In Search of the Perfect Investment

I feel positive. I’ve bought a little stock recently, including more AYX, CCI and TPL.

I’ve spent time on some capital calls, and rustling up K-1s for the mass of real estate syndicates (both commercial and residential) I’m in.

I wish Amazon would fall, so I could buy more. Every news out of the company impresses — including that Whole Food (an Amazon sub.) could grab 110 Sears stores.

I love Apple Pay. I gave up carrying a credit card in Hawaii. I just carried my iPhone. It’s much easier to use Apple Pay than a credit card. you can’t speak on a credit card or find directions to the closest beach.

Apple stock is now over $200. How did that ever happen?

I shorted Boeing

I don’t like shorting cockroach stocks. I prefer to just ignore them — not own them.

But Boeing was tempting. It’s fulfilling the classic definition of cockroach. Every day another one cockroach appears. Today I read:

Shareholders filed a lawsuit in a Chicago court, alleging that the company “effectively put profitability and growth ahead of airplane safety and honesty,” according to Reuters.

I suspect it’s going lower. Who’s going to buy the flawed 737 Max? Not me. I’m never going to fly in it, either.

Talk about a tempting short…look at GE. What an amazing disaster for one of America’s erstwhile most admired companies:

Meanwhile Lyft needs a serious lift. I suspect unicorn IPOs are going to have some problems.

Too much hype always ends badly. (You can quote me.)

Don’t do stupid

Unfamiliar places are the most dangerous. Like airplanes. Writes my friend Harry P.:

Coming out of the bathroom, I half turned to close the door. The plane must have been tilted a bit. I took a couple of steps, and reached for a wall to brace myself. Unfortunately, there was no wall, just a curtain which I literally flew through. I landed on my bottom, my hip, and bumped my head on the floor.

I could walk with assistance, but couldn’t get in or out of my seat without help for the remaining 7+ hours of the flight.

Fortunately, my only injury was a severe hip pointer and a compressed fracture of a vertebra on the opposite side of the side on which I fell.

He got taken off the plane in a stretcher. They didn’t check him into the local loonie bin. But should have, for being stupid.

You should be getting higher Internet speeds, also

My friend moved to Wendell, NC and got a fiber landline from AT&T. Here’s his speed:

He pays around $100 a month for this speed and TV.

He says his streaming from Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, etc. is stupendous. Good quality.

And he can watch what he likes when he wants to — not when they force him to.

His speeds are the speeds you should be getting. This is what I’m getting from Verizon FiOS:

You can figure your own speed out here. 

Call your local Internet provider and kibbutz them into giving you higher speeds. You deserve higher speeds. You’re important.

Software programmers have their own agenda

If you’re no longer receiving my daily blog by email, know I’m not dead.

Just the insane software I’ve been using has been dropping my subscribers for weird reasons.

Suffice if you’d like to receive this column by email — when I write it — intermittently, send me an email or fill in the box at the top of the left hand column.

Why do we suddenly hate immigrants?

Talk that our country is “full” really irritates me — an immigrant.

I’ve never taken a nickel from the Federal Government (or any local or state government). And one year I wrote the IRS a check for $40 million. (They never sent a “Thank You.”)

I just read:

Of the 122 Americans who won a Nobel Prize from 2000 to 2018, 34 were immigrants. Four of the five Americans who won Nobels in 2016 were born outside the country. Of the 41 Fortune 500 companies created since 1985, eight had an immigrant founder.

Not bad for rapists, murderers or whatever else we’re meant to be.

I get emails

This afternoon, this nonsense arrived:

+ Mrs. Feeney shouted from the kitchen, ‘Is that you I hear spittin’ in the vase on the mantel piece?

“No,” he answered, “but I’m gettin’ closer.”

+ Finnegan: My wife has a terrible habit of staying up ’til two o’clock in the morning. I can’t break her out of it.

Keenan: What on earth is she doin’ at that time?

Finnegan: Waitin’ for me to come home.

Harry Newton, who’s tripping off this evening with Susan to Hudson Yards — the biggest real estate development ever in the U.S.

Hudson Yards, New York City. $25 billion. That thing in the middle is a sculpture you can climb.