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Monthly Archives: November 2009

Why Investing is Fun

November 23, 2009
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Why Investing is Fun

I want to speak up for one big benefit of stock investing that doesn’t get a lot of publicity. I think it’s fun! Yes, fun.  And I don’t just mean that making a big killing on a hot stock is fun. I think the daily drama and the brain work and the blood, sweat and tears of researching, buying and selling stocks is totally engaging.  (It may even be as immersive as playing World of Warcraft or diving into Grand Theft Auto, but I wouldn’t know from first-hand experience.) I know it’s a fact that the ranks of investors...

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Investors in the Movies

November 22, 2009
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Investors in the Movies

I’m a deeply committed devotee of the movies.  I taught film criticism at the University of New Hampshire, wrote film reviews for a seacoast New Hampshire arts weekly for years and had a film review show on the radio for many more.  And I’ve been leading film discussions at The Music Hall in Portsmouth for going on 17 years. But in the years I’ve been watching movies, I can think of only a few in which investors come off as anything other than villains and sleazes. The biggest sleaze of all, of course, would have to be Gordon Gekko,...

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Fuel Systems Solution Redux

November 21, 2009
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Fuel Systems Solution Redux

I received an email from a reader last week after Brendan Coffey’s post on Friday that mentioned Fuel Systems Solutions (FSYS), asking where he could find more information about the company and stock. The reader isn’t a Cabot Green Investor subscriber, although I hope he becomes one since he has a clear interest in the Green sector, so I couldn’t point him to Brendan’s original recommendation. But fortunately enough, Timothy Lutts also wrote about Fuel Systems recently, so I sent him that write-up instead. I’m guessing that other readers might have also missed Tim’s discussion last week (when I worked...

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A Misallocation of Assets

November 20, 2009
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A Misallocation of Assets

This week brought news that some of the U.S. government’s stimulus package funding has been delegated to some very unique places in Massachusetts: $1.5 million to fix a lighthouse on an uninhabited island, $123,000 to terrorist-attack-proof the Spirit of Boston party cruise ship and $95,000 for the University of Massachusetts at Boston to study pollen samples from the Viking Era. With millions of people out of work nationwide (thousands here in Massachusetts, although our unemployment rate improved recently), it seems that there are dozens of better uses for the stimulus money. The first one that comes to my mind...

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Chrysler, Italy and a Great Stock to Buy Now

November 20, 2009
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Chrysler, Italy and a Great Stock to Buy Now

Shifting gears a little, I was mulling the desire to reduce our carbon footprint as a nation and the part-ownership we all have in two of Detroit’s Big Three. Specifically, I was thinking about Chrysler and why it just ended its electric car program ENVI. Technically, the program was absorbed into mainstream vehicle development being run by Fiat, the Italian automaker that owns a large minority chunk and controls the management of Chrysler. I don’t suspect that Chrysler is walking away from electric as a possible vehicle platform, but I can speculate as to where I think Chrysler, led...

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