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, Thursday, March 22, 2007: There
are growing industries and there are declining industries. The newspaper business
is declining. There are three reasons. Young people get their news from the
Internet. Many older people hate the Times' liberal bias. And advertisers advertise
with Google.
Advertising revenue for
the New York Times' newspapers fell 7.0% in Feb. The New York Times itself was
down 7.5%.
The New York Times stock has reflected the bad times.
A bunch of institutions stubbornly still hold stock in the Times. They're all
trying to motivate the Times management to perform better. That has the same
pleasure as peeing into the wind. Times management can't be fired by stockholders,
since the Times is a two-class company -- public A class shares and private
B class shares that have all the control. The Wall Street Journal had
a piece. Click
here. One day the institutions will wake up and dump their stock. Then
the stock will plummet.
The
Fed held interest rates yesterday. And stockmarkets boomed. The Fed
said:
Recent indicators
have been mixed and the adjustment in the housing sector is ongoing. Nevertheless,
the economy seems likely to continue to expand at a moderate pace over coming
quarters.
Recent readings
on core inflation have been somewhat elevated. Although inflation pressures
seem likely to moderate over time, the high level of resource utilization
has the potential to sustain those pressures.
In these circumstances,
the Committee's predominant policy concern remains the risk that inflation
will fail to moderate as expected. Future policy adjustments will depend on
the evolution of the outlook for both inflation and economic growth, as implied
by incoming information.
As we know, all
the Fed cares about is inflation. If it senses it, it lifts rates. With the
economy slowing, the housing business going away, and electronics getting cheaper
by the minute, there is little chance of serious inflation. The only inflation
is on the farm, where demand for ethanol is driving up the price of corn. Soon
oil will rise again. But it's hard to predict when. See Tuesday's column. Click
here
The
story with subprime mortgages: From a very
talented man called Jeremy Diamond, managing director of Analy Capital Management
(NLY):
The
events of the last few weeks in sub-prime mortgages have rocked the financial
markets, and rightly so. The papers
and the web are rife with stories of end-of-cycle misbehavior, regret and
recrimination among the various players in the
mortgage finance chain-lenders cutting corners for market share and growth,
borrowers stretching to buy homes they
couldn't afford, appraisers and real estate agents colluding on home values-not
to mention the enabling of the Wall
Street securitization machine, the ratings agencies and, some would argue,
a Federal Reserve that kept rates too low for too long. Depending on who is
speaking, the consequences for this cyclical turn could range from brief and
sharp pain narrowly centered on the sub-prime lenders and borrowers to a deep
consumer-led economic recession featuring a tidal wave of defaults and a credit
contraction. We would say that once the books have been written, the documentaries
have been made and the finger-pointing ends with jail time, it will have turned
out to be closer to the latter than the former.
If you'd like to
read the whole 6-page piece, click
here.
Dropload.com is for sending large files. Want to send someone a huge
file -- bigger than 5 megs? Email doesn't work. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) works
but few people have FTP sites. Dropload.com
is a place to drop your files off and have them picked up by someone else. Recipients
you specify are sent an email with instructions on how to download the file. Files
are removed from the system after 7 days, regardless if they have been picked
up or not. You can upload any type of file, mp3, movies, docs, pdfs, up to 100MB
each. You can upload an encrypted file or a zipped file. Recipients can be anyone
with an email address. Neat service. Trivial to use.
Check
your PC's time: I set the new daylight savings time
on my PC. Then Microsoft messed up and set it back. Can't this company do anything
right? Meantime, my new Mac continues to work flawlessly. And Steve Balmer leads
MSFT to rack and ruin -- somewhat exaggerated. But you get the idea. I'm not
impressed.
Traveling
this summer? Check that the specs on your power supplies
say "110-240" or "110-220" or "100-200." All these
variations will work on the higher voltages overseas. Plug your U.S.-only adapter
into a European power outlet, and you will blow your American gadget. Nokia
phones are the worst. Some adapters work only here. Some work only there. And
some work everywhere. There is no consistency. You need to check.
Oh
to be a dictator:
Kim Jong II is
the world's leading buyer of Hennessy Cognac, says a congressional intelligence
report. The North Korean dictator spends up to $720,000 a year on Hennessy.
Divorce
is fun (well, sort of)
A German man in the throes of a bitter divorce chain-sawed his house in half
and drove off with his portion on a forklift truck. The unnamed 43-year-old
is apparently a trained mason, and took careful measurements of the one-story
summer home before beginning to cut. "The man said he was just taking his
due," said a spokesman for the police. "I don't think his wife was
too pleased."
Nice
pun. Bad moral:
On a farm lived a chicken and a horse, both of whom loved to play together.
One day the two were playing, when the horse fell into a bog and began to sink.
Scared for his life, the horse whinnied for the chicken to go get the farmer
for help!
Off the chicken
ran, back to the farm. Arriving at the farm, he searched and searched for the
farmer, but to no avail, for he had gone to town with the only tractor.
Running around,
the chicken spied the farmer's new Harley. Finding the keys in the ignition,
the chicken sped of with a length of rope hoping he still had time to save his
friend's life.
Back at the bog,
the horse was surprised, but happy, to see the chicken arrive on the shiny Harley,
and he managed to get a hold of the loop of rope the chicken tossed to him.
After tying the
other end to the rear bumper of the farmer's bike, the chicken then drove slowly
forward and, with the aid of the powerful bike, rescued the horse!
Happy and proud,
the chicken rode the Harley back to the farmhouse, and the farmer was none the
wiser when he returned.
The friendship
between the two animals was cemented: Best Buddies, Best Pals. A few weeks later,
the chicken fell into a mud pit, and soon, he too, began to sink and cried out
to the horse to save his life!
The horse thought
a moment, walked over, and straddled the large puddle. Looking underneath, he
told the chicken to grab his hangy-down thing and he would then lift him out
of the pit. The chicken got a good grip, and the horse pulled him up and out,
saving his life.
The moral of the
story? Yes, there IS a moral.
When You're Hung
Like A Horse, You Don't Need A Harley To Pick Up Chicks.
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. Thus I cannot endorse any, though some look
mighty 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 Claire's
law school tuition. Read more about Google AdSense, click
here and here.
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