Just a Few Quick Follow Ups July 22, 2005January 17, 2017 MARRIED $$$ Doug Olson: ‘You quoted a correspondent who advised getting married as financial advice. She’s half right: you need to get married AND STAY MARRIED. I first read this financial advice in Getting Rich in America by the MacKensies. I’m sure that’s a terrific financial practice, in the same way ‘Don’t buy stocks just before a bear market’ is.’ KOOL-AID Anne Speck: ‘Like your reader Dan, I’m a devout American Christian. I don’t have any problem at all with the comments you post on your site about Christians. As the dominant faith in the U.S., we have many flavors, though all related in profound ways. I have problems with the behavior of some parts of my faith community; I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t too.’ BROWSERS Dean Reinemann: ‘I have been using Opera as my browser for a couple of years. One of the features I like is the ability to zoom in to make reading text easier. Goes from 100 percent up to – I think – 2000 percent. It also stores your bookmarks so you can search them easily. You can get it free for Mac, PC, Linux and several other operating systems. It has loads of features, it’s small in size, quick, adaptable to the user, etc. Of course one gets use to a browser or anything, but for my taste and use, it’s great. You can also delete all private data easily.’ PPD The stock was down sharply to $45.52 yesterday, bringing the intrinsic value of our LEAPS down to $20.52 (up from the $11.80 we paid in March). This could be in anticipation of what the company signaled, when it announced higher sales recently, will be lower second quarter earnings (higher sales, but commissions are paid out up front, so, perversely, a big gain in sales cuts profits in the short term). I got an e-mail from Glenn E. Hudson, who suggested this stock in the first place, who now writes: ‘I am not as confident that we are going to see a short squeeze here because even though there still are a lot of shorts who haven’t covered, I think the fact that Prepaid Legal has already indicated that this quarter’s profits will take a major hit may cause a significant enough drop in share price to let the shorts off the hook. Prepaid Legal’s releases their quarterly earnings report after the bell on Monday, July 25th. I admit I can’t tell how the market will react to the quarterly numbers even though they have already been warned of lower profits and haven’t reacted negatively. You can do whatever fits your strategy but I would suggest you might consider taking some (half or more) of your profits at the appropriate time between now and the earnings release. As far as the expectation that PPD may be bought or merged into another company, I think there is still a good possibility that it might happen but am not sure that the share price will be significantly higher than the current PPD share price. It is still possible that shareholders will ignore the lower earnings this quarter and that shares of PPD could still rise even higher.’ ☞ Now you know as much as I do. WHO THE HELL WANTS TO HEAR ACTORS TALK? It turns out that some of the most famous quotes we’ve all heard are (at best) hard to authenticate. Click here.