In Search of the Perfect Investment

I don’t deserve this. At some stage it will turn and drop.

I have cash on the side to buy more.

Some of this rise is because it’s emotional. We dodged the Iran bullet.

Some of it is because because there’s good news — like Apple’s.

I bought a little more ENPH (see below). Now is the time to play tennis.

Technology is the problem with predictions.

+ The fed is obsessed with 2% inflation.

+ Economists measure GDP by dollars.

+ We measure wealth by dollar income.

+ We measure the strength of the economy with today’s employment numbers (which are good).

Or we used to, when I went to Economics school. Oh… so long ago.

Item: I visited Home Depot yesterday:

+ I bought four LED bulbs. Each gives off the light of a 60 watt incandescent bulb, but uses only 9.5 watt of electricity. Hardly inflationary.  If the world goes LED (which it will), we won’t need so many power plants, so much coal, etc.

+ I checked myself out. I scanned my stuff. I watched my stuff magically appear on the screen. Then I paid with my MasterCard. No human. No job. I do my own stuff without people. Book airlines. Do banking. Deposit checks.

Where were the HD cashiers? They became salespeople. And they upsold me on stuff I didn’t intend to buy, but now “needed.”

I hope they all own shares. Here’s the past five years:

Other “minor” tech developments that are upsetting what I learned in Economics school:

+ The Internet, the laptop and the cloud. We can now work anywhere, and do our work faster and serve our customers better.

Hats off to former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani. He commented the stone age did not end because we ran out of stones; It ended because we invented new tools. America now pumps more oil than Saudi. Have you ever loaded an app on your phone from Saudi? Me neither.

The inverter market

Think of all the stuff that converts what comes out of solar panels into electricity.

Three companies are key, according to a recent Goldman Sachs piece — ENPH, SEDG and GNRC. They like ENPH.

I especially like GNRC, which also makes emergency generators, like this one  at our hotel in Anguilla:

Australian fires

You can help them out at at the new Australian Bushfire Relief Fund. Click here.

National Geographic wrote a piece How can you help Australia?

For the National Geographic piece, click here.

Last night Trevor Noah suggested these sites:

The new world of autocrats

Survival is everything. Why you saw the Ayatollah back down.

+ Venezuela: Mr Maduro has weathered the sanctions and Mr Guaidó’s efforts to peel the army away from his regime. Some 5 million Venezuelans have fled the country and millions more are poor and hungry. The economy has contracted by an astounding 70% since Mr Maduro took office in 2013. But helped by Cuba and Russia, and the lifting of socialist price and exchange controls, he is achieving a precarious semi-stability.

+ Iran: They backed down, fearful that the U.S. could do this to them:

+ Oman: A friend is vacationing there. It’s warmer than England where he lives. This stuff  from Wikipedia:

Oman is an absolute monarchy, with the Sultan’s word having the force of law. The judiciary branch is subordinate to the Sultan. According to Oman’s constitution, Sharia law is one of the sources of legislation. Sharia court departments within the civil court system are responsible for family-law matters, such as divorce and inheritance.

The country has no system of checks and balances, and thus no separation of powers. All power is concentrated in the Sultan, who is also chief of staff of the armed forces, Minister of Defence, Minister of Foreign Affairs and chairman of the Central Bank.

I pray my friend doesn’t get a parking ticket while on his vacation in Oman.

Other autocracies include the absolute monarchies  of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Eswatini (in Africa) and Brunei, and dictatorships (such as Turkmenistan, Eritrea, Belarus, Russia and North Korea) and then there are the emerging ones of Hungary, Brazil, Poland and much of South America.

In all the world has 50 dictatorships. For a full sick-making list, click here.

The new Subaru 2020 Outback XT

Rave reviews. My favorite car just got much better. Picked up some ideas from Tesla.

This is the color I like too.  I own this color in a 2015 model, which I love. For the WSJ’s review, click here.

I have two bathroom scales

One showed I weighed 184.6 lbs. The other showed I weighed 179.5 lbs.

Mmmm. Which should I believe?

Favorite three New Yorker cartoons

And this one is specially picked for my son Michael:

Dietary supplements

Some work. Some don’t. Some have horrible side effects, like thinning your blood.

I prefer to stay away from them.

The FDA doesn’t regulate them, so you’re often not sure what’s  on the label is what’s in the bottle. Or the factory is clean. Or anything. You know my feelings about Prevagen, the brain supplement from jelly fish, which don’t have brains.  Prevagen proves you can sell anything with enough advertising.

Some people swear by dietary supplments. I’m tempted to go into the sugar pill placebo business. Different colors for different ailments.

For me, exercise, sleep, simple food and lots of sugar work just fine. My kids will love the reference to sugar.

— see you Monday. Harry Newton