The Thoughts of Lamdar

A little while ago, out of curiosity, I signed up for those free promo subscriptions to a few investment advisor magazines.  I figured any new source of investing knowledge would be useful, and who should know more about it than investment advisors.  Much to my chagrin, the magazines contained almost no information on investing though, and only information on how to market your services, retain clients, and make money off those clients.  Think about that for a second…

If you’re buying a house right now because you need a place to live and like the benefits that go along with owning your home, that’s a good thing as long as you’re able to make whatever the monthly payments are. If you want to buy a house because it’s a great investment and you’ve heard people quote the fact that real estate has never gone down, you are quite uninformed. While it’s true that real estate hasn’t gone down across the nation, locally many cities have seen declines. I’ve been hearing many stories about real estate advice that people have been getting, and I find quite a lot of it is very irresponsible. Here’s a page that chronicles real estate articles from the NY Times about the market in New Jersey through the 80’s and 90’s. Note that the main decline was over several years so those hoping for a quick pop will likely be disappointed. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I dug real deep to find an article that I still reference all the time even though it’s pretty old.  It’s the story of an auto company with mounting debts that threatened to close them down.  Leave it to those brilliant union leaders to figure out a way for the company to continue paying its employees without selling any cars.  I’m just wondering why you would continue working for the auto company when you could just sell your own goods and pocket the full $50.

Most people will pass over pennies and nickels on the ground, but did you know that they’re actually worth the most now if you look at production costs?  While that dollar bill in your pocket only cost several cents to make, those pennies actually cost 1.23 cents each and the nickels cost 5.73 cents each.  If the cost of zinc keeps going up, the next boom you see after the real estate bubble pops might be hoarding pennies.

Ok, anybody that reads my blog probably can’t actually afford hedge funds, but if you were wondering why the normal fees are 20%, it’s because they buy things like this. I’d be willing to bet that none of the people buying these things would actually be able to pick out the fish that cost $3000 if you put them in a tank of well bred $100 exotic fish. I guess value is really just the price that someone is willing to pay though, so if you can sell a rock for $5k, it’s worth $5k now. Sounds oddly like the real estate market right now…

Everybody has seen those nice pairs of Abibas shoes or Folex watches in Chinatown.  You know what I’m talking about, the kind that are hidden at those little shops and cost about 1/10th the price of their similar sounding counterparts.  Well, watch out for the RedBerry now.  The thing that makes me laugh about this one is how blatent it is and how high up the shadiness goes.  Hmm… RIM, you want to launch the BlackBerry in China?  First you need to get all these permits and sort out these government regulations that will take just long enough to allow us to launch the RedBerry a month before you.

With the rampant spread of identity theft, I’m sure everyone is careful to shred all those credit card offers they get periodically in the mail.  That’s probably still not enough though as shown by this guy’s little experiment.   Maybe you should burn those applications instead and pee on the ashes since credit card companies will still take them after they’re torn and taped up.

I’m kinda surprised nobody really tried crawling the web specifically for stock information before. Then again, those that are were probably smart to keep that fact a secret since I’m sure companies are going to start practicing black hat techniques to boost their values to those crawlers.

I really like this new real estate site that shows prices for houses overlayed on dynamic maps.  No idea how accurate the prices are, but the site got a lot of publicity (including a cnn main page link) so I’m hoping the mainstream press will let us know if it’s really far off.  I’m sure it will get a lot of bashing from the NAR regardless.

Wow, today Google (GOOG) had quite a ride.  First they’re buying napster to compete with iTunes, then they’re not.  Then rumors spread that they’re planning on toppling Microsoft with their own Ubuntu Linux based OS, but that was also denied.  To finish the day, they reported earnings far below expectations causing their stock to dive in the after hours.  Hopefully tomorrow brings some more excitement.

It annoys me when people find out that I do well with stocks and they just ask, “What stocks are good now?”  Rather than trying to actually learn how to pick stocks, they just want a quick answer.  Brings to mind that proverb about giving a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but teach him how to fish and he’ll eat for life.  I think that’s the thing that really separates the successful people from those that are not: the desire to actually learn a skill rather than having the finished products handed to them.  With stocks, unless a person completely holds your hand and tells you “buy this now” and “sell this now,” you will need to learn skills beyond just the picking of companies.  So to the point, don’t go in the forums and buy stocks that we like unless you know the rest of the strategy that goes along with it.  And yes, we are trying to get that part down too.  Till then…