momentum market. Eventually we’ll return to value.

Meantime, a good list of momentum stocks is the portfolio of stocks I own — in the right hand column of my web site. Click here.

Guess what this is?

Looks remarkably like a Boeing 737. But it’s not. It’s a Comac C919 on its maiden flight on December 28, 2018.

Comac is the state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China, or Comac. The C919 is a narrowbody passenger plane with a capacity of about 170 that the company says already has more than 800 orders worldwide. It competes directly with the Boeing 737 Max 8. It is part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ambitious plan to build an aerospace industry from scratch and break Western companies’ grip on the skies.

The 737 is just under half of Boeing’s present sales (or was until the two recent crashes).

Would you own Boeing stock given the groundings and Comac’s lofty ambitions?

Here’s the last 10 years of Boeing stock (BA). Looks to me to be now way overpriced

Boeing’s crisis management has given abysmal a whole new meaning.

Last night the New York Times reported:

Weeks after a deadly crash involving a Boeing plane last October, company officials met separately with the pilot unions at Southwest Airlines and American Airlines. The officials said they planned to update the software for their 737 Max jets, the plane involved in the disaster, by around the end of 2018.

It was the last time the Southwest pilots union heard from Boeing, and months later, the carriers are still waiting for a fix. After a second 737 Max crashed, on Sunday in Ethiopia, United States regulators said the software update would be ready by April.

“Boeing was going to have a software fix in the next five to six weeks,” said Michael Michaelis, the top safety official at the American Airlines pilots union and a Boeing 737 captain. “We told them, `Yeah, it can’t drag out.’ And well, here we are.”

Want great ridiculous dreams?

Pop a Melatonin. They’re meant to put you to sleep. But some people (me included) achieve wondrous dreams.

We’re not sure if we’re asleep when we’re dreaming. The dreams are fun.

Should I open an dream analysis web site? Good startup?

Don’t leave your devices charging

When they’re 100% charged, use them or unplug them. That will prolong your battery life.

The latest Borowitz Report (It’s satire).

Betsy DeVos Suggests That Bribing Colleges Helps Students Learn Math

“Let’s say Jenna has a 470 verbal score, but she needs a 730 to get into Yale,” DeVos said. “How much will she have to pay to get her score changed?”

Dying wish

The doctor gives the 94-year old man the bad news. “You have only four more days to live.”

The man croaks, “You mean I’m going to die before I see the Mueller Report?”

America’s Got Talent

A man is auditioning.

“What can you do?”

“I can imitate a bird.”

“Forget it. We have a thousand bird acts every week. Come back when you have something else.”

The man shrugs, lifts his arms, flaps them and flies away.

HarryNewton
Harry Newton who was with granddaughter Sophie in Paris’ Tuileries Gardens where she performed magnificent acts of physical prowess — for a four-year old.

I shot this SLO-MO sequence on my iPhone 8 plus. I emailed the movie to my laptop. Apple’s software sent it as a “MOV” file which WordPress, the key software enabler of this blog, did not recognize and messed up in yesterday’s blog.

Ron Acher, a technology whiz and reader, suggested I convert the MOV video file to a MP4 file, which I did. Here it is. Neat:

To convert it, I used a free desktop converter from here.

Video is a much more fun than boring old photos. Apple’s iPhone also includes rudimentary video editing tools.

Ain’t technology wonderful?

I love those two jokes. Try them on your friends this weekend.