My friend has just driven from California to New York through Texas.
Based on the trucks schlepping pipes through Texas, the country is booming.
Based on the full trucks on every road, the country is booming.
And today… the market is touching its record high.
Here’s the year to date in SPX, Dow and Nasdaq. Impressive?
When will it go down? Well, it’s already gone down. And the YTD movement is basically catching up to December’s peaks.
Yet, a friend is 100% in cash because he fears a 2008 crash. He’s been out for ten years.
Another friend simply ignores the market, but invests his monthly savings in an S&P index fund.
When my friend buys a high priced stock, he simultaneously buys a PUT. The price of the put is all he can lose if the stock goes down.
His broker’s manager called my friend and ripped him for having only two stocks in his portfolio, one of which was TPL. Hence no diversification.
My friend said “Have you checked the price of TPL?”
The broker gasped, dropped all discussion of “diversification” and asked my friend “If it was not too late to invest in TPL?:
Some of my friends just trade options.
Everyone does his own thing. It’s critical you find your own investing style.
Personally, I’m in this for the long-term. I’m unlearning my tendency to panic.
I do like today’s market. But then I may not like tomorrow’s. But I won’t panic and sell.
I updated our portfolio today with a couple more buys.
Here’s proof positive
The top screen is my 32 inch Samsung running on Verizon FiOS TV. The bottom screen is my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon streaming the same CNBC over YouTube TV.
Yesterday I wrote:
Video streamed over the Internet delivers the same quality as cable and satellite TV.
Video streamed over the Internet is replacing cable and satellite TV.
YouTube TV is the closest to cable but it has HUGE advantages over cable:
+ It costs much less.
+ It is not locked to one house. You can watch it in your holiday home, in your Airbnb, VRBO rental etc. You can watch it anywhere there’s Internet.
+ Six of us can watch it simultaneously — without the need for renting multiple cable boxes.
+ You can watch streaming video directly on your laptop, or iPad. Or on your TV through Apple TV, or Roku, etc. They’re one-time charges. No monthly rental for cable boxes.
+ You can watch your favorite shows whenever you want to. Think of YouTube TV as a gigantic cloud for TV shows.
YouTube TV which costs around $50 a month doesn’t get every channel — though it has all the important ones, like the networks, CNBC, Fox and The Tennis Channel. It doesn’t have HBO and of course Netflix. That’s where Amazon Prime and Netflix come in. If you subscribe to Netflix and YouTube TV, you’ll be paying $66 a month — much cheaper than Spectrum or Verizon FiOS which is fixed to one location.
The good news in all this is that Internet speeds are skyrocketting. I just got a pitch from Spectrum for “speeds up to 940 Mbps.” You can watch a lot of movies simultaneously at that speed.
There are huge benefits:
Susan can watch one channel. I can watch another. We’re not limited by what’s on TV that moment. We can watch old shows. We can watch shows we fell asleep in. We can rewind present shows.
One tip: If you’re watching on a laptop, or an iPad, plug in some headphones. They don’t have to be decent. Even Amazon’s cheap ones will sound better than the speakers in your device.
The bottom line: It’s not just saving huge gobs of money. It’s all about the huge convenience of the new world of steaming Internet TV. Think about the hotel you just stayed at that didn’t have your favorite channel. They can now.
One year not worn and it’s out
If you haven’t worn it in the past 12 months, give it to charity.
If you won’t wear it more than three times, don’t buy it.
We all have too many things in our closet.
I just go rid of suits I haven’t worn in 20 years. And they weren’t exciting then. And they’re much too baggy now.
Cuba is about to be out
If you haven’t booked your trip to Cuba, skip it.
Trump is tightening travel restrictions. Read more here.
Hysterical. Herman Cain opts out
“Without getting too specific about how big a pay cut this would be, let’s just say I’m pretty confident that if your boss told you to take a similar pay cut, you’d tell him where to go,” Cain said in an opinion column on the blog site The Western Journal. No mention of the virtues of “government service.”
Newspaper profiles
+ The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
+ The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.
+ The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country, and who are very good at crossword puzzles.
+ USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand The New York Times.
+ The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could find the time and if they didn’t have to leave Southern California to do it.
+ The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country.
+ The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
+ The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
+ The Chicago Tribune is read by people that are in prison that used to run the state, & would like to do so again, as would their constituents that are currently free on bail.
+ The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.
+ The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for.
+ The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.
+ The Seattle Times is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something to wrap it in.
Harry Newton, who hasn’t read the Mueller Report and has no intention of reading it. I’d rather binge-watch Netflix or binge-play tennis. As far as I can see, the Mueller won’t change anything. Niente. Nothing. We won’t get a new president. And Washington won’t tackle the nation’s important unfinished business — like immigration reform, drug overdosing, healthcare for more and infrastructure fixes. Check out China. Here are two recently built Chinese bridges. the first one is 16.6 miles long. The second is the longest bridge in the world. It spans 102.4 miles.
Meanwhile we desperately need a new rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey. The pair we use every day to bring commuters in and out of Manhattan were built between 1904 and 1908 by the Pennsylvania Railroad to allow its trains to reach Manhattan. They opened for passenger service in late 1910. I bet they’re getting old.
