Harry Newton's In Search of The Perfect Investment
Newton's In Search Of The Perfect Investment. Technology Investor.
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8:30 AM EST Friday, January 25, 2008: The
best news. Long-term mortgages are getting cheaper by the day. The 30-year fixed
is around 5.48% That's the lowest since the Spring of 2004. Banks are still
lending, but only if you put down a significant deposit and have a real job.
The
second best news is that tech stocks are "cheap" -- typically 35%
to 40% off their highs in late Fall last year. Many tech stocks have rallied
in recent days, suggesting that we may have hit bottom. The rules are: Buy only
if you really want to own the stock long-term. Be prepared to get out quickly
if the stock goes sour. Don't buy ahead of earnings. Don't bet the bank. Now
is for dipping, not immersing. Typical charts:


Asian markets
rebounded last night, with gains typically around 5%-7%. There is some hope
in Australia that China's internal boom will insulate Australia from
America's accelerating downtown. That logic makes EWA a continuing "buy"
especially at these low prices:

Storms
gather: The recession is on us. The recession
may or may not adversely affect the stockmarket from here, though the good news
is stocks have already taken a strong haircut. Negative items about the economy:
+
Latest housing figures show sliding prices, higher inventories, reluctant sellers.
Not good stuff.
+
Stew Leonard runs the world's greatest (and possibly most famous) grocery store.
His metric of the economy:
I
look for the mashed-potato effect. If the customers are buying our freshly-prepared
mashed potatoes instead of whole potatoes, the the economy is doing well.
Lately bulk potato sales have been up, so there's concern about where the
economy is going.
+ The new owners
just fired 40% of the management of the firm my friend works at. They were probably
overstaffed. Still, that's more unemployed.
+ Serious price
increases are happening in foodstuffs, like corn. I just read that the beer
business has been hit by 500% increases in the price of hops. Barley has doubled.
+ No one on Wall
Street seems to have much faith in the administration's understanding of what's
actually ailing the economy or the proposed "stimulus" package. A
reader sums it all up in this email.:
What scares
me is that I do not believe that anybody has any idea of how bad this mess
is or how to solve it.
The
speed of change: Nickel prices rise. More nickel gets mined. Zinc
prices rise. More zinc gets mined. Nickel and zinc are now in surplus,
with prices sharply down. Some Australian mining stocks, have plummeted.
New rules: There is no long-term. Take some profit off the table quickly. Haircut
your stop loss rule to perhaps 8%, down from our inviolate 15%. Watch for getting
back in on a 40% pullback. Place low buy orders. You never know when they'll
be filled, as my EWA were this week -- at $23.60.
10
Questions you must ask your doctor: This piece
is from my favorite men's magazine, Best Life,
which
I recommend you subscribe
to.
1. Do I really
need this test?
Doctors often adhere to a better-safe-than-sorry philosophy, ordering
tests just to protect themselves in the event of a lawsuit, says David
Sandmire, MD, coauthor of Medical Tests That Can Save Your Life. A full 16
percent of prostate-cancer screenings, for example, are unnecessary, say Harvard
researchers. Since 80 percent of PSA results are false positives, thousands
of men undergo needless biopsies each year. Another overused procedure: CT
scans. The radiation from these tests causes an estimated 5,695 cancer cases
a year, say British researchers.
2 Where would
you send your wife or children?
Like our tax code and the judicial system, medicine is supposed to treat everyone
equally, but its clear that some people receive better treatment than
others. General practitioners who work within a particular system routinely
refer patients to specialists within that health-care system, says Kevin
Soden, MD, coauthor of Special Treatment: How to Get the Same High-Quality
Health Care Your Doctor Gets. However, oftentimes the best surgeon is
in a completely different facility on the other side of town, and you can
bet thats where your doctor would send his family.
3 How many
surgeries do you perform each year?
Nowhere is the saying practice makes perfect more applicable than
in the operating room. Urologists who perform more than 40 prostatectomies
a year, for example, experience 50 percent fewer complications than those
who perform fewer than 40. The same goes for hospitals performing more than
200 coronary bypass surgeries a year, according to a report in the journal
Circulation. Bottom line: Your health hinges on your surgeons experience.
4 Can I schedule
my surgery for the morning?
Arrive early and youll get the undivided attention of an alert medical
staff. A recent study of 90,000 surgeries by researchers at Duke University
found that patients who had operations in the morning were four times less
likely to have anesthesia complicationsnausea, post-op pain, fluctuating
blood pressurethan those who had them in the afternoon.
5 If I get
sick, will you see me in the hospital?
In the past 10 years, the number of hospitalistsa new breed of physicians
who specialize in inpatient carehas grown from a few hundred to nearly
20,000. So if you require hospitalization, odds are your primary-care
physician wont be at your bedside, says Evan Scott Levine, MD,
author of What Your Doctor Wont (or Cant) Tell You. Youll
be dealing with a new doctor who doesnt know you or your medical history.
Make sure your GP makes hospital calls.
6 Do you
earn bonuses based on performance?
Before you schedule a surgery, check the hospitals physician reward
system. Insurance companies reimburse hospitals based on the type of treatment
provided, not the length of your stay. As a result, Many hospitals pay
their physicians bonuses based on how quickly they move patients out the door,
says Dr. Levine. Quality of care is sacrificed in the interest of increasing
patient turnover.
7 When did
you graduate from medical school?
In an analysis of 62 studies, researchers at Harvard Medical School discovered
that doctors who have been out of medical school for more than 20 years were
up to 48 percent less likely to stay up-to-date on developments in their fields.
They are equally likely to be unaware of current treatment guidelines, such
as prescribing aspirin to treat angina (chest pain caused by decreased blood
flow to the heart). If you dont want to ask your doctor directly, check
out how long it has been since he graduated at healthgrades.com.
8 What the
hell does that say?
No doctor would prescribe Zoloft for high cholesterol, but thats what
you might end up with if your pharmacist cant read Zocor in your doctors
chicken scratch. Poor penmanship isnt just an old stereotype; its
responsible for up to 61 percent of medication errors and more than 1.5 million
patient injuries per year, according to a recent report from the National
Academies of Sciences Institute of Medicine. If you cant
read a prescription, chances are your pharmacist cant either,
says Dr. Soden. Get your doctor to print out the name of the medication.
9 Will you
remove that wedding ring?
When scientists at Rush University Medical Center, in Chicago, analyzed the
hands of 66 nurses, they found that those with wedding rings had 10 times
more bacteria than those without. Bacterial infections are the leading
cause of death in American hospitals; about 98,000 people die from them each
year, says Dr. Soden. That means you can contract a secondary
infection at the hospital.
10 What else
can I do to treat my condition?
Recent studies suggest that diet and exercise are essential for treating and
preventing everything from heart attacks to prostate cancer, yet only one
in six doctors discusses how to use nutrition to prevent disease, according
to a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Researchers in Colorado,
meanwhile, found that only 28 percent of doctors mention exercise to their
patients. Many primary-care physicians work with dietitians and trainers who
can help treat patients with lifestyle-influenced health problems, such as
type 2 diabetes. So even if your doctor doesnt have answers regarding
nutrition and exercise, he likely knows someone who does.
Oh
to play with someone else's money.
You heard about the rogue trader who lost France's
second-largest bank of €4.9 billion ($8.2 billion). It said the young Paris
trader, 31-year-old Jerome Kerviel, who has yet to be charged, used his position,
plus a knowledge of the bank's security system, to construct "a scheme
of elaborate fictitious transactions" on European equity markets. Apparently
he took some bets, lost money, then took more, trying with ever larger bets
to make back what he had lost. A rogue trader is one who loses money. Some traders
don't lose money. Here's today's news:
Goldman Sachs
announces that they have discovered two rogue traders who have by passed their
risk management systems and have a secret trading gain of around $18.6 billion.
Both of the 26 year old janitors have been given honorary Princeton PhDs in
mathematics and have been moved from the furnace room in the basement to corner
offices on the trading floor. When interviewed, Jean Paul Arristide, the only
janitor identified so far, admitted that his cousin who worked for Societe
Generale in Paris, had emailed him from a trading station and as a joke showed
him how to enter orders. Mr. Arristide began playing on a trading computer
on the graveyard shift during his breaks, taking the opposite positions to
his cousin. Mr. Arristide thought he was just playing around and did not realize
that the trades were actually being executed. "I was just trying to annoy
my cousin by doing the exact opposite...as a kind of funny joke!" "Then
I would email him that he was, how do you say... une tete de pee-pee stupide..
a stupid dick head!" "Je m'appologise..c'est dommage."
A spokesman for Goldman explained that they have yet to identify the second
roque trader who is thought to be hiding in the duct work of the HVAC systems
in their New York head office.
In a separate news release Goldman indicated that the profits from the unauthorised
trading would be added to the bonus pool for 2008. "It is a good start
to the year, and we would like to thank Mr. Arristede for his fine janitorial
work."
The
Australian Tennis Open is on. It's hard to sleep when
the main matches come on at 3:00 AM EST. Times are not always accurate. Sometimes
they play re-runs during the day. Best to just turn on your TV and scour ESPN
and the tennis channel.
Date |
EST
Time
|
Round
|
Channel
|
January
25 |
1:00
AM
|
Women's
Doubles Final (Repeat)/Semifinals |
Tennis
Channel |
January
25 |
3:30
AM (Live)
|
Men's
Semifinals |
ESPN2 |
January
25 |
6:00
AM
|
Women's
Doubles Final (Repeat)/Semifinals |
Tennis
Channel |
January
25 |
3:00
PM
|
Men's
Semifinals (Repeat) |
ESPN2 |
January
25 |
6:00
PM
|
Women's
Doubles Final (Repeat)/Semifinals |
Tennis
Channel |
January
25 |
9:30
PM (Live)
|
Women's
Final |
ESPN2 |
January
25 |
11:30
PM (Live)
|
Men's
Doubles Final |
Tennis
Channel |
January
26 |
1:00
AM
|
Men's
Doubles Final (Repeat) |
Tennis
Channel |
January
26 |
1:00
PM
|
Men's
Doubles Final (Repeat) |
Tennis
Channel |
January
27 |
12:00
AM (Live)
|
Mixed
Doubles Final |
Tennis
Channel |
January
27 |
1:30
AM
|
Mixed
Doubles Final (Repeat) |
Tennis
Channel |
January
27 |
3:30
AM (Live)
|
Men's
Final |
ESPN2 |
January
27 |
12:00
PM
|
Men's
Final (Repeat) |
ESPN2 |
January
27 |
3:00
PM
|
Men's/Women's
Finals (Repeat) |
Tennis
Channel |
|
Secret
ingredients in Viagra. Finally released.
3%
Vitamin E
2% Aspirin
2% Ibuprofen
1% Vitamin C
5% Spray Starch
87% Fix-A-Flat
Chinese
and Jewish pilots
A plane leaves Los Angeles airport under the control of a Jewish captain. His
co-pilot is Chinese. It's the first time they've flown together and an
awkward silence between the two seems to indicate a mutual dislike.
Once they reach
cruising altitude, the Jewish captain activates the auto-pilot, leans back in
his seat, and mutters, "I don't like Chinese."
'"No rike
Chinese?" asks the co-pilot, "why not?"
"You people bombed Pearl Harbor , that's why!"
"No, no," the co-pilot protests, "Chinese not bomb Peahl Hahbah!
That Japanese, not Chinese."
"Japanese,
Chinese, Vietnamese... doesn't matter, you're all alike.
There's a few minutes of silence. "No rike Jews!" the co-pilot suddenly
announces.
"Why not?" asks the captain.
"Jews sink Titanic."
"Jews didn't sink the Titanic!" exclaims the captain, "It was
an iceberg!"
"Goldberg, Greenberg, Rosenberg , Iceberg, ....no mattah...alla same."

This column is about my personal search for the perfect
investment. I don't give investment advice. For that you have to be registered
with regulatory authorities, which I am not. I am a reporter and an investor.
I make my daily column -- Monday through Friday -- freely available for three
reasons: Writing is good for sorting things out in my brain. Second, the column
is research for a book I'm writing called "In Search of the Perfect
Investment." Third, I encourage my readers to send me their ideas,
concerns and experiences. That way we can all learn together. My email address
is . You can't
click on my email address. You have to re-type it . This protects me from software
scanning the Internet for email addresses to spam. I have no role in choosing
the Google ads on this site. Thus I cannot endorse, though some look interesting.
If you click on a link, Google may send me money. Please note I'm not suggesting
you do. That money, if there is any, may help pay Michael's business school
tuition. Read more about Google AdSense, click
here and here.
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