A Way to Play the Dollar? October 31, 2003January 22, 2017 Per yesterday’s link, Warren Buffett thinks the US dollar it could fall relative to other currencies and has, he says, been buying foreign currencies for the first time in his life. In which regard this query is particularly apropos: Tom MacFarland: ‘It now seems that its possibly for the American consumer to easily and affordably open up foreign currency accounts (Deposit, Money Market and fixed-term CD) with small minimum amounts over the web (that are FDIC insured) that pay an interest rate appropriate for the target currency. I knew this was in principle possible previously, but the minimum amounts were not accessible to many of us. A friend called my attention to everbank.com. I would be interested in your comments and those of your readers.’ ☞ Well, Everbank is new to me, but at first blush this looks as if it could be worth your pursuing. One concern is that the FDIC won’t insure your account against currency loss (if you choose to denominate your savings in Euros or renminbi, say, and if the Euro or renminbi should fall rather than rise against the dollar). It only insures against insolvency of the bank. Another concern is – what do I know about Everbank? (And what kinds of spreads does it charge as you buy and sell foreign currencies?) But, like you, I think it’s intriguing, and, like you, I would be interested in the thoughts of readers who may have had some experience with this bank, or with competing opportunities. Wouldn’t it be a wild coincidence if the best strategy for your savings were always to keep all of it denominated in US dollars? Clearly, there are times other currencies will do better. Warren Buffett (and, apparently, Sir John Templeton) are two pretty smart guys who think this may be one of those times. Happy Halloween.
Warren’s Warning – and Way Out October 30, 2003January 22, 2017 Click here. (Well, or here.) Tomorrow: Saving in a Currency Other Than the Dollar?
Hoax Busters, Earbuds, Bananas October 29, 2003January 22, 2017 THREE GOOD HOAX BUSTERS The suspected hotel key-card urban legend reported yesterday turns out definitely to be one – as you know if you read yesterday’s column after 10:02am Eastern time, when I revised it. Thanks to the dozens of you who sleuthed this for me. E.g.: Melissa Hines: ‘Whenever you are in doubt about something like this, you can quickly check snopes.com. For more info on today’s urban legend, check out this.’ ☞ I always do check out snopes.com, but for some reason my search bulb was particularly dim that night. Not finding it quickly, and not having seen it before, I vaingloriously imagined I might actually be the first to report it. Ego run wild. In addition to snopes, I could have checked: truthorfiction, which yields this. And hoaxbusters, which yields this. Good sites, all, to bookmark. AND SPEAKING OF PUTTING THE LIE TO MISIMPRESSIONS . . . Shelley Steen: ‘I am currently reading Al Franken’s book and with every chapter I am getting more upset. It is time to take the gloves off!! I am daring everyone I know who is a Republican to read this book. It is just an amazing read!’ CLEARLY AUDIBLE Eric Batson: ‘With the new iTunes for Windows and an exclusive deal with Audible, Apple’s iTunes Music Store is the slickest, easiest way to buy and use Audible’s content.’ BUT NOT WITHOUT HEADPHONES Jim: ‘When I click on the link to find out more about the Sony MDR-EX70LP earbuds, I get an error message.’ ☞ Try this link? (Cheaper, too!) BANANAS Bananas! They are just so wonderful, safe, comfortable, unchallenging – like coming home. Could this be the contented little chimp in us? Tomorrow: Warren’s Warning – and Way Out
You Could Buy One Share or Two Light Bulbs Extra: The Birth of an Urban Legend! October 28, 2003February 23, 2017 BOREALIS So Borealis is hanging in there around $8 a share, meaning that the entire company, divided, as it is, into 5 million shares, is now valued at $40 million. One of the things it owns is 5.2 million shares of its Cool Chips subsidiary, currently trading around $14 – or roughly $72 million worth. To me that means either that BOREF is worth at least $72 million (how can a wallet with $72 in it be worth less than $72?), or else – more likely – that COLCF is worth less than $72 million. BOREF also owns most of Chorus Motors, which has begun trading (all of these wildly speculative stocks are listed on the ‘Pink Sheets‘), with a current bid and ask of $9 bid, $23 offered, a wide spread to be sure. With 6.2 million shares outstanding, sellers are valuing CHOMF at $56 million, buyers at $142 million. Are we having fun, or what? THE HEADWATERS OF AN URBAN LEGEND A smart hedge fund manager forwarded this seemingly compelling alert to me and the rest of his list: The below info was forwarded by the Dallas U.S. Secret Service Field Office ********************************************* Subject: Identity Theft Warning Southern California law enforcement professionals assigned to detect new threats to personal security issues, recently discovered what type of information is embedded in the credit card type hotel room keys used throughout the industry. Although room keys differ from hotel to hotel, a key obtained from the “DoubleTree” chain that was being used for a regional Identity Theft Presentation was found to contain the following the information: * Customer’s (your) name * Customer’s partial home address * Hotel room number * Check in date and check out date * Customer’s (your) credit card number and expiration date! When you turn a key in to the front desk your personal information is there for any employee to access by simply scanning the card in the hotel scanner. An employee can take a hand full of cards home and using a scanning device, access the information onto a laptop computer and go shopping at your expense. Simply put, hotels do not erase these cards until an employee issues the card to the next hotel guest. It is usually kept in a drawer at the front desk with YOUR INFORMATION ON IT!!!! The bottom line is, keep the cards or destroy them! NEVER leave them behind and NEVER turn them in to the front desk when you check out of a room. They will not charge you for the card. Information courtesy of: Pasadena Police Department I checked with a friend who works at a hotel, who checked with colleagues throughout the industry, and none of them, so far, knows of any hotel that copies your name or credit card or address to the key. This inadvertent hoax is just an urban legend in the making – like witnessing the birth of a star. Then again, in the course of looking into this, I did learn that the plastic key cards cost hotels only 20 cents each; so now at least I know not to feel guilty when I forget to return them. CHEAP BULBS Jonathan Hochman: ‘Home Depot now sells nice Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (CFL’s) for as little as 2 for $8.00. CFL’s can replace ordinary lightbulbs. They use 75% less energy and last much longer. Early generations of CFL’s were dim and expensive. However, the new fourth generation bulbs work even better than incandescent bulbs. At these prices the bulbs pay for themselves in a matter of months.’
Air France, Genocide, and the Plague October 26, 2003February 23, 2017 A thousand apologies for missing columns last week, but for your $6,200 business class seat on Air France you do not get an outlet for your laptop. (I hasten to add this was not my $6,200, and that by using the American Express platinum card we got a second seat, for Charles, thrown in for free. That’s the main perk of the platinum card – a free companion ticket when you fly first or business class abroad. To which I hasten to add, further, that I didn’t pay for the platinum card either. The group flying us over asked me to get a platinum card at their $395 expense so they could pay $6,200-plus-$395 rather than $12,400.) You do get an entertainment system in your Air France business class armrest, and a little shaving kit with socks and a shoe horn. You get to see your altitude, speed, position, and the outside temperature. (Bundle up!) You get an extra shoulder-height flexible reading light and an extendable power foot rest and, if you’re sitting upstairs, wonderful window-seat storage bins that double, when shut, as side tables. (Upstairs? That hump in a 747 is home to 10 rows of business class seats, two lavatories, and, at the very front, the cockpit.) But in case – being in business class – you had a little actual work to do on your ten-hour flight (like writing a column or two), you’d better bring a lot of batteries. The irony (and what are the French if not ironic) is that there is laptop power in the seats in first class, or so someone told me. The one class in which, of course, no one does have any work to do. So it was not the dog that ate my homework, it was Air France. Charles and I, meanwhile, ate very nicely ourselves, both on the plane (where you get stainless steel forks but plastic knives, for reasons so completely stupid, when you think about it, one barely knows where to begin) and in Florence, which is where we were. There are two things to note about Florence. Well, maybe two hundred, but start with these: It is a very beautiful, wonderful little city. None of the hotels that advertise broadband Internet connections actually has them. So, again, it was not the dog that ate my homework last week, but a conspiracy of bandwidth in league with AOL, which insists I must upgrade from Version 5.0 in order to reach the Web, but that I can’t upgrade from Version 5.0, because I have too many addresses. This after three years of high-level contacts, all of whom agree there must be a million other users like me (out of their 30-odd million) who would gladly pay an extra $25 a month for ‘power’ status – an extra $25 million a month for AOL – if only they would allow us more than 1500 addresses. Feel free to write to me about Florence (we got to dine in a palazzo with a marchesa! we had a medieval feast in a castle with monks, jugglers, and seven knights in actual shining armor smashing each other with actual broadswords! we saw Galileo’s actual scientific instruments, Michelangelo’s restored David [who is about 15 feet tall, so Goliath must have been 25 feet tall], and magnificent views of the river Arno and its bridges, with cedar trees silhouetted against the jumbled clouds on the hills in the far background), but please don’t write me about AOL and all the simple solutions to my problem. Having no power at my seat, I spent much of the flight home reading Samantha Power’s powerful Pulitzer-prize-winning ‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide. It seems that for all our goodness and can-do spirit . . . and for all our willingness, over the past century, to dabble in international affairs (think CIA) . . . the United States has ‘never in its history intervened to stop genocide and [has] in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred.’ Take Iraq. In 1987-88, Saddam killed close to 100,000 mostly unarmed Kurds, many of them women and children. We had been giving Iraq $500 million a year in Commodity Credit Corporation credits to buy U.S. farm products. ‘After the September 1988 attack, Senator Claiborne Pell introduced a sanctions package,’ Powers writes, ‘[arguing] that not even a U.S. ally could get away with gassing its own people. But the Bush administration, instead of suspending the CCC program or any of the other perks extended to the Iraqi regime, in 1989, a year after Hussein’s savage gassing attacks and deportations had been documented, doubled its commitment to Iraq, hiking annual CCC credits above $1 billion.’ (So the urgency to topple Saddam precisely when we did, with debate timed for the 2002 U.S. mid-term election, may not have stemmed in any really important way from concern for his atrocities, of which the Bush team, including Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, who served in both administrations, had been long aware.) And then there’s Rwanda. It suffers the double plague of genocide and HIV-AIDS. In 1994, Samantha Power tells us, an average of 8,000 Tutsi a day were slaughtered for 100 days, in a country whose population was 8 million. (Imagine if, on September 11 and the days following, we had lost 28 million people instead of 4,000.) ‘Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian major general who commanded UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda in 1994, appealed for permission to disarm militias and to prevent the extermination of Rwanda’s Tutsi three months before the genocide began. Denied this by his political masters at the United Nations, he watched corpses pile up around him as Washington led a successful effort to remove most of the peacekeepers under his command and then aggressively worked to block authorization of UN reinforcements.’ And today, according to Laurie Garrett – another brilliant author whom we got to meet in Florence (The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health) – today Rwanda is simply collapsing under the weight of the HIV-AIDS plague. So, too, much of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. And the Caribbean. With China and Russia and many others facing enormous problems as well. In Florence, in the 14th Century, four out of five inhabitants died of the plague. And yet, somehow, the city survived and went on to flourish. To make sure today’s story has an equally happy ending, it could be useful to read Power’s and Garrett’s books and try to think through what we might be doing better.
The Kid Stays in the Picture October 23, 2003February 23, 2017 If you haven’t got audible.com (and, full disclosure, I own the stock, albeit more out of enthusiasm for the service than the stock), then as before I recommend it highly. Not just for you, but as the perfect gift. Say you have a parent or grandparent who has trouble seeing (or hearing, for that matter). 1. Buy him or her an audible subscription, but perhaps with your address so he/she doesn’t have to deal with the mechanics of it. 2. When the MP3 player arrives, load it up with books you think the recipient would enjoy; then take it over for Christmas or Chanukah, Kwanzaa or Good Pagant’s Day. (You could also listen to the books yourself, if you wanted, through your computer speakers.) 3. Those weekly or bi-weekly visits? No more conversation lulls . . . you’d now have a mission and plenty to discuss. You’d bring the reloaded MP3 player, discussing past and future selections. (You might want to get a second MP3 player, so you can drop off the newly loaded one and pick up the listened-to one for reloading.) For someone who has trouble reading, this is an obvious joy. But even for someone hard of hearing, it could bring pleasure, because with the pricy-but-worth-it Sony earphones I’ve recommended, I think most folks would hear quite well. (Of course, they should be careful: they’ll never hear the phone or the doorbell.) My point is: The Kid Stays in the Picture, read by the author himself. What a life.
If the Man in the Moon Owned Palestinian Mutual Funds October 21, 2003February 23, 2017 INDEX VS TAX-MANAGED Marty: “I’ve had Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index Fund (which mirrors the Wilshire 5000) as my core taxable holding for some time. I liked owning the entire market (not just large caps), and figured that this should be pretty tax efficient. Could you discuss the pros and cons of Index vs. ‘Tax Managed’ Funds?” ☞ Index funds are, by their nature, tax efficient (they subject you to little capital gains tax until you sell, because they rarely have to take gains) – and they carry lower fees and expenses than the actively managed funds. So, yes, a tax-managed fund may eliminate one of the disadvantages of the typical actively managed fund (namely, the taxes it exposes you to). But it doesn’t eliminate the other (higher fees). THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX: A PLAN FOR PALESTINIAN ECONOMY This comes from a very smart money manager who has the ear of serious people. It’s not new (they have not yet listened that closely), but it’s a fascinating notion for boot-strapping a bereft economy. If you like pondering audacious proposals, take a look. PICKING UP THE PACE I was in a magnificent cathedral today that took 140 years to build. They started in 1296; finished March 25, 1436. Consider that the project to put a man on the moon took nine years. (Or was it eight?)
Google THIS, Henry Fonda October 20, 2003February 23, 2017 Click here for some Google tips from PC Magazine. And here for some of Google’s own guidance. And, especially, don’t forget to add Google to your browser’s toolbar, as I suggested this summer. It’s a huge convenience. In the old days, I set my browser’s homepage to Google. Now, I use the ‘blank’ homepage – which comes up very fast because there’s nothing to load – and Google is already there, in my toolbar. Wherever I am on the Internet, Google is there. (Like Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath.) Need a quick phone number? Type the name and state, and you may well get it. A quick calculation? Enter it and click. A quick stock quote? Just type the symbol. The more you know about Google, the handier it gets. As I’ve suggested in the past, it’s magic. It can even translate! I entered . . . Hey, Marc! Look at me — I am speaking German. Is this not amazing? Tomorrow, I leave for Italy with Charles. But for now, I am using Google to translate from English, which is my native tongue, to German, which is yours. And it rendered . . . Hey, Treber! Blick auf mich — ich spreche Deutsches. Ist dieses nicht erstaunlich? Morgen verlasse ich für Italien mit Charles. Aber für jetzt, verwende ich Google, um von Englisch zu übersetzen, das meine gebürtige Zunge, zum Deutschen ist, der Ihr ist. Of course, this has its limits. I then took the German and had Google translate it back into English. Here’s what it came up with: Hey, Treber! View of me — I speak German. Is this not amazing? Tomorrow I leave for Italy with Charles. But for now, I use Google, in order to translate from English to, my native tongue, to the German am, which their is. And then (you can see where this is heading), I used Google to translate that back into German: Hey, Treber! Ansicht von mir — ich spreche Deutsches. Ist dieses nicht erstaunlich? Morgen verlasse ich für Italien mit Charles. Aber für jetzt, verwende ich Google, um von Englisch zu, meine gebürtige Zunge, zum Deutschen morgens zu übersetzen, der ihr ist. And back again: Hey, Treber! Opinion of me — I speak German. Is this not amazing? Tomorrow I leave for Italy with Charles. But for now, I use Google, in order to translate from English to, my native tongue, to the German in the morning, which their is. Pretty darned good, if you ask me . . . and (are we spoiled or what?) free! Translating that last English version to French: Hé, Treber! Opinion de moi — je parle allemand. Est-ce que ce n’est pas étonnant? Demain je pars pour l’Italie avec Charles. Mais pour maintenant, j’emploie Google, afin de traduire de l’anglais à, ma langue maternelle, à l’Allemand le matin, qui leur est. And thence to German: Hé, Treber! Meinung von mir spreche ich deutsch. Ist es, daß es nicht erstaunlich ist? Morgen gehe ich für Italien mit Charles weg. Aber jetzt gebrauche ich mich Google, um vom Englischen zu übersetzen an meine Muttersprache am Deutschen der Morgen, die ihnen ist. And finally back to English: Hé, Treber! I speak opinion of me German. Is it that it is not amazing? Tomorrow I leave for Italy with Charles. But I use now Google, over from the English to to translate itself to my native language at the German the morning, which them is. Well, the only question I’m really left with is – who the hell is Treber? But I really have left for Italy with Charles, so if travel vagaries prevent transmission . . . or translation . . . of this week’s columns, or they’re all about the pasta, you’ll know why. Capisca? But wait. You’re thinking, what did he mean about Henry Fonda? Well, for those who missed the reference, I had in mind that very moving (and, I would argue, hauntingly Democratic) scene where Fonda’s character tells Ma Joad . . . “Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad – I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise, and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too.” And now you’re thinking, how’d-a he find-a this Fonda? And even this (very warbly) soundclip of it? Does he spend hours researching these columns? And I tell you, coming full circle, that it’s magic! I typed Alt-G, which instantly jumped the cursor to my browser’s Google toolbar. Then I typed “Wherever there’s a” “I’ll be there” [with the quotation marks] and, searching the entire universe of human data output in a second and a half – poof! – there it was. Boy, this is an exciting time to be alive.
A Penny for My Thoughts October 17, 2003January 22, 2017 GETTING YOUR 403(b) INTO BETTER HANDS A Former Employee of American Century Investments: ‘Tuesday, you explained how 403(b) participants can instruct their employers to pass their contributions through to the mutual fund of their choice. One of your readers then wrote: ‘I called American Century to ask about this, and they never heard of it. ‘ American Century (ACI) operates in divisions. The communication between them can be really spotty. If your reader remains committed to ACI funds, he should call back and ask to talk to someone in ‘Institutional’… and preferably a ‘TRS’ (Team Resource Specialist).’ AND YOUR 401(k)? Les Rosenbaum: ‘Does this apply to 401(k) plans?’ ☞ Sadly . . . no. NEW ENGLANDERS: ONE-THIRD OF A CENT A MINUTE Robert Pistey: ‘Yes, this is true. No strings, no fees. Ten bucks buys you 3000 minutes of long distance. Scroll down the left column to select Talk 1000 minutes. Then choose the 10 dollar recharge option. This is cheapest I’ve found. International rates are unbeatable also (2 cents/minute to Europe). Click here.’ ☞ The catch seems to be that for those outside New England, who can’t initiate their calls via a local number, there is a six-cent-a-minute charge for using an 800-number. SO, FOR THE COST OF A THREE-MINUTE CALL . . . Gray Chang: ‘Here’s another money-saving tip for your readers. If they want a copy of your book, My Vast Fortune, it is available used from amazon.com for a very reasonable price. Right now there’s a copy available for 1 cent (plus shipping). I got my copy for 50 cents.’ ☞ Ah, but at least my work fetches something. That’s more than Gray can say for his work. ‘In the 1980s [he continues] I sold computer games for $20. Now I am trying to give away these same games for free, and nobody is taking them. In fact, I am offering a cash prize just to try a game! If you have a minute, please take a look at The Dog Daze Home Page at: concentric.net/~ktchang.’ OK, it turns out Gray is not offering a very big prize – two bucks. (Does he live on a tiny little planet where books sell for a penny and cash prizes are $2 and even the basketball players are only half an inch tall?) But, Gray says, ‘I spent several months of my young life writing my masterpiece computer game, Bumpomov’s Dogs, but almost nobody has seen it.’ Hey – check it out! HE DOESN’T KNOW IT, BUT WE HAVE ACTUALLY BUGGED BILL BARON’S BREAKFAST NOOK Bill Baron: ‘The breakfast conversation today at our house: 1. My 403(b) plan, the high-expense choices it offers, and the roadblocks I was encountering in trying to move the accumulated funds. 2. Where to find an inexpensive fax service on the web? Now, after reading today’s posting: 1. Rev. Ruling 90-24 solves the problem, and 403bwise.com was extremely helpful. 2. OneSuite.com offers a fax service for $1 a month. Thanks for the personalized help.’
Extraterrestrials Are Not Buying Borealis October 16, 2003February 23, 2017 INADVERTENT ANDY DAY The dog had nothing to do with it; something happened at Verio, which hosts this site, and it broke. Sorry. A SLIM – SLIM! – CHANCE THIS STOCK MAY NOT GO TO ZERO Long-term readers will be more than a little familiar with a wildly speculative company – Borealis – whose stock is almost surely going to zero (how could it not?), but of which I own a ton. After years of sitting around $3.50, giving the entire company a market cap of a used ten-seat corporate jet – yet hanging in there better than most blue chips you might have bought in 1999 or 2000 – it has recently come to sit at more like $8 a share, giving it a total market value of roughly the cost of a new 10-seat corporate jet. In years past, it announced a deal with an elevator company which went nowhere, and an evaluation by Boeing, which seemed to have positive results but went nowhere. Maybe the recent Rolls Royce announcement will go nowhere, too. And yet the company perseveres. Yesterday, a deal was announced with Semikron, which apparently knows something about electric motors, certainly a great deal more than I do. I won’t rehash the whole saga . . . only the warning that you should not gamble even a dime in this speculation that you cannot genuinely afford to lose, because you probably will. Anything that purports to be as astonishingly good as Borealis almost always turns out too good to be true. But I continue to think that, as wild speculations go, this one is more than a little fun. If Borealis has invented and patented the hugely significant new technologies it claims, could they not be worth as much as, say, the Krispy Kreme Donut? That company is valued at sixty brand new corporate jets. EXTRATERRESTRIALS ‘The best proof of intelligent life in space is that it hasn’t come here.’ – Sir Arthur C. Clarke (author of, among others, 2001: A Space Odyssey). Tomorrow: No, That 403(b) Thing Doesn’t Apply to 401(k)’s — Sorry