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On Christmas we replace batteries.

Duracell batteries.

So buy Berkshire Hathaway which owns Duracell.

Hold on. Everything now comes with a teeny-tiny USB-C plug, a shorty cable (and no charger), and, sadly, no batteries!

There’s a moral here.

Technology (and life) changes in a blink.

It’s our history.

I used to publish technology magazines on paper!

Now there are almost no magazines about technology. Thank you, Mr. Internet.

We had covid.

Moderna, made covid vaccines and had a booming share price.

They cured us, but forgot to cure themselves.

Ditto for Zoom.

Change comes in many formats: Covid is over, AI supersedes CPUs (like those made by Intel). Regulation kills LNG. For now.

Some industries are cyclical. As mineral prices rise, new mines open. The price falls, profits fall. They close the mines. Then the price goes up. Soon, new mines.

Airlines follow similar patterns.

Good investing is to pick the best part of cycles to be in, and to get out of. Most observers think we’re still in the best of Nvidia’s cycle. And its price will go much higher. Fingers crossed for Blackwell.

I tend to let my 15% stop loss rule guide me. That usually dumps me out before The Big Fall.

I avoid “cyclicals” like airlines, energy, biotech/pharma. Even the ones I tried to follow — like Eli Lilly and and Novo Nordisk — have proven extraordinarily difficult.  Look at NVO.

I’m favoring companies with businesses with low marginal costs, and hence huge marginal profits. For example cloud providers or their customers.

Now I’m floundering in this Christmas “analysis”. I love Nvidia which doesn’t have a pricey factory, like Intel.

I love Google which has a factory and makes huge margins on what it sells “made in its factory. Ditto for Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.

There are a million rules. For example, I’d rather own the company that provides computer/cloud based reservation services to tennis courts than the fixed cost, “factory” tennis courts themselves — especially the pricey indoor heated ones.

My portfolio is up 54%. My rules are holding. My holdings are listed on the web site — click here.

Email me if some of this makes sense, or drop a comment on the web site.

The best Christmas investment advice

The 98-year-old Mother Superior lay dying. The nuns gathered around her bed trying to make her last journey comfortable. They tried giving her warm milk to drink but she refused it.

One of the nuns took the glass back to the kitchen. Then, remembering a bottle of Irish Whiskey that had been received as a gift the previous Christmas, she opened it and poured a generous amount into the warm milk.

Back at Mother Superior’s bed, they held the glass to her lips.

The frail nun drank a little, then a little more and before they knew it, she had finished the whole glass down to the last drop.

As her eyes brightened, the nuns thought it would be a good opportunity to have one last talk with their spiritual leader.

“Mother,” the nuns asked. “Please give us your wisdom before you leave us.”

Mother Superior raised herself in the bed, looked at them and said: “Don’t sell that cow.”

See you tomorrow or so — Harry Newton