In Search of the Perfect Investment

I’m visiting these two, Zoe and Sophie. I haven’t seen them since March. It’s nice to watch them grow.

Our stocks continue to climb, despite stock analyst reports telling me the economy is awful, unemployment is high and  tech stocks are way overpriced.  And now some analysts predict the market will tank if the Democrats win.

My take is simple: There’s oodles of good news around — from an approaching vaccine, to a housing construction boom, to a remarkably painless opening of the economy, albeit with new rules on social distancing. And there’s my eyes — I watch the trucks on the roads and the highways. They’re moving a lot of stuff.

I’ve made my life in technology since 1969 when I graduated business school and became editor of The Knowledge Industry Report and went on to start ten technology magazines in networking, open telecommunications, computer telephony, imaging, etc.. My job was to guide hundreds of thousands of readers through the explosion of technologies, hopefully to pick the ones that were to last and which could make all of them rich beyond their wildest dreams.

But, I’ve never seen like the last six months. As the pandemic descended on us, zillions of us got hellishly creative. We got to work inventing new ways of working  and new technologies to keep us working — video meetings, cloud sharing, new software, and new artificial intelligence to move us faster forward.

The best place to wax enthusiastic is bandwidth. I transmitted my first article at 300 bits per second.  That was  the early 1970s. Now, 50 years later, I’m on a fiber line the thickness of a human hair that’s transmitting and receiving one gigabit per second. That’s 3.3 million times as fast. But wait, researchers have just sent 178 terabits over the same single strand of fiber coming into my house. That 178,000 faster.

To explain, a gigabit is a thousand million bits per second. A terabit is a million million bits per second.

178 terabits is  fast enough to download the entire Netflix library in under a second. No one wants to do that. What they want is high definition video conferencing wherever they choose to locate their business. And they want 5G wireless speeds that can do that and more: In theory, 5G will reach speeds that are 20 times faster than 4G LTE which is what we have today. 4G LTE has a peak speed of one gigabit per second; 5G could theoretically achieve speeds of 20 gigabits per second. There’s a lot of remote equipment you can monitor and manage — from oil pipelines to fields of vegetables. There’s lots of businesses you can run remotely.

And lots of new businesses to invest in. Snowflake which makes software for storing and managing cloud data stored in data warehouses, has just filed for an IPO. Ticker symbol SNOW.

In its S-1 filing, Snowflake revealed that its revenue grew 138% in Q4 of last year, 148% in Q1 2020, and 122% in Q2 2020. Sales through the first half of this year amount to $242 million, nearly as much as the $265 million it took in for all of 2019. The company is losing money on all these sales. Last year, Snowflake booked a net loss of $348.5 million, and losses so far this year total $171.3 million. But who cares. Lots of big companies with big and rising stock prices are losing money also.

I rushed to Snowflake’s web site. This is how it described its business:

Conventional data platforms and big data solutions struggle to deliver on their fundamental purpose: to enable any user to work with any data, without limits on scale, performance or flexibility. Whether you’re a data analyst, data scientist, data engineer, or any other business or technology professional, you’ll get more from your data with Snowflake.

To achieve this, we built a new data platform from the ground up for the cloud. It’s designed with a patented new architecture to be the centerpiece for data pipelines, data warehousing, data lakes (whatever they are), data application development, and for building data exchanges to easily and securely share governed data. The result? A platform delivered as a service that’s powerful but simple to use. …

Snowflake’s cloud data platform supports a multi-cloud strategy, including a cross-cloud approach to mix and match clouds as you see fit. Snowflake is available globally on AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft) and Google Cloud Platform. With a common and interchangeable code base, Snowflake delivers advantages such as global data replication, which means you can move your data to any cloud in any region, without having to re-code your applications or learn new skills.

I”m thoroughly intrigued (but don’t quite understand it all). Hence I signed up to join an online demo  on Thursday morning. I’m psyched.

Which brings me to my keys for choosing stocks. (Readers have asked). Here, in excruciatingly simple terms, are my stock-picking secrets:

+ Understand what the company does and why it will succeed.

+ Make sure the company’s technology is instantly scaleable — without the need for building pricey, physical factories.

+ Check that the company’s finances are growing fast steadily — those two words don’t sound good together, but you get the idea.

+ Figure that there’ll be enough buzz (on TV, in the financial press) about the company to get everyone excited — even if they don’t understand the full minutiae of what the company actually does.

I don’t understand exactly what Snowflake does, but I’m sufficiently pumped to want to learn more.

I’ll report back after my Thursday online demo conference.

Don’t do stupid

+ Friends are still falling down stairs. They forget to hold the handrail. Other friends forget to turn on the light when they go the bathroom in the middle of the night.

+ Get the latest flu shot. You do not want to suffer from both the flu and Covid-19 in the fall. That would be really stupid. Apparently only 40% of us get the flu shot. Read more at the CDC site. Click here.

+ Don’t leave your car keys in the ignition or your wireless keys in your car. You’ll flatten your battery. Been there, done that.

+ A friend punched a hole in a tennis ball to accommodate his father’s walker. Sadly, he held the ball in his hand while he punched it with a knife. He also punched his hand and now he needs a tetanus shot.

+ Put a knife down the center of what they give you at dinner. Save one half for tomorrow. Portion control is the essence of keeping your weight low.

Technology quirks

+ Windows often updates itself on your laptop. Sadly, that often affects the devices you’re connected to, like scanners. The latest Windows 10 update destroyed my connection to my ultra-reliable Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner. Fortunately Fujitsu’s excellent tech support walked me through the solution.

+ YouTubeTV works seamlessly with Apple TV and your local TV set. You do not need Comcast or DirecTV or Verizon. You need a speedy Internet connection. I’ve been watching YouTube TV on a 65 inch TV set. Looks as good as satellite or cable, but is a lot cheaper.

Now to politics

I’m not in favor of giving Trump a second four years. I’ve been writing words for weeks. But frankly, the Washington Post has just done a far better job than I ever could:

Opinion | A second Trump term might injure the democratic experiment beyond recovery

Part one of a series of editorials on the damage President Trump has caused — and the danger he would pose in a second term.

AFTER HE is nominated at a pared-down Republican convention next week (that’s now this week), President Trump will make this argument to the American people: Things were great until China loosed the novel coronavirus on the world. If you reelect me, I will make things great again.

Seeking reelection in the midst of the worst public health crisis and sharpest economic downturn of our lifetimes, this may, realistically, be the only argument left to him. But, fittingly for a president who has spoken more than 20,000 lies during his presidency, it rests on two huge falsehoods.

One is that the nation, his presidency and, above all, Mr. Trump himself are innocent victims of covid-19. In fact, his own negligence, ignorance and malpractice turned what would have been a daunting challenge for any president into a national disaster.

The other is that there was anything to admire in his record before the virus struck. It is true that the economic growth initiated under President Barack Obama had continued, at about the same modest rate. Mr. Trump achieved this growth by ratcheting up America’s deficit and long-term debt to record levels, with a tax cut that showered benefits on the wealthy.

But beyond the low unemployment rate he gained and lost, history will record Mr. Trump’s presidency as a march of wanton, uninterrupted, tragic destruction. America’s standing in the world, loyalty to allies, commitment to democratic values, constitutional checks and balances, faith in reason and science, concern for Earth’s health, respect for public service, belief in civility and honest debate, beacon to refugees in need, aspirations to equality and diversity and basic decency — Mr. Trump torched them all.

Four years ago, after Mr. Trump was nominated in Cleveland, we did something in this space we had never done before: Even before the Democrats had nominated their candidate, we told you that we could never, under any circumstances, endorse Donald Trump for president. He was, we said, “uniquely unqualified” to be president.

“Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together,” we warned. “His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.”

The nation has indeed spent much of the past three-plus years fretting over whether that experiment could survive Mr. Trump’s depredations. The resistance from some institutions, at some times, has been heartening. The depth of the president’s incompetence, which even we could not have imagined, may have saved the democracy from a more rapid descent.

But the trajectory has been alarming. The capitulation of the Republican Party has been nauseating. Misbehavior that many people vowed never to accept as normal has become routine.

A second term might injure the experiment beyond recovery.

And so, over the coming weeks, we will do something else we have never done before: We will publish a series of editorials on the damage this president has caused — and the danger he would pose in a second term. And we will unabashedly urge you to do your civic duty and vote: Vote early and vote safely, but vote.

“I alone can fix it,” Mr. Trump proclaimed at his convention four years ago.

How has that turned out?

His campaign, as our columnist Michael Gerson has noted, was based on the premises that Mr. Obama and all his predecessors had made such a botch of things that nothing could get worse — and that expertise and moral leadership were not only irrelevant, they were handicaps.

Mr. Trump has decisively refuted these premises.

By most objective measures (the stock market indices being the exception), things today are worse.

But, you say, is it fair to blame him for the coronavirus?

No. Mr. Trump did not cause the pandemic; and China, as he says, mishandled it at the start.

But every other nation in the world has had to deal with the same virus, and most of them have done so far more competently, and with more evidence of learning and improvement as they go, than the United States.

More people have died of covid-19 in the United States than in any other country. Even adjusted for population, the death rate here is almost five times worse than in Germany, and almost 100 times worse than in South Korea.

These are facts. This is reality. And the excess deaths and illness are directly attributable to Mr. Trump’s failures of leadership.

He failed to prepare the nation for a pandemic, though experts for years had warned of the possibility.

When the virus emerged, he first praised China’s handling of it, then imposed travel restrictions too slapdash to offer any protection.

For months, when he could have been preparing the nation, he insisted the virus would just go away.

When reality washed that nonsense away, he allowed government experts to guide the nation for a few weeks. But as the nation began to make some headway, Mr. Trump — more concerned with the impact on his reelection prospects than with the risk to human life — urged Americans to ignore expert advice and “liberate” their states, never mind masks or social distancing.

The result is the worst of all worlds: unneeded deaths, no possibility of real reopening and intensification of the markers of “carnage” that Mr. Trump railed against four years ago: unemployment, inequality, opioid addiction.

Perhaps most frightening: Even now, there is no plan, no learning, no strategy for testing and reopening. Under his leadership, it is all too easy to imagine that our children will still be out of school a year from now, or two, or three.

A president’s first duty is to keep the nation safe. If he has failed at home, maybe Mr. Trump has a better record overseas?

He continued a successful campaign to demolish the Islamic State, the self-styled caliphate that established itself on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border after Mr. Obama’s premature disengagement. The recently announced peace deal between Israel and the tiny United Arab Emirates is a step forward. Mr. Trump has kept the nation out of major conflict.

But neither the country nor the world are safer four years on. The nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, which Mr. Trump said he could easily take care of, are less constrained than ever. Russia continues to illegally occupy parts of three sovereign nations, including Ukraine. The malign dictatorship in Venezuela, which Mr. Trump vowed to dislodge, remains firmly entrenched.

To the greatest challenge of our time, Mr. Trump has failed most destructively. That challenge is the rise of authoritarian powers, most notably China. Like dictatorships before them, they threaten the values upon which this nation was founded: individual dignity and liberty, the freedom to worship and speak and think. But unlike past dictatorships, they are bolstered by technologies that enable unprecedented surveillance and intrusion into what was once the private sphere.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said 80 years ago, when democracy was similarly under threat, “There can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.” If they should gain the upper hand around the world, “We should enter upon a new and terrible era in which the whole world, our hemisphere included, would be run by threats of brute force.”

Mr. Trump, in his fourth year, has branded China an enemy, mostly because he needs a pandemic scapegoat, but also because he hopes it will give him a campaign issue.

But for three years, he embraced and admired Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and made clear his indifference to China’s genocide of its Muslim Uighur population, its stifling of Hong Kong, the repression of its own people. Mr. Trump’s one concern was mercantile, and even there he failed: China’s economy is no more open to U.S. business than it was four years ago.

A president truly attuned to the Chinese threat would be investing in American universities and science; welcoming the smartest young people from around the world to study and work in the United States; and building alliances with like-minded democracies such as South Korea, Japan, Canada and Germany. In each case, the president has done the opposite.

Most of all, he would be modeling the virtues of democracy, but again he has done the reverse, admiring and embracing the methods of strongmen such as Mr. Xi. Mr. Trump denigrates a free press, makes a mockery of free markets, elevates insult over civil exchange, shows contempt for the rule of law in civilian and military courts, devalues truth, and dismisses legitimate oversight from Congress, the courts and executive branch inspectors general.

Last fall, Mr. Trump became the third president in history to be impeached. The House of Representatives charged him with what amounts to extortion for personal political gain: Mr. Trump held up an arms sale and a White House meeting in an effort to pressure the president of Ukraine to slander former vice president Joe Biden. The House also charged Mr. Trump with illegally refusing to cooperate with its investigation.

In February, the Senate voted to acquit the president, with Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah the lone Republican honest enough to acknowledge that the evidence was irrefutable. A few other Republicans, perhaps embarrassed by their own moral collapse, suggested that Mr. Trump would be chastened by impeachment and mend his ways.

Instead, he has been emboldened, and his behavior in the half-year since provides an indication of the lawlessness we can expect if Mr. Trump is reelected. He has swept aside U.S. attorneys who would not bend the law to his whim; fired officials throughout the government whose only offense was to do their jobs honestly or seek to hold his administration accountable; sicced unbadged troops on peaceful protesters in D.C. and Portland, Ore., for the benefit of his reelection campaign; and ignored and lied about credible reports of Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers.

He has sought to undermine confidence in democracy itself, lying about the prevalence of fraud, floating the possibility of delaying the election and even suggesting he may not accept its results.

These are high crimes and misdemeanors, as the framers of the Constitution understood the term. But this time it is up to us, the American people, to remove Mr. Trump from office.

Soure: Washington Post

I’ve updated our list of stocks we like and own on the web site.

See you on Thursday after my 1:00 PM EST web conference with Snowflake. — Harry Newton