Revving the Engines of Capitalism May 11, 2011March 24, 2017 WHICH IS BETTER: $11,000 OR $475,000? Joel Grow: “You wrote yesterday that the stock market does better under Democrats than Republicans. From 1929 to the end of Bush’s second term, Dems and Reps have each had the White House for 40 years. During the Dems’ 40 years, $10,000 in the S&P index would have grown to just over $300,000. Under the GOP presidents, to … $11,000 and change. This is before Obama’s bull market.” ☞ You can see the graphics here. It’s a striking contrast. Updated from October 10, 2008, when this was calculated with the S&P at 899, you have $10,000 under Republicans growing not to the $11,733 shown but – with the S&P opening at 849 on Obama’s Inauguration morning – to just $11,080. Meanwhile, with the S&P now around 1350, the Democratic $300,671 shown in the graphic swells a further 59% to $475,000. As I understand it, none of these calculations includes dividends. Both numbers would be higher if they did, which would mute the contrast somewhat. Even so . . . To have grown from $10,000 to $11,000 under one broad political philosophy but to $475,000 under the other suggests, however crudely, that one of the two is better for investors – and America – than the other. As I wrote yesterday, anyone you know who wants to keep government out of the bedroom and out of the doctor/patient relationship . . . who finds the enormous Reagan/Bush/Bush debt accumulation repellant (as well as the enormous shift of wealth from the broad middle class to the top 1% of the top 1%) . . . who thinks the mentally ill should not be able to buy assault weapons at gun shows . . . is warmly welcome on our side of the aisle. MARRIAGE Turns out, two people loving each other – even if one is black and one is white or both are men or both are women – is not such a scary thing once you get to know those two people. As a result, relatively few now question Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s right to have married his wife. And fewer and fewer question the right of people like Charles and me to share the same legal rights and responsibilities of civil marriage as any other couple, had we wanted to. (We didn’t want to. But shouldn’t that have been our choice to make, not Mitt Romney’s or Rick Santorum’s to make for us?) The Republicans are on the wrong side of this one – as they were wrong in trying so hard to keep us from serving in the military – and they lose ground on it every day, as more and more people think it through. A particularly telling example: Anti-gay Facebook page hacked by its own administrator By Helen A.S. Popkin Who says people don’t change? After five years of writing anti-gay blogs, making anti-gay YouTube videos and going on the National Organization for Marriage’s “Summer of Marriage,” NOM Facebook administrator Louis Marinelli deleted the organization’s Facebook page, taking all 290,000 “fans” with it. Marinelli now supports civil marriage equality! . . . CVV Of this February suggestion for money you can truly afford to lose, Aristides’ Chris Brown writes: “As you’ve probably seen, CVV reported earnings this morning. On the whole, they met my high expectations. Fourteen cents eps on $6.2 mil in revenue. Backlog implies the company received an additional $2.1 mil of orders in the second half of March, and the company announced $4 mil of orders thus far in Q2. Gross margins slipped this quarter sequentially vs. q4, but operating expense was essentially unchanged, so they had excellent fixed cost leverage. Based on recent order trends, I would expect them to soon reach a revenue run rate of $10 mil per quarter, which at current gross margins and allowing for 15% higher operating expense, with a 32% tax rate, converts into about $1.08/year for an eps run rate. So, company is trading at roughly 1.5x the revenue run rate I expect them to achieve soon, and about 11x the eps run rate I would expect. Remember that this company’s closest public peers are all semiconductor capital equipment companies, and that many people are calling for those company’s earnings to peak in 2011, and slump severely in 2012. If you believe that 2011 will be a peak year for CVV, the stock is expensive here. If you believe management that this company is going to have years of secular growth, the shares are cheap cheap cheap, at essentially half the multiple of the Russell 2000. Company remains a core position for us.”