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Monthly Archives: August 2009

10 Big Ideas … and 10 Ways to Profit

August 18, 2009
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10 Big Ideas … and 10 Ways to Profit

Not long ago, I was having a discussion with some friends about real estate when the focus drifted to Cape Cod housing prices, which had plunged in the 2007-2008 real estate collapse. The consensus among the group was that prices would eventually rebound, and that patient owners and investors would come out OK. And that was no surprise. Most people tend to extrapolate the future from the past … and for most of our lives, real estate prices have gone up. Then up piped my brother-in-law the geologist, commenting, “10,000 years ago Cape Cod wasn’t there … and in...

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MXWL and Exciting Developments in Car Technologies

August 17, 2009
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MXWL and Exciting Developments in Car Technologies

Right now, the auto industry is presenting a lot of opportunities for appreciating assets, something I like a lot more–in the stocks of companies developing the cutting edge technologies for electrics, hybrid, natural gas vehicles and many others. Most of the truly exceptional opportunities are in companies most people have never heard of, not Ford (F) and Toyota (TM). Two such companies are featured in the August issue of the newsletter I edit, Cabot Green Investor. I can’t tell you what those stocks are, since we give our newsletter subscribers a good head start into the promising stocks we...

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An Aged Visitor and Buy-and-Hold Investing

August 16, 2009
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My wife and I are getting ready for a visit from her 92-year-old father and her brother.  They’re coming up to escape the heat in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which has been recording one scorcher after another. It will be fun to have them with us for a nice 10-day visit, although a 92-year-old house guest requires more than a usual amount of preparation. I’d say that Bill, my father-in-law, is near the top of his class in terms of mobility, mental acuity and sense of humor.  He still drives his own car, lives in his own house, and pays his...

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Transforming the Movie Rental Business

August 15, 2009
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Transforming the Movie Rental Business

On a recent trip to the local shopping district near my house, I noticed that a staple of the neighborhood–the local movie rental store–had closed. It wasn’t a Blockbuster or a Hollywood Video, it was a true local shop with three locations in the Somerville and Cambridge area. Instead of housing just the typical movie rental store fare, this store had an extensive collection of films by diverse directors, a vast foreign and independent film selection and a section of excellent staff picks. You could stop in to pick up the latest box office hit, but the store was...

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What Cash for Clunkers Really is Telling Us

August 14, 2009
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What Cash for Clunkers Really is Telling Us

I’m not sentimental about cars. To me, there is no point in feeling attachment to a depreciating asset. My attitude likely stems from when I was a teenager and my future brother-in-law gave me his 1981 Subaru, which had survived a minor crash with a 1970s-era Buick that left the Buick’s chrome bumper scratch-free but crumpled the front end of the hatchback. Still, being a suburban kid on Long Island, I was thrilled to get a car that promised the ability to go, well, anywhere. Paying for insurance was an issue–a still-astonishing $1,600 for six months. But I set...

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