I’ve been mulling, reading and observing. But I’m still alive.
My hope was to discover what’s hot or about to become hot.
Let me explain: There are four ways you can pick stocks:
- Earnings and growth. Also called value investing.
- Magnificent founders with a great Vision.
- The hot new world — dot-com, electric cars, work-at-home Pandemic, the cloud, vaccine/lose weight biotech, AI, 5G and gig Internet etc.
- Lots of buzz in the financial world — TV, blogs, magazines, etc.
If I can find a combination of all four, I’m in pig heaven.
But … They often shoot up, buoyed by heady enthusiasm.. and then they often fall down big time.
Here’s the classic pattern of a classic work-at-home pandemic stock. Classic flash-in-the-pan. It’s Zoom Video:
Here is the classic pattern of a stock with all four:
Here’s another one that’s little harder. A little of all four:
Today I ran into a fellow fixing a cell phone antenna. What with 5G, their business must be exploding. It is. Despite nicely growing sales and earnings, Crown Castle is doing kaka on the market:
So for now I stick with AAPL, AMZN, BRKB, GOOGL, LLY, META, MSFT, NVDA and TSLA. Those equities are one leg of my three legged investment “strategy.” The other two are fixed income — largely six-month US. treasuries now paying 5.53% and real estate syndications — office and residential.
This is a great book
I read every word and took acres of notes.
Musk is one of the brightest, most driven and most accomplished people on the planet. Elon is a control freak (I am too).
Writes the New Yorker,
Elon Musk is currently at or near the helm of six companies: Tesla, SpaceX (which includes Starlink), the Boring Company, Neuralink, X (formerly known as Twitter), and X.AI, an artificial-intelligence company that he founded, earlier this year, because he believes that human intelligence isn’t reproducing fast enough, while artificial intelligence is getting more artificially intelligent exponentially. ..
Musk controls the very tiniest things, and the very biggest. He oversees companies, valued at more than a trillion dollars, whose engineers have built or are building, among other things, reusable rocket ships, a humanoid robot, hyperloops for rapid transit, and a man-machine interface to be implanted in human brains. He is an entrepreneur, a media mogul, a political provocateur, and, not least, a defense contractor: SpaceX has received not only billions of dollars in government contracts for space missions but also more than a hundred million dollars in military contracts for missile-tracking satellites, and Starlink’s network of four thousand satellites—which provides Pentagon-funded services to Ukraine—now offers a military service called Starshield. Day by day, Musk’s companies control more of the Internet, the power grid, the transportation system, objects in orbit, the nation’s security infrastructure, and its energy supply than any other single human being.
I’ve read all the reviews on the book — from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Financial Times to the New Yorker, etc. You’ll enjoy them. Google them. They’re all fascinating.
If there’s one book you need to read in 2023, this is it — Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk.
I prefer to read books on the Amazon Kindle app on my iPhone, my laptop and my iPad. Kindle lets me jump from one device to the other seamlessly. My reading device of the moment depends on whether the light from the screen will bother a sleeping wife. I tend to read all through the night. I reverse the screen to white on black and increase the font.
Every time I highlight something in a Kindle book, Amazon copies it to the cloud, where I can access my notes and highlights. Don’t give me nonsense about “the feel of paper,” this is far more valuable. Thank you Amazon.
Covid, flu, pneumonia and RSV are vaccines to get
Covid is back with a vengeance. Friends are getting it. Friends went on a cruise. More than half the people on the cruise caught covid!!
The CDC recommends everyone older than 6 months get the updated 2023-2024 COVID-19 vaccine. The CDC says the updated vaccine is safe and effective at protecting against COVID-19 hospitalization and death. It also cuts your chances of suffering Long COVID, which is truly awful.
I just got the updated COVID-19 Moderna vaccine.
I also got the flu, the pneumonia and the RSV vaccines. Four jabs in the last few weeks.
I got them at my favorite place — CVS, which keeps an on-line record of my vaccinations. To get yourself an appointment go to www.CVS.com. Click here.
Lessons for crypto from Sam Bankman-Fried
Despite all the bankruptcies, all the lost investor money and all the obvious fraud, the price of bitcoin is still robust. I have no idea why. Totally beats me.
Sam had two companies: One that was a stock exchange on which you could trade crypto currency, including one Sam made up out of thin air. The second was his own company for trading crypto.
He helped himself to money in the customer’s accounts for his own spending. As his spending increased, he needed more and more customer deposits to keep his dipping going. But crypto fell and his customers wanted their money back. Which sadly, wasn’t all there. Then it all fell apart. Sam is now in jail and on trial for fraud and stuff which could take him to jail for the rest of his life.
Michael Lewis has written a book on Sam. It’s just out.
Lewis did a great interview for 60 Minutes. Click here and here.
‘Dumb Money’ Exposes the Baffling Allure of Bad Investment Advice
That’s the headline of yesterday’s brilliant New York Times piece.
I’ll run more of the article tomorrow. For now, the whole piece is here.
The funniest skit I’ve ever watched
Favorite Jewish news channel
Tennis is therapeutic
Everyone needs aggressive exercise. My preference is tennis. You get exercise without depressing about exercising. Your focus is to beat the a**hole on the other side of the net and not worry about the brutal last six weeks in the market and all the uncertainty — inflation, interest rates, the consumer, Congress, funding the government, etc.
Stop reading, turn off BubbleVision and play the best medicine:
Taylor is approaching billionaire status. The woman is super-talented.
See you on the weekend. Promise. — Harry Newton
See you on the weekend.
