Years ago, I owned a sailboat built in 1929 . . . and you know what else happened that year. Designed by John Alden and built in Marblehead by the James E. Graves yard, the boat, which I named Ivy, was 28 feet long, thin and beautiful, and propelled by a big mainsail on a 40-foot wooden mast. When I bought it, it leaked like a sieve. I fixed it up, enjoyed it for a few seasons, and when I sold it to Matt Murphy, who became editor of Wooden Boat magazine, it still leaked like a sieve. The...
With pressure building underground, there hasn’t been a real breakout to the upside by U.S. markets. The Nasdaq has put in some nice gains; its chart looks like it wants to build a cup that began its left side on January 6 when the Index topped at 1,666. But whether it happens this week or this month or a few months from now, the stock market will be coming back. It’s the only thing about the stock market that I’m willing to predict. It always does. Always. So, as we’ve said here a dozen times or more, you should...
“Simplify, simplify.”–Henry David Thoreau “Seek simplicity, and distrust it.”–Alfred North Whitehead The search for simple solutions to complex problems has been going on for a long time. And with Thoreau on one shoulder encouraging you to pare down and Whitehead on the other telling you to dig complexity, you could easily go totally insane. First you would look for big, underlying principles to explain things; then you’d start working out the exceptions and adaptations that always pop up when big principles meet the real world. Anyone who has ever tried to get a straight answer from a politician knows...
Note from Editor Elyse Andrews: Has every ship run aground? Have all the oceans frozen over? You might think so if you’ve followed the dramatic tumble of the Baltic Dry Index. The index tracks the price to ship dry goods–everything from corn to cement–and unless the world suddenly stops eating and building, the odds are this index is ripe for a stunning rebound … that looks already underway. Today, we’re featuring an article from our friends at StreetAuthority. StreetAuthority Editor Amy Calistri explains why these shipping stocks have a bright future ahead of them while providing some monstrous yields–one...
So what looks good right now? Netflix (NFLX). The story is already well known to most Americans. The company is the world’s largest online movie rental service, with more than eight million subscribers. It has over 100,000 DVD titles, and a growing database of consumer preferences, so it knows what customers will like. It has a growing library of titles that can be watched instantly thanks to online streaming. This saves the company the expense of buying the DVD, the expense of handling it in the warehouse, and the expense of mailing it . . . both ways. Furthermore,...
