Previous Columns
9:00 AM EST Thursday, May 29, 2008: My investment rule is simple: When you can't control the outcome, diversification is the only control. Lately, I've been visiting a handful of my bigger disasters. All are making one huge mistake -- they're not paying attention to marketing. By "marketing" I mean talking to their customers and their shareholders. I happen to be the world's leading marketer -- self-proclaimed, of course. Though it's what I did for 30+ years, and though it's ultimately what makes a company succeed, it's remarkable how many companies pay attention to marketing and don't listen to the need for marketing. Many -- perhaps the majority of startups -- genuinely believe that because they have a better mousetrap, the world will flock to their doors. I think of the difficulties which the activist hedge funds, like Carl Icahn, Chapman Capital and Barington, have getting the attention of management. And I think of the time I've recently spent visiting executives who don't understand marketing and, worse, don't listen. My new rule: If it ain't working, don't try and fix it. Sell it. Life is too short. Time is the diversification's heavy cost. You have to learn to manage it. The more diversification, the more of your time.

Which brings me to a piece that ran last week in the sports section of the New York Times. This piece says oodles about life.

When Life at the Top Isn’t Enough of a Life
By HARVEY ARATON

Life happens. Sooner or later, that crackling backhand winner is not as thrilling, measured against the exhilaration of impending adulthood.

“It is my life as a woman that starts now,” Justine Henin said Wednesday upon stepping down from her perch atop women’s tennis at 25, and worn out.

Could it be that the burden of being 5 feet 5 ¾ inches and 125 pounds in the era of what Mary Carillo calls “big babe tennis” was finally too much? Could Henin, slumping and already with “more money than I can use in three lifetimes,” merely be having her middle-age career crisis, and will return after time off?

“I have a feeling she means it,” Carillo, the incisive insider and broadcaster, said in a telephone interview. “Justine always was an admirer of Steffi Graf, and when Steffi felt she’d had enough, that was it, she was gone, even though she was still near the top.”

Last year, when Henin won the French and United States Opens and was No. 1 for all but seven weeks, she found time to divorce her husband, Pierre-Yves Hardenne, and to reconcile with her father and siblings after being estranged for nearly a decade. She stepped outside the protective cocoon and allowed herself to breathe and feel. It’s entirely possible she especially liked feeling free.

“Are you telling me she made the dreaded mistake of trying to be happy, to have balance in her life?” Carillo said, in recognition of the blinders it takes to compete at the rarefied levels of this sport, out of a suitcase, from one continent to another, with only a few weeks’ break.

The women’s golf champion Annika Sorenstam announced her retirement Tuesday at the comparatively ancient age of 37. In tennis, the highway to 30 is littered with the carcasses of careers that crashed and burned around Henin’s age, at least since the mushrooming prize and endorsement money allowed them to settle in on easy street.

On the men’s side, even old-timers like Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, Mats Wilander and Boris Becker did the majority of their winning before their 25th birthdays. These are unique individuals, with different personalities and motivations, but what rich twentysomething wouldn’t want a little variety to spice up a life bounded by white lines from the time the racket was as long as the torso?

At the risk of sounding heretical, even Roger Federer, now 26, may not be immune to tennis ennui. Last summer, he seemed to be embracing his inner Vincent Chase, was wined and dined by the likes of Anna Wintour and then went off to pal around Asia with Pete Sampras. In stepping out of his skin, has Federer taken an eye off the prize? His results this year are cause for concern.

Maybe an alternative path to 30 is to let life intrude incrementally instead of all at once. For years, the tennis establishment complained as Venus and Serena Williams defiantly dabbled in side ventures that were not going to help them in the historical pursuit of Graf and the other women’s legends. Yet here they are, still out there, no longer dominant but winning a major here, another there, while Henin, Martina Hingis, Kim Clijsters and other grinders have picked up and gone.

“Maybe Venus and Serena will be in the game longer because they took a break here and there,” said Larry Scott, the chief executive of the Women’s Tennis Association. “I’ll also say it takes a remarkable athlete to turn it off and on the way they have.”

The inference was that Henin, undersized as she was, couldn’t risk losing her edge. With versatility, grit and a textbook backhand, she won seven Grand Slam titles, was the tour’s best player in recent years, but always with a vulnerability well hidden under her ubiquitous baseball cap. ...

Playing the French Open, which Henin won four times, didn’t matter anymore. Winning Wimbledon, the last Grand Slam title to elude her, was not worth carrying on for a couple more months. Effective immediately, life becomes priority No. 1.

Mike O'Rourke, chief market strategist of BTIG, wrote this for swissHEDGE magazine.

In the interim, as weak economic data is released week by week and month by month, investors will have their spirits broken by the recurring negative news flow. Before committing, investors must ask themselves whether they should commit to an investment idea even if continuing jobless claims rise to 3.5 million, the US unemployment rate is above 6%, or if a dollar rally snuffs out the only investment opportunities. The key is to remain patient enough so that you can seize them from a position of strength.

Before committing, investors must ask themselves whether they should commit to an investment idea even if continuing jobless claims rise to 3.5 million, the US unemployment rate is above 6%, or if a dollar rally snuffs out the only strength.

It will be a painful slow bleed as investors retrench and step away from the market one by one. In the end, it will lead to a healthier investment atmosphere. The companies that can successfully navigate the environment will benefit from competition being driven out of business and the opportunity to pick up assets inexpensively. Warren Buffet articulately surmised this concept in a television interview this past December (note that US Equities where 10% higher at the time): «It is the nature of capitalism to periodically have recessions, people overshoot. So it isn't the end of the world. As a matter of fact, for an investor, it turns out to be the one time when you make your best buys. I have made by far the best buys I've ever made in my lifetime in 1974 and it was a time of great pessimism. The oil shock, stagflation and those sort of things; but stocks were cheap.» When asked if stocks are as cheap as they were in 1974, he said "They are not remotely, as they are not within miles as cheap."

Are you using Outlook? Everyone is. And everyone's drowning in emails. There's one thing you can do -- install the new, free plug-in called xobni. When you visit xobni's web site, it talks about "social networking." Ignore that crap. Xobni's has two big pluses -- lightning fast searching, and threaded conversations. There are other pluses. Xobni is clearly the best Outlook add-on around. Recommended. Get it before Microsoft buys Xobni and destroys it. They did that to Lookout, the last great Outlook plug-in.

Life's dumb moments. Manhattan Cable's Internet stops working yesterday. I call Tech Support. They tell me because there are few lights on my modem, it must be busted. I bicycle six miles to replace the modem. An hour later, the new one doesn't work either. I call them back. "Oops, there's a service outage in your area. Your modem is not busted. We didn't tell you? Sorry." Two hours later, the new modem and the old Internet start working.

It was a nice bicycle ride. In my haste, I narrowly missed two taxis, one bus and a Chinese delivery boy who screamed at me (in Chinese) that he had no brakes on his bicycle. A typical, uneventful Manhattan bicycle ride.

Joost has free TV shows. Joost.com is the latest venture from the two guys who brought you Skype and Kazaa. Download their software, and you can watch recent TV shows like Jericho for free. The "cost" to you is watching a mandatory advertisement. The software is painless.

Microsoft steals from Apple, again: From SmartMoney:

A LONG-HELD KNOCK against Microsoft is that it steals everybody else's best ideas. (It's true.) But if there's one thing you can say after the software giant gave a sneak preview of its next operating system, at least it steals from the best.

Dubbed Windows 7 for now, the new OS (operating system) boasts multitouch, gesture control screen capabilities a la Apple's iPhone. It's terrific technology....

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Chief Executive Steve Ballmer showed off the gesture control — the most salient feature of the new OS — at The Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference on Tuesday. It looks very pretty, and pretty cool, too. It also looks largely impractical.

The ability to rotate, re-size and flip images — or play a virtual piano — using just your fingers on a laptop screen is no doubt a neat and potentially useful trick, as shown by the demo. That's great and all, but how many PC users sitting at their local Starbucks eating sticky buns want to smear icing all over their pristine screens? And when it comes to desktop PCs, forget about it. Leaning forward to manipulate programs on a monitor won't just make it dirty, it'll add some sort of new lower-back/neck/shoulder condition to the lexicon of computer-induced pathologies that began with carpal tunnel syndrome.

Concluded SmartMoney:

..if history is any guide, Windows 7 will likely be both late and disappointing, if not outright lame. ...

After numerous delays, Vista took nearly six years to get out the door. And it is so perfectly disappointing that it actually makes Windows XP look good. It's slow. It nags users to distraction with irritating security pop-up windows. It devours RAM and graphics power. And even after more than a year, third-party driver support — the pieces of software that allow hardware to work with an OS — is still wonky.

Under the current timetable, you have just over a month to buy a laptop with Windows XP. My present favorite Windows machine is the Lenovo ThinkPad X61. For higher speed, a bigger screen, more weight and a cheaper price, go with the ThinkPad T61.

Please have your children and grandchildren watch this video. This is a video of Shimon Peres, current President of Israel, talking to a bunch of kids about their future. He has great advice and he recommends three areas of opportunity. Peres served twice as Prime Minister of Israel. This is a seriously super talk. Click here.

Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq by Patrick Cockburn. Iraq has cost us $1 trillion, 4,000+ lives and huge dislocation to our economy. Here's the beginning of a review of the new book by Dexter Filkins:

To feel the power of Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite cleric and tormentor of the Americans in Iraq, all you needed to do, in the years after the invasion, was go to the Mohsin Mosque in eastern Baghdad. There, spread in the street for a half a mile, as many as fifteen thousand young men would stand assembled, prayer mats in hand, waiting for the service to begin. The scene was safe: Mahdi Army gunmen searched the cars and the supplicants for bombs. There were no American soldiers in sight. And then, as the thousands fell to their knees, an imam would exit the mosque, climb onto a raised wooden platform, and signal the beginning of prayer. As he began, the crowd started to chant.

May God speed his appearance!
May God curse his enemies!
May God make his son triumphant!
Muqtada!
Muqtada!
Muqtada!

The "his" in the first three chants referred to the Mahdi -- the messiah of Shia Islam -- and the last three lines established a momentous equivalence between this redeemer and Muqtada al-Sadr. But Muqtada never showed his face; he almost never does.

Muqtada al-Sadr stands for everything in Iraq that we do not understand. The exiles we imported to run the country following Saddam's fall are suave and well-dressed; Muqtada is glowering and elusive. The exiles parade before the cameras in the Green Zone; Muqtada stays in the streets, in the shadows, surfacing occasionally to give a wild sermon about the return of the hidden twelfth imam. The Americans proclaim Muqtada irrelevant; his face adorns the walls of every teashop in Shiite Iraq. The Americans attack; Muqtada disappears. The Americans offer a deal, and Muqtada responds: only after you leave.

Who is Muqtada al-Sadr? What does he want? For the full book review, click here.

The French Tennis Open continues. Watch it in high definition (HD). The quality is mind-blowing. HD is the only way to watch sports. The Tennis Channel is 455 on Time Warner Manhattan and 217 on DirecTV. ESPN is 209 on DirecTV and 29 and 729 (HD) on Time Warner. Your channels will be different.

This is your captain.
A jumbo jet is making its final approach to Calgary Airport. The Pilot comes on the intercom, "This is your Captain. We're on our Final descent into Calgary. I want to thank you for flying with us Today and hope you enjoy your stay in the Calgary area".

He forgets to switch off the intercom. Now the whole plane can hear his conversation from the cockpit.

The copilot can be heard saying to the pilot, "So, Skip, whatcha got planned while we're in Calgary?"

"Well," says the skipper, "first I'm gonna check into the hotel, take a big crap.... Then I'm gonna take that new stewardess with the huge tits out for dinner.... I 'm gonna wine and dine her, take her back to my room and give her a ride on the baloney pony all night long."

Aghast and amused, everyone on the plane hears this and immediately begins looking up and down the aisle, trying to figure out who this new stewardess is that the pilot's talking about.

Meanwhile, the new stewardess is seated at the very back of the plane. She is so embarrassed that she starts running toward the cockpit to turn the intercom off. Halfway down the aisle, she trips over an old lady's bag and down she goes.

The little old lady leans over and says: "No need to hurry, dear. He's gotta land the plane and take a shit first.

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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