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, March 31, 2006: Nice
to be away for a month. Not nice to return and see the piles. Just junking the
mail order catalogs last night took two hours. Then there were the K-1s -- all
those various syndicates I'm in. Good for me. Most are doing well. Nightmare
for Brendan, my tax accountant.
One advantage of being away: It brings home how little we all really
need. The key is renting a place with a washing machine. One set of clothes
to wear. One set in the machine. The second key is giving away everything you
haven't worn in the last year. The third key is not replacing anything.
I watched Cramer
on JetBlue coming back. It was the first time in a month. Having a daily TV
show (or a daily column like this one) is desperation times. To keep your viewers
(or your readers) amused, you have to create great excitement with a new
discovery every single day. Last night Cramer created his "Fast
and Furious" portfolio -- momentum stocks that are hot (and already
way over-priced).
Compare the one-year low to last night's close. Pity he didn't highlight these
five earlier.
The
danger of stop losses: from reader Michael Dehncke:
This morning
(yesterday) somebody decided to sell 150,000 shares of Insite Vision (ISV).
That tripped off a long string of stop losses and resulted in the stock falling
to $1.47 at one point just after trading opened. As I type this, we are back
up to $1.89, although where we will end up today is anyone's guess.
Conference call
was amusing if you missed it. High points were:
- Kumar (ISV's president) wondering about the drop this morning;
- Estimate that total market for all products is $2 billion in next 1 to 4
years;
- Hope that a marketing partnership will be consummated in next quarter -
noted that several companies were interested ;
- Plan to submit Azasite NDA to the FDA by close of next quarter;
Both of those
last two bullets should be good for some runs in the next few months.
In short, he and I both agree, ISV should move even higher in coming months. Market
capitalization is only $147 million, low for a hot pharma company. Look
carefully at the chart. See how little volume this thing trades.
Specialty
real estate makes huge sense. My Western tennis buddy is the king
of mini-storage places in Spokane. He tells me there are still great
opportunities if you can handle the clientele. Meanwhile, what do I find on
my desk:

I fell into bed
last night reading this thing. Guess what? I was impressed. As college enrollment
soars, many colleges find it hard to keep up. Items:
+ The University of Arkansas was forced to book students into a local Holiday
Inn Express.
+ Many students at the University of California at Irvine went to live at nearby
trailer parks.
+ At Rutgers, the waiting list for on-campus school-owned housing has been 1,000+
for the past several years.
+ Many public colleges and universities are taking out master leases on entire
apartment complexes near their campuses to house students closed out of university-owned
dorms.
The book has a table showing university-owned beds to enrolled students ratio.
It ranges from a low of 4.6% for Boise State University to a high of
47.5% (still low) for the University of Connecticut.
I know there's truth in this book from our family's own experience. My son is
Dartmouth '04. We bought an apartment for him. This had three benefits. It avoided
Dartmouth's hideously high on-campus accommodation charges, gave us some rental
income (he had a roommate) and gave us a nice 30% gain when we sold it
-- on his graduation.
How
to get your LCD monitor to sing: Don't feed it an analog RGB signal.
Feed it a digital DVI signal. The difference in clarity is staggering.
China
surpassed Japan as the world's biggest holder of foreign reserves.
The news came amid more politicking over China's currency policy, which some
politicians see as a cause of the US's huge trade deficit. Charles Schumer,
a senator who has been shrill in his attacks on Beijing (and on everything else),
dropped plans, for the moment at least, to slap a 27.5% tariff on Chinese
goods.

This chart from the Economist.
I
don't make this stuff up.
Item 1, India: Two days ago, the day of the solar eclipse, the Hindustan
Times of India advised pregnant women not to go outside during the eclipse to
avoid having a blind baby or one with a cleft lip. It also advised that food
cooked before the eclipse should be thrown out afterward because it will be
impure, and that those holding a knife or ax during the eclipse will cut themselves.
Item 2, France:
The headline reads: French Gendarmerie Nationale to use Subaru Impreza
WRXs for chase vehicles. French cars were too slow. "We have
a contract to supply 63 cars to the Gendarmerie Nationale for patrols on the
roads," Subaru spokesman Gilles Varmoux said on Thursday. "There was
a tender for four-door, four-wheel drive cars that could go faster than 149
miles per hour and had a reasonable price," he added. The Subaru Impreza
WRX cars will replace Peugeot's 306 S16 and the Renault Megane Coupe. The
police forces are among the most faithful clients of the local car makers, but
this time the French offerings were just too slow. "These new vehicles
will allow the national police to fight the most serious and most dangerous
road offenses," the Gendarmerie Nationale, part of the defense ministry,
said on its Website. The cars are for the rapid intervention brigade (BRI) which
previously had vehicles that could not go faster 118 miles per hour. In 2005
there were 53,000 instances of people in France on the run in cars or
refusing to stop at the police's request.
Nasdaq
100 Tennis from Miami TV Schedule |
|
Start
(EST) |
End (EST) |
|
|
Today |
15:00 |
17:00 |
Men's
Semi-Final 1-Live |
ESPN2 |
Today |
19:00 |
21:00 |
Men's
Semi-Final 2-Live |
ESPN2 |
Saturday,
April 1 |
12.00 |
14.00 |
Women's
Final -- Live |
CBS |
Sunday,
April 2 |
12.00 |
16.00 |
Men's
Final -- Live |
CBS |
Another
Norwegian joke:
Ole and Sven walk into a restaurant. While waiting for their order, they
talk about the lutefisk and lefsa dinner at the Lutheran Church last night.
Suddenly, a woman at the next table, who is eating a sandwich, begins to cough.
After a minute or so, it becomes apparent that she is in real distress.
Ole looks at her
and says, "Kin yew svallo?" The woman shakes her head no. "Kin
yew git yewr brett?" The woman begins to turn blue and shakes her head
no. Ole walks over to the woman, lifts up the back of her dress, yanks down
her drawers and quickly gives her right butt cheek a lick with his tongue. The
woman is so shocked that she has a violent spasm and the obstruction flies out
of her mouth.
As she begins
to breathe again, Ole walks slowly back to his table. His buddy Sven says, "By
golly, ay herd oof dat Hind Lick Maneuver, but ay never seed nobody do dat before!"

Harry Newton
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.
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