Meet Trevor Noah August 11, 2015August 10, 2015 Here he is. Jon Stewart’s replacement. Major taltent, obviously . . . I just hope he has Stewart’s political focus, because we need it. Enjoy! PRMRF I recently bought this Canadian oil comany’s shares between $20 and $27 (down from $60) because a smart guy who’d done a lot of research saw potential for a five- or even ten-fold gain over the next few years. Very low production costs, apparently. The stock topped $30 in short order . . . but on Friday, at $11.86, I checked back. His view: the company’s problems are temporary, even if oil prices never rebound. He was buying more. So I have, too. Very glad I thought better of telling you about it at $30. Hope someday I may be glad I mentioned it to you now. But promise me you will only buy shares, if at all, with MYCTATL — money you can truly afford to lose. Which reminds me, as it’s been a while, that this may be as good a time as any to repeat my overall suggested strategy: Put most of the money you want exposed to the very real risks (but, over time, remarkable rewards) of the stock market — which must be money you will not need to touch for many years — into equally- or fundamentally-weighted index funds, as explained here. But if you want a little more excitement, and a chance to dream a little — and a possible tax advantage — consider setting aside a small portion of those funds to direct yourself, at Ameritrade or Fidelity. Split that cash it among perhaps five or six speculative bets (not made all at once, by the way . . . no need to rush into this). Those that crater could help you lower your taxable income by as much as $3,000 a year; those that soar (if any ever do) could remodel your kitchen or, so long as you hold them a year and a day, fund all your charitable giving (through the account you set up at Fidelity’s Charitable Gift Fund) with an added tax advantage, as also explained here. If you were new to all this, and had MYCTATL, you might want to buy 100 or 200 shares of BOREF, trading today barely above $6 a share (be sure to use a “limit” order), 100 shares of PRMRF as noted above, and perhaps even a few shares of SIGAQ, currently $1.15 or so, on which (against all reason?) I have not yet entirely given up. I often get such things wrong; but once in a while they go right.