All News, All the Time — Even Under Water? July 16, 1999February 13, 2017 For those who take their laptops to the pool, I’ve just turned on Chapter 13 of Fire & Ice. (You already have Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12.) It’s about the Quiz Show scandals of the late 1950’s. (What would they think when they found out wrestling was rigged, too?) But it’s also about the relationship between Charles Revson and his younger brother Martin. Ouch. For those who would rather go in the water, you may recall my quest for the Sony Swim-man — a Walkman you could wear swimming laps. Never found one. But now (no thanks to the Internet; with just a good old-fashioned quarter-page ad in the New York Times Sunday Magazine) I am the proud owner of three Swimmers Choice underwater radios. They won’t play tapes, but I can listen to FM radio lap after boring lap. I have three because you got a third one free if you bought two. I only needed one, but . . . well, you know. They run $34.95 apiece. I knew the sound wouldn’t be as good as from that famous Bose “Wave Radio” you see advertised everyplace for $350. But I’d like to see how well the Bose Wave Radio would do in a real wave. (Three hundred fifty dollars for a radio? I got mine cheap, from a writer who had gotten it directly from Bose to “review.” He had decided not to spring for the wholesale price to keep it, so — expecting Mahler himself to jumping out of the thing for that price, even wholesale — I bought it instead. And I must sheepishly report that, to my tin ear, my $12 Sony Dream Machine clock radio sounds very nearly as good.) Anyway, this little yellow Swimmers Choice with its little black earplugs works really well, under the circumstances . . . when you’re on dry land. Under water, or even just stroking your way through it, you do hear occasional patches of sound, sometimes faint, sometimes blaring, but they are more or less drowned out by the sound of your swimming. In case your pool is located in the shadow of a 50,000-watt radio antenna (or the FM equivalent thereof), and in case you swim very, very quietly, you may want to call 800-839-5002 to order your own. But I wouldn’t rush to buy three.
Clipping Those Electronic Coupons A Penny Saved is 1.5 Cents Earned July 15, 1999February 13, 2017 Robert Doucette: “Although I also admire Amazon.com, I have stopped buying from them in favor of a site called positively-you.com. I love the site for many reasons. It was run from the spare bedroom of a college professor in Iowa who started it because he loves books. They were profitable from the first day (their fixed costs are about $150/mo). And, best of all, you can donate 10% of your purchase price to any charity you want. Why would you buy books from anyone else?” Well, perhaps because others charge less? Barry Basden: “Go to http://www.bestbookbuys.com and look up a title. You may find a delivered price even cheaper than the booksamillion club price.” The title I tried this on showed booksamillion.com as the cheapest of the bunch — $10.97 delivered (46% off the price of a paperback), vs. $14.35 at Amazon. Ralphe Wiggins saved even more: “Bestbookbuys.com compares prices at about a dozen different sites. I recently bought a book that was priced at $107 at every site but Borders, where it was $69! Of the three technical books that I bought, there was a different best-price site for each.” Tom Mathies: “As a guy interested in saving a buck and as a computer science professor, I like to follow how online shopping is evolving. I agree that competition makes it difficult for an online store to earn a profit.” If it’s books you’re after, Tom suggests http://www.acses.com. But forget books. Try deal-finder.com, flamingoworld.com, and http://www.albany.net/~tiacat/Refunding/Offer.html. All three list deals and coupon codes on a variety of items, the modern-day electronic equivalent of 40 cents off on a can of coffee. Only you need never leave your chair, and you typically save $5 or more. Thanks, Tom.
Can You Do Well AND Do Good? July 14, 1999February 13, 2017 Debra Pappler: “I live overseas (Tokyo) and want to invest in some kind of environmentally friendly / sustainable future mutual fund, the kind you see ads for in UTNE Reader and the like. I’ve gotten the prospectuses from couple of places but I wasn’t happy with their fees. Do you have any recommendations? I hope that making money and being good to the environment aren’t mutually exclusive.” My own feeling is that this is sort of like recycling in a community where the garbage is later just all thrown together. It makes you feel good, and you WANT to help … but recycling (in such a circumstance) really doesn’t. That is, I’d invest for best results (which usually means finding an index fund or two with really low annual expenses); then give some of those results to worthy environmental causes. That said, you could do worse than to check out http://www.citizensfunds.com/ . At least in recent years, socially responsible investing has been a good strategy for high performance, because the most forward-looking companies, socially, tend also to be forward-looking in other respects as well. Viva la France. Happy birthday, Duncan.
He Who Controls Seinfeld Laughs Last July 13, 1999February 13, 2017 Erich Riesenberg: “PriceSCAN.com is the best web price-comparison service I’ve seen. Very thorough. Hard to see how Amazon will ever be profitable, especially as broadband improves and checking prices becomes an automatic feature. Explorer and Netscape will probably have a BUY button, person will enter item name, list of cheapest site to buy it will come up automatically and person will just hit a CONFIRM button.” [If it’s only books you’re after, you might try http://www.boolah.com. This must be run out of someone’s garage because the server is always busy. It searches for your book at Amazon but also shows the prices at Barnes & Noble and Borders, letting you link straight to your book there if one’s cheaper. The plus: It’s fast and convenient (or will be once they have it running right). Just an extra four seconds to save $1.40. (The book I checked was discounted 30% at all three booksellers, but from a list price of $24.95 at Amazon versus just $22.95 at Barnes & Noble.) The minus: It only checks the Big Three. You’ll generally save more at, for example, booksamillion.com.] My own feeling, oft expressed, is that e-commerce is great for consumers and the economy but will be no bonanza to most investors. E-commerce makes price comparisons so easy, it heightens competition. Competition is tough on profits — and hence investors (should the day ever return when stock prices are related in some way to profits). I think the ultimate winners will be the folks who control the Seinfeld reruns. Right? Anything you watch — even your screen saver — will have little tabs across the top, and a little window to type in what you want: “A Case of Bud Light.” You’ll then click “add to my regular order” (so it gets aggregated with the rest of the stuff you’ve elected to have delivered Every Tuesday Between Six and Nine) or “NOW!” (so the Domino’s Pizza guy comes racing over with it). Whatever you’re watching will be your shopping portal . . . and the chances are, Seinfeld reruns will be capturing a lot of eyeballs. In the New York Metropolitan area at 11pm there are two kinds of people: those watching Seinfeld on “the WB” and those racing home from dinner to do so. Or the portal could be even more basic than that. The top inch of your computer screen might be controlled by the computer maker itself. (You’d put up with this because the computer, thus subsidized, would be irresistibly cheap.) There, at the top of the screen, no matter what you were doing or watching, you could click a BUY button and Dell or Compaq or IBM or whoever controlled that button would rake off its little piece of the action as it found you the item you wanted at the lowest price — a price so low the vendor could hardly make much from the transaction. OK, I’ll admit to being out of my depth here. A lot of smart people have spent a lot more time thinking this through than me. But tell me again why AMZN, which I love and admire, but which has never made a dime of profit, and owns very little that Barnes & Noble does not, is worth twelve times as much? Why it is worth three times as much as The New York Times Company? Why it is worth substantially more than Federal Express and United Airlines combined?
Send Andy to Kansas July 12, 1999March 25, 2012 A lot of you may already have gotten this from a friend, but if not — or if you haven’t acted on it yet — click here to go to PlanetRx and get three free products of your choice. (Well, there’s $3.95 shipping.) When you do, I’m supposed to get frequent flier miles. And if enough people click here, I might actually be one of four Grand Prize Winners who get 25,000 miles — enough for a coach ticket anywhere in the US. Even Kansas. Like an idiot, I told you about this free stuff (and some other free stuff) in my July 1 column, before I knew about this. If you clicked over to PlanetRx from that column, sure, you got your free stuff, but I got nothing. But now, if you click here, it’s Topeka here I come. (The rules say I’m not supposed to post this on a bulletin board, or some public forum. But this is my web site, and you guys are old friends by now, so I hardly think this is cheating. If it is, I’m sure they’ll disallow me, but you’ll still get your free stuff.) Some of you were wondering how I would get paid for this daily column? Do I sell subliminal banner ads you just can’t see? Am I secretly sponsored by the Used Car Dealers of America? By the Anti-Tobacco Lobby? No . . . I was just waiting for a deal like this to come along. Anyway, click here, get your free stuff, and if I win, I’ll send you a postcard.
Hunger – II July 9, 1999February 13, 2017 To those of you who get this column Q-paged automatically each day, my apologies — I posted yesterday’s too late to make it, so you got a repeat of the day before. Soon Q-Page will be smart enough to send you columns only once they have changed. But for now, here it is again. To those of you who did read yesterday’s column, here it is again — but with “the answers” appended. (To those of you who have no idea what Q-Page is, but would like to get this page e-mailed to you automatically each morning, just scroll to the bottom of this page and click the Q-Page button. With AOL, unfortunately, it comes as an attachment. Maybe the forthcoming AOL 5.0 this fall will fix that. But for those with other Internet Service Providers, it seems to work quite well.) # Have you been to hungersite.com? Every time you visit and click, one of its sponsors buys a hungry person a meal (limit: one click per day). I’ve clicked a few times, and it got me to wondering . . . how do we know they gave away 20,865 meals on July 7? Did the folks from USA Today and Yahoo! who’ve plugged this site checked to be sure? My guess is that, no, they didn’t check, but that, yes, the meals are being distributed, albeit not literally one-by-one on the days listed. I.e., the meal may cost a nickel (we are not talking about steak and potatoes in France — potato, I might note, does have an “e” when it’s plural — but, rather, one and a half cups of rice or something similar in a poor country). Presumably, the sponsor pays hungersite.com on some regular basis, and hungersite.com passes on all or a good chunk of the sponsorship money to groups like the UN’s World Food Program to be used to provide food to the hungry. I have a call in to the UN World Food Program — listed as the current beneficiary of our largesse — to make sure they have heard of the hungersite.com, and to get an idea of what sort of dollars are involved. In the meantime, one does wonder who, exactly, the hunger site is. Are there no names or faces out of modesty and altruism — definitely possible — or because full disclosure might tarnish the nice tone of this? In the Frequently Asked Questions section, you will see no question like, “Who Are You?” or “Who Started This?” Rather: “The Hunger Site was founded as an independent Internet site to help alleviate hunger in the world. It enables people to learn about hunger and to make free donations of food to the hungry. It is not owned by any company or affiliated with any group or organization.” Fair enough. But that could mean a bright young guy or gal is doing this and taking in a penny or two of his or her own for every click. To which I would say, basically: more power to him or her . . . but disclosure would be nice. (Imagine getting 10 million people a day to click this, and getting a penny from each — $100,000 a day.) Anyway, I hope to learn a bit more about this. In the meantime, I may set Quickbrowse to include http://www.hungersite.com in my daily fare, so I can quickly and efficiently click. Then again, how many seconds is a nickel even worth? (If your time is worth $20 an hour: 9 seconds.) If I find out anything interesting, I’ll let you know. So here’s what I’ve learned since posting this yesterday. The meals go for 3 cents each (at a nickel, I guessed high), which of course does not begin to cover the actual cost of getting a meal to the people involved, but may pay for the rice or grain itself. Sponsors pay 3.5 cents a click. Each day you click, you rack up three cents for the cause and half a cent for John Breen, in Bloomington, Indiana, who started and runs hungersite.com. (And who doubtless has some expenses to pay out of that half cent.) His intentions, I suspect, based on his e-mail to me, are good. In the short time the site has been up, it claims about 300,000 clicks, which at 3 cents each would work out to $9,000 for the UN World Food Program. And indeed, when I reached that outfit, I was told that $7,000 had thus far been received, and that they had been told another check was in the mail. The UNWFP seemed a bit perplexed by all this, and stressed to me it had no connection with hungersite.com, other than to have received three checks. So far, also, one assumes John Breen is 300,000 haepennies ahead of the game, before expenses and any payment for his time and talent — about $1,500. True, if a million children a day clicked, that would be $5,000 a day for John Breen (and $30,000 a day to help fight hunger). And if 10 million a day . . . well, but something tells me they won’t. And that if they did, John might well shave his cut of the action still further. In addition to the 3 cents, the site does help raise awareness of world hunger. And it links to organizations to which people may wish to donate actual money. In short, hungersite.com is a clever and, I like to think, well-intentioned idea, nicely executed; but — if your time is worth anything at all — unlikely to revoke the maxim that there is no free lunch.
Hunger July 8, 1999March 25, 2012 Have you been to hungersite.com? Every time you visit and click, one of its sponsors buys a hungry person a meal (limit: one click per day). I’ve clicked a few times, and it got me to wondering . . . how do we know they gave away 20,865 meals on July 7? Did the folks from USA Today and Yahoo! who’ve plugged this site checked to be sure? My guess is that, no, they didn’t check, but that, yes, the meals are being distributed, albeit not literally one-by-one on the days listed. I.e., the meal may cost a nickel (we are not talking about steak and potatoes in France — potato, I might note, does have an “e” when it’s plural — but, rather, one and a half cups of rice in Mauritania) . . . and the sponsor may pay hungersite.com monthly. Hungersite.com may then pass on all or a good chunk of the sponsorship money to groups like the UN’s World Food Program to be used to provide food to the hungry. I have a call in to the UN World Food Program — listed as the current beneficiary of our largesse — to make sure they have heard of the hungersite.com, and to get an idea of what sort of dollars are involved. In the meantime, one does wonder who, exactly, the hunger site is. Are there no names or faces out of modesty — definitely possible — or because full disclosure might tarnish the altruistic tone? In the Frequently Asked Questions section, you will see no question like, “Who Are You?” or “Who Started This?” Rather: “The Hunger Site was founded as an independent Internet site to help alleviate hunger in the world. It enables people to learn about hunger and to make free donations of food to the hungry. It is not owned by any company or affiliated with any group or organization.” Fair enough. But that could mean a bright young guy or gal is doing this and taking in a penny or two of his or her own for every click. To which I would say, basically: more power to him . . . but disclosure would be nice. (Imagine getting 1 million people a day to click, and a penny from each — $10,000 a day.) Anyway, I hope to learn a bit more about this. In the meantime, I may set Quickbrowse to include http://www.hungersite.com in my daily fare, so I can quickly and efficiently click. Then again, how many seconds is a nickel even worth? (If your time is worth $20 an hour: 9 seconds.) If I find out anything interesting, I’ll let you know.
Costly Addictions VI – The Smith Corona Caper July 7, 1999February 13, 2017 This one, from Larry Jensen, pretty much speaks for itself: “I was a witness to some interesting day trading manipulation recently, in one of the stocks I own, Smith Corona (SCCO). “[Full disclosure: I was employed by Smith Corona for nine years. I was given my 60-day layoff notice in May, 1995, and then — a week before it took effect in July — the company appointed a “turn-around expert” as its new CEO. His first action was to file for Chapter 11. In February, 1997, the reorganization was completed, and I finally got 70% of my severance pay in new Smith Corona stock. (The other 30% in cash mostly went straight to Uncle Sam, to pay the taxes on the imputed value of the stock.) Although, rationally, I’ve never had any confidence in the reorganization or the future of the company, I continue to hold the stock. I consider it my license to continue speaking out as the “loyal opposition” to management. I was the only “outside” stockholder at the 1997 annual meeting, and one of three at the 1998 meeting. All of us were vehemently negative!] “Since emerging from Chapter 11 in February, 1997, Smith Corona has racked up heavy losses, while trying to market a new line of products. Its stock has fallen precipitously over the past year, from 6 to as low as 5/8. “Last Wednesday, a day-trading web site, www.great-picks.com, selected Smith Corona as its pick of the week. Within hours, the stock jumped from 1 3/8 to 2 1/4, with a total volume of over half a million shares for the day (many times the average). But by the afternoon, the price started slipping, and it was back to 1 3/8 by Friday. “Reading all of the disclaimers on the great-picks web page, they (the sponsors of the page are essentially anonymous, with no identification beyond an e-mail address) make no effort to hide their purposes: ‘Our picks will have a small float, will be trading under $3.00 and will offer tremendous upward gains . . . Great-Picks, Inc., its executives, representatives or employees will invest in all posted picks and/or hold positions in the companies profiled, and these positions are obtained prior to announcement and publication of the Great-Picks.com pick on the web-site. Great-Picks.com, Inc., its executives, representatives or employees reserve the right to liquidate all or portions of these positions immediately after announcement of pick on the Great-picks.com web site.’ “In other words, they are touting a thinly traded stock, in order to make an instant profit off of those who take their advice! I can hardly find fault with manipulators who are so honest about their intentions. “But the big question is, why do they attract such a large following? Nobody day-trading a stock on their vague recommendation is holding it for any fundamental reasons. Pure herd mentality will cause a spike in the stock, and the participants must be engaging in the ‘greater fool’ theory, thinking they can get out before everyone else. But in this case, the time frame for the fools to catch on in measured in mere hours or minutes!” I went to the site and it really is sort of breathtaking. At the top, in large type: “Please read our disclaimer at the bottom of this page. This type of trading is only for experienced, seasoned traders.” But isn’t that sort of like the warnings to kids that smoking and sex and drinking are only for grown-ups? Does it deter? Or merely tempt? The disclaimer itself is much longer than the piece Larry quotes above, and it is all jammed together in a single, dense 474-word paragraph. But the site makes a big show of urging people to read it. Boiled down to its essence: “We decide on a stock to recommend and quietly load up on it. Then we make it our pick — and, if we like, sell it to you idiots.” Larry is right. This has nothing to do with investing. This is naive people playing musical chairs — against players (the executives of great-picks) who control the Victrola.
Reader Mail – Gift for a Newborn July 6, 1999January 29, 2017 From Alan Rogowsky: “Dyslexics have more fnu.” I forwarded this to a good-humored dyslexic friend who replied: “I don’t get it.” From Bob Downs: “Perhaps because I belong to organizations aimed at uniformed service members, I can beat quotesmith a goodly bit on medicare supplement plans and auto insurance. The price on the Plan D medicare supplement, for example, is $16 per month less than Blue Shield, the lowest price on quotesmith. However, I appreciate the column because it affirms that [I’m doing well].” From Yunah K: “I would like to make a gift of $200 to the newborn son of a good friend. My first instinct was to look into a 20 year treasury bond, but my husband suggested that an equity would probably be a better idea given the time frame. What do you think?” Your husband is right. Apart from the fact the Treasuries can’t be bought in such tiny denominations, over the long run, equities — ownership of business enterprises — are likely to do better, on average, than risk-free loans. (A Treasury bond represents a loan to the US government.) For those who simply cannot afford any risk, it’s worth “paying” for safety by way of a lower expected return. But young Elvis, here — he’s just getting started. And the longer he has to invest, the more likely that equities, for all their ups and downs, will eventually outperform Treasuries. Indeed, given the way inflation can wipe out bond values (in real, inflation-adjusted terms), you could argue that bonds are actually the riskier bet for someone with a very long time horizon. Inflation can knock the heck out of stock prices, too; but for the most part they eventually bob back up, riding on top of the newly-inflated price levels. That said, given the small size of the gift — more than I give friends’ newborns, but still — I wonder if you shouldn’t give it to the parents to combine with something else they are doing along these lines. This would also avoid the hassle of having to get the actual stock certificate and then transfer it into the newborn’s brokerage account. (How about clipping two $100 bills to a good investment guide and gift-wrapping that?)
The 223-Year Bull Market July 2, 1999March 25, 2012 [With apologies to a couple of very long-time readers who have read a version of this before . . .] One of my favorite things to do July 4th is to buy the New York Times, knowing that its back page will be a reproduction of the Declaration of Independence, and that I will be able to read it out loud to whatever younger folks happen to be around. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," wrote Thomas Jefferson, one of the largest slave-owners in Virginia. "That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." I rarely get through the entire list of grievances against King George III. (Did you see The Madness of King George? Great movie. If it rains Sunday, why not rent it — and 1776?) But there is something wonderfully anchoring about reading these words, written so long ago, that are so fundamental to our freedom, that connect us to each other, and that so changed the world — and continue to do so today. And the fact that Jefferson was, until the day he died, a slave-owner, far from putting the lie to any of this, merely emphasizes it. The Declaration is about fundamental fairness and the need to change when things are unjust. Over the years, the notion of people pursuing their happiness with equal rights — whether they be black or Jewish or women or gay — has steadily gained ground. In Turkey today a woman needs signed permission from her husband to work. In Albania, until a few years ago, two men could be imprisoned for 10 years for loving each other. Even in America, as recently as 1960, it was anyone’s guess whether a Catholic (gasp!) could be elected president. Who would have imagined that the number one draft choice of the Republican party in 1996 would have been a black general? Or that in the summer of 1999 the Stonewall Inn — where 30 years earlier a group of citizens who had had it with police harassment fought back — would be added to the National Register of Historic Places? It’s a bull market that, with ups and downs, began 223 years ago tomorrow. Drive safely.