In Search of the Perfect Investment

Myths I’m sick of hearing. Also called “positive” investment attributes that are meant to tempt:

+ The purchase price (of the building) represents a 25% discount to replacement cost.  So what? What you paid is what it’s worth. The only nut who’d spend the money to replace the building is your local insurance company. Which brings up an old joke about fires and floods. Another time.

+ 25% of the stock’s value is sitting in cash. Again, so what?  The company can’t figure out what productively to do with the money. So cash sits idly, valueless. Microsoft and many tech companies have zillions of dollars of idle cash. To Microsoft’s credit, they once gave some of it away to their shareholders. But neither the cash nor the payout did anything for Microsoft’s  flagging stock price. Cisco has $40 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Their stock remains firmly in the tank.

I’ve totally soured on biotech.Item:

+ The company I invested in was formed in 2004.

+ By 2011 it had run out of money. All $48 million of it. Yet it had accomplished basically nothing in seven years, except change management.

+ Now it’s raising another $22 million. That will cover one Phase 2 trial of one drug.

+ If the results of this trial are good, it will need to raise another $60 million to $80 million for a Phase 3 trial.

+ Then, if the stars are in alignment and some patients are actually helped, the FDA may give it permission to sell the drug to the dieing cancer patients who desperately need it.

Today’s cancer patients will, however, all be dead, since it will be many, many more years before a risk -adverse FDA finally bestows its approval.

And you wonder why drugs cost so much.

Don’t even think about gambling on biotech. A case in point: Mankind. As it got closer and closer to FDA approval, its stock fell more and more.

It never did get FDA approval.

Useful web sites for your business.

+ Customer-friendly phones. Grasshopper.com, Twilio and GoogleVoice.

+ Designs for your own web sites. RichWP.com.

+ Sell your stuff online easily. Shopify.

The hidden world of Islamic Women. Millions of women worldwide spend their entire lives in arranged marriages, locked in their homes, leaving only occasionally (if ever) in awful, confining head-to-toe covering. How Islam got this  way and why is explained. The book is:

I ‘m having trouble putting it down. This is not a radical feminist rant. This is a fascinating first-hand explanation, with plenty of history. Highly recommended. Click here.

Amazing new Coachella Valley technology.

An 86-year-old man goes for a physical. All of his test results come back normal.

The doctor says, “Gary everything looks great. How are you doing mentally and emotionally? Are you at peace with God?”

Gary replies, “God and I are tight. He knows I have poor eyesight, so he’s fixed it so when I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, *poof* the light goes on. When I’m done, *poof* the light goes off.”

“Wow, that’s incredible,” the doctor says.

A little later in the day, the doctor calls Gary’s wife. “Marianne, he says, Gary is doing fine but I had to call you because I’m in awe of his relationship with God. Is it true that he gets up during the night and *poof * the light goes on in the bathroom, and when he’s done, *poof* the light goes off……?”

“OH MY GOD!” Marianne exclaims.”He’s pissing in the refrigerator again!!!!”

Favorite recent New Yorker cartoons.

Harry Newton who’s genuinely amazed how cheaper it is to live outside of New York (and the North-East). Apples don’t cost $1 a piece. I bought ten cartons of fresh blueberries for $10. What an amazing world. I ought to get out more often.

I’m very sad for the disaster in Japan. But those talented Japanese will clean up the mess and rebuild in no time flat. Look what they did with their world-War II destroyed cities. You’d never know today. I wish we’d allow the Japanese  into Detroit and other horrors of the North-East.

This is hysterical. Because so many of us couldn’t figure out the new time, we went to www.Time.gov, the official US Government time site. Our government couldn’t handle the demand and dropped its normal map in favor of:

I’m sure there’s a reason for daylight savings time.