Had I taken the money I earned from the sale of my business in 1997 and invested every nickel in muni bonds, I’d be a lot richer (and probably a lot happier) today.
Instead I mucked around, figuring I ws smarter.
I wasn’t.
These words are here today because I spent an hour yesterday on the phone with my partner (from the business). He was eyeing his returns this year and last. He was thoroughly depressed. All his great hedge funds and money managers suddenly were no longer performing. They were losing him money. His handsome life style was being questioned.
He figured that the next years in the U.S. would look like Japan’s lost decade — in which everything went basically backwards. He figured our delveraging (reducing consumer and corporate debt) will take 10 years.
He’s 62. He should have 62% of his investments in bonds. I’m 69. I don’t have 69% in bonds, but more than he does. (I need to figure the number this morning.)
The sad thing is that muni bonds don’t yield very much. Thank you, Mr. Bernanke.
The good news is that muni bonds are not like traded stocks, whose price you can find from one minute to another. Muni bonds trade by appointment, which mean you can occasionally find bargains — if you have a good finder.
Let’s take up this “Developing your own theory on managing your investments” on Monday.
Meantime, if you didn’t read yesterday’s long column, please do. Click here.
Annaly goes to Congress: Yesterday’s opening remarks before Congress of Michael Farrell, Annaly CEO. Nothing earth-shattering. Click here.
Change to an SSD. Friend reports “I installed a Crucial 512 gb SSD (solid state drive) — $740 from Amazon — in my older (2008) MacBook Pro. I have e experienced an amazing pickup in speed. Windows now fly open.” Click here. He writes,
Amazon also has smaller, cheaper SSDs. I use a 128 gb drive on my laptop. I keep my photos and videos on an external moving-platter (i.e. cheap) drive). I do that because I don’t need them every waking moment.
I strongly recommend using external drives to back up your daily work. I do not recommend “cloud” services for now. If you don’t believe me, check out BlackBerry. I’d let Apple’s new iCloud settle in before I used it.
Obama, the busical. Beautifully done. Click here.
Latest favorite New Yorker cartoons:
Three Black Men (totally tasteless, but wonderful)
At the National Art Gallery in Dublin , a husband and wife were staring at a portrait that had them completely confused.
The painting depicted three black men totally naked, sitting on a bench. Two of the figures had black penises, but the one in the middle had a pink penis.
The curator of the gallery realized that they were having trouble interpreting the painting and offered his personal assessment. He went on for over half an hour explaining how it depicted the sexual emasculation of African Americans in a predominately white, patriarchal society. In fact, ‘some serious critics believe that the pink penis also reflects the cultural and sociological oppression experienced by gay men in contemporary society.
After the curator left, an Irishman approached the couple and said, ‘Would you like to know what the painting is really about?’
‘Why would you claim to be more of an expert than the curator of the gallery?’, asked the couple.
‘Because I am the artist. I painted the picture,’ he replied. ‘In fact, there are no African Americans depicted at all. They’re just three Irish coal miners. The guy in the middle went home for lunch .
Harry Newton who lost 6 lbs on his two-week Vietnam/Cambodia trip. Key: Eat the local diet, which is fat-free — largely noodles and fresh fruit (like mangoes).
Family is clamoring for pictures. One video does a great job. I hope you can watch it. If not, download the free VLC Media Player. Monsoon in Hue. Click here. I’ll run a video of the incredible traffic in downtown Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City) when I figure out how to chop it to 20 megs, which is the maximum my dumb server allows. Better, I’ll upload it to youTube.
The big key in traveling in hot climes: Drink water and eat lots of salt.
Harry instead of worrying about backing up your files all the time you should consider moving to using virtualbox. run what ever O/S you want to on top of the host(MAC) O/S in VB hypervisor…once deployed..backup a single vdi file that contains the bootable O/S and all your files. I think the only thing Virtualbox cant do natively is manage a webcam.
If Americans followed the Thai and Cambodian diets, we could put an end to hunger and obesity. The food is good, healthy there and beyond cheap but I guess we are a burger nation…After coming back from Cambodia and Vietnam you can't be too depressed about the market. Not sure about Vietnam but I couldn't believe how poor Cambodia is. It was hard not to feel bad…
The noodles were probably buckwheat. No gluten. That's another factor.
To reduce the size of your video files: Handbreak http://handbrake.fr/