In Search of the Perfect Investment

Find one cockroach in a New York apartment and kill it.

Two days later his brother will appear. Kill it.

Then its other brother.

Cockroach stocks have recurring, irksome problems.

The classic cockroach stock begins when financials are delayed because of auditing “problems.”

You don’t want to own cockroach stocks because no stock can withstand the body blows of ongoing bad news.

I made a list:

+ Boeing. Negative articles on Boeing have appeared in every publication you can imagine, including, more recently, the Seattle Times and the New Yorker.

The Boeing analysis “understated the power of the new flight control system,” the Seattle Times article said. “When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document.” The Boeing analysis also “failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward.”

Boeing rushed to get the plane out, throwing caution to the wind. I can only imagine how many law suits Boeing’s negligence will produce.

+ Facebook. Face it. The regulators don’t like it and will find every reason to dislike it even more.

+ Dell. Dell sells more and more stuff and keeps losing money. How is this ever possible?

+ Wells Fargo. There’ll be more scandals out of this bank before it’s all over.

+ Tesla. Elon Musk is brilliant, but crazy. I love him. But my stomach can’t take the stock’s churning.

+ Deutsche Bank. It wants to merge with another big German bank. The regulators won’t allow it. Meantime, the press ferrets out juicy stories. From the New York Times:

As a developer, Donald Trump borrowed more than $2 billion from Deutsche Bank. Once he was president, employees were told not to utter his name.

President Trump’s financial ties with Deutsche Bank are now the subject of investigations by two congressional committees and the New York attorney general.

+ Ford. From Business Insider: Ford CEO Jim Hackett took home $17.7 million of compensation in 2018, up 6% year-over-year, despite the automaker’s profits dropping by more than 50%.

+ AT&T. My God. They’re a telephone company. All the pricey “creativity” they just bought — e.g. HBO — is walking out the door. Oy veh.

+ Brexit. I can’t predict this one. No one can. It looks grim for the pound. But it’s not obvious. I’m reading the New Market Wizards. Here’s a neat quote:

James Rogers said it perhaps most colorfully, “I just wait until there is money lying in the corner, and all I have to do is go over there and pick it up. I do nothing in the meantime.” In essence, by not wanting to trade, I had inadvertently transformed myself into a master of patience. By forcing myself to wait until there was a trade that appeared so compelling that I could not stand the thought of not taking it, I had vastly improved the odds.

+ Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoins disappear, get stolen, etc. Here’s a piece on “Why Bitcoin and Crypto Have No Future” published by Think Outside the Blox. Click here.

This is what you do with cockroach stocks. Put in an ultra low buy bid. And hope you get it, viz:

This wasn’t me at $6.31, the low. I’m not that smart, or lucky.

Tips

+ Turbotax is great for most people’s taxes. My friends love it.

+ When you highlight or take notes in Kindle (on your PC, your phone or your Kindle device) it pops up here: https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights. Totally brilliant.

+ Constant Contact is great for sending emails to PCs, laptops, Macs and smartphones. MailChimp is too hard.

+ Your fax line is a waste. When was the last time you sent or received a fax?

Housing prices are in freefall worldwide

I’d hoped to get $2 million on an apartment I just sold for $1,750,000. But I consider myself lucky. Friends are having open houses and no one is coming.

In Sydney, Australia a friend bought a place for $AUS5.8 milllion. A year later it’s back on the market for $AUS4.5 million is not selling.

One big change: Nobody wants “fixer-uppers.” No one has time.

To sell a house or an apartment, staging has become necessary, and expensive.

The value of real estate derives from its rent (and hence its profitability), less from its location.

The key variable in real estate is the price you buy it at.

Totally priceless corporate bonding exercise

Lawyers

On the first day of school, a first-grader handed his teacher a note from his mother.

The note read, ‘The opinions expressed by this child are not necessarily those of his parents.’

Harry Newton. Dueling grandparents: Susan and I took grandkids Sophie and Zoe to Notre Dame in Paris:

But her other grandmother, Georgia, took Sophie to the Ritz in London for afternoon tea (without the Queen):

Both photos were taken with an iPhone. I Photoshopped both by cutting their native size and sharpening them. Nothing else. If you want to take better photos, you’ll need this:

It’s a Nikon D850. The body alone costs $3100. Add a lens or two, you can easily spend $6,000+. But your pictures will be gorgeous. And your arm and your back will hate you. It’s not light. To buy one, click here. If you buy one, please buy one for me too.

Now I’m healthy, life is once again wonderful. Please tell all my friends: It’s not 1968. There’s no rioting in the streets and there’s no war in Vietnam.