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8:30 AM EST, Tuesday, May 22: Susan arrived back from Paris last night after a week of bonding with my daughter, my daughter's future mother-in-law and sister-in-law. Genuinely nice to see Susan, despite horrid trip back and forth to Kennedy airport and the $13.50 in parking and tolls. Good marriages, like the one I have, are satisfying. That's not news. I only mention it because many of my friends' marriages are breaking up, usually for weird reasons I don't understand. They're having "mid-life" crisis in their mid-sixties. I wonder if this is a trend?

Happy for these recent recommendations:

That's the good news. The bad new is that I don't have brilliances every day. Some days (i.e. most days) I have to play tennis, or try to help a politician understand marketing (a thankless task).

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. What happens when you're really stupid (and I mean REALLY stupid) violate your own 15% Stop Loss Sell rule. Here's the story: I was down 15% on this piece of drek. But I had "good" information. The drug had merit. Handled correctly by an intelligent management, the drug could make it big-time. But the dumb management put it into Phase III trial prematurely and generally made every mistake possible, including not listening to some of his largest shareholders. I knew the management was dreckky. But I thought the big shareholders would organize a takeover or the management, led by stubborn CEO Don Kiepert, would finally see the light. He didn't. They didn't. Yesterday Point Therapeutics fell a whopping 68.2% after this hit the wires:

DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

Point Therapeutics Inc. (POTP) said the Food and Drug Administration placed Talabostat, a potential non-small cell lung cancer drug, on clinical hold because of interim Phase III trial results.

The biopharmaceutical company said Monday its independent data monitoring committee recommended stopping both studies because Talabostat didn't meet a primary endpoint of median progression-free survival and a secondary endpoint of overall survival demonstrating improvement compared with a placebo.

The data indicated the combined use of Talabostat and chemotherapy drug Docetaxal demonstrated "significantly lower overall survival" than patients in the trial's placebo arm, Point Therapeutics added.

One could easily argue that Kiepert has been milking the company for his own personal benefit. As the stock did this,

he paid himself a salary of $360,538 and a bonus of $155,250, for a total of $515,788. The only good news is that if Kiepert still has his 574,731 shares, yesterday he lost $172,419.30. And today if he tries to sell, it will be even lower than 14 cents, perhaps 10, if he's lucky. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving person.

The moral is simple: Don't ever violate the 15% Rule, no matter what you "know." If the stock drops 15% from where it is (not from where you bought it) SELL it instantly, if not sooner.

I lost money on Point. I could have lost less. I violated my own rule. I believed in fantasy. The market doesn't lie.

No. No. No. "I will review your reply and get back to you in a day or so." That was the email I got to his request from me for a plan. I send the plan. He delayed a response. That's horrible time management. All the successful people I know read everything quickly. Successful people do things immediately. Unsuccessful ones delay decisions. End of lecture.

How to bid on eBay: I was the winner at $1,077.50, with a maximum bid of $1,150. Ten seconds before the auction was to close, someone bid $1,200. I had no chance to counterbid. Lessons:

1. Don't sit smug, savoring the bargain you were about to get. If you really want it, bid higher.

2. If you lose the auction, be joyful for the thrill of the auction. Feel elated that you've just avoided buying something you didn't need and don't have the space to store.

Don't you just love computers? I found this on a stock market site that lets you track your portfolio of shares:

Please note: Prices are reset to zero at approximately 4.30 a.m. on the following trading day. When this occurs your portfolio value and change figures may also show as zero.

How to cure bronchitis: Thank you all for all the tips and recommendations on curing my bronchitis, which lingers. My favorite tip came from reader Mike.

Get to a health food store and get some Sambucol elderberry either in lozenges an elixir and whatever else they think. Go to a real health food store since you are in the city, NOT a chain. It will DEFINITELY help. Unless my Dr. tells me I'm at risk for pneumonia I always go natural. I am 400 pounds and eat like shit, so if it works on an unhealthy person like me, it should do wonders for someone like you that tries to take care of themselves.

Two very useful services-- repeated from yesterday: In case you missed them.

+ Quickbrowse.com. Think of this as your Internet slave. You tell it what information you want. It goes out, grabs the information and sends it to you. Quickbrowse can find anything you want anywhere on the Internet -- from my column to the front page of the Wall Street Journal, to electronic filings at the SEC. You can slot your info requests into schedules -- daily for this column, weekly for the Economist, etc. Quickbrowse costs $2.95 a month. It's worth every penny. You can get a 14-day free trial.

+ FreeConferencePro.com: Sign up and make free telephone conference calls. You can host unlimited length calls for 2 to 200 participants -- if you have that many friends. I highlight the world telephone. These calls are not the awful quality you usually get on VoIP. They're all real phone calls. You can do on demand conferencing -- whenever you want to speak to 200 of your nearest and dearest. You can do scheduled conferences. Email your friends with the call-in details.

Friendship:
Between women:
A woman didn't come home one night.
The next day she told her husband she had slept over at a friend's house.
The husband called his wife's 10 best friends.
None of them knew about it.

Between men:
A man didn't come home one night.
The next day he told his wife he had slept over at a friend's house.
The wife called her husband's 10 best friends.
Eight of them confirmed he had slept over. Two said that he was still there.

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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