My Sick Mind

If you’re following along - and why wouldn’t you be? - you would have been reading about my pride and angst over my investments and their consequences. It’s a struggle, but fun. Strange, and fun. I didn’t sell anything - much to my joy and dismay.  Square has begun to trade along with Bitcoin, and Pfizer seems to have found a new life with the FDA approval of a new drug.  Such is life for drug companies.  It’s the risk-reward scenario that we embrace when we invest.  The stock has approached its 52-week high, and I suspect that it has room to run here - and my patience is being rewarded.  I no longer view the stock as a potential sell, especially with the new tax plan. Darden Restaurants reports this week.  I don’t own it, but the “pin action” may translate to my favorite DelTaco (TACO) and its struggling $12 stock price.  In other news, the new 21% corporate tax rate may help dissuade DelTaco’s current 40% tax rate and help them control some ...

I’m pretty happy with my investment choices - and if you’ve been following along, you would be, too. [Ooops] The options at this point are:  What to do with Pfizer and Key.  Pfizer pays a dividend in a week, so I’m content to stick with it until then.  For some odd reason, I’ve stuck with it longer than I had anticipated.  Only my investment in Ford was more agonizing.  Key is a great bank, but they are a ... bank, and as such tend to waffle with this goofball that is in the White House and his so-called tax cut - but I digress. I continue to be long DelTaco (TACO) and would advise you to be, too. They will struggle with costs and the eternal problems of bringing people into their restaurants, but ... people have to eat somewhere, and the stock is priced right, and if you aren’t in already, at the $12 area, you should be.  The management team knows what they’re doing. Ride along.  It says here, I’m 60 and I’m supposed to be risk averse, but I enjoy t...

Thanksgiving is coming.   No kidding.  What bugs me about it is the choice of food.  We're supposed to eat turkey.  Why?  On account of, because.  It's what we eat.  We make no effort on any other day to cook a giant turkey - other than Thanksgiving. Mostly, people find something to complain about.  It's too dry. It's tough. It's cold (have you ever burned your mouth on Thanksgiving turkey? No). For what?  Here's an idea:  Gather your friends and family, and eat fish, or chicken, or burgers, or ... GOD ... whatever.  Be thankful.  Isn't that the idea? Our annual company Holiday party is coming. Egad.  I've been there 26 years and have not yet attended one.  I'm not sure what that says about me, other than the idea that I don't like going to parties alone and I don't care to have someone sitting around counting my drinks.  Especially since it's in Atlantic City, and they seem to pick the furthest possible pla...

As a young person in the 1970s, I had a few favorites.  I was enthralled by the prog-rock movement spearheaded by Yes and Emerson, Lake, & Palmer; and my boyhood dreams of being a musician were fueled by the likes of them.  I had a few guitar heroes:  Robert Fripp, Peter Banks, Jan Akkerman among them, but there was one lurking in the background that I didn't acknowledge until later in life.  Terry Kath. If we go back to the early 1970s (where I come from) the world of pop music was cluttered with nonsense, and even as a youth, I recognized it.  My bus rides to school were dominated by questions like, "Have you heard 'Hocus Pocus' by Focus?" and if you were listening to 92.5FM (WIFI) so that you could hear the "long version" of Yes' "America."' You have to remember, those were the days when, if you didn't hear something live, you couldn't "YouTube it" or go back to your DVR and re-watch it.  It was a "...

“Beat and raise.” Those are the two best words a shareholder can hear out of an earnings report.  That is exactly what Square (SQ) did this week. They beat analyst’s estimates and raised guidance for 2018. For some reason, the stock fell a bit after the report, but once investors heard the conference call, SQ rose another 1.5% to another 52-week high near the $38 mark. The “payment space,” as Wall Street would call it, is hot.  Paypal (PYPL), Visa (V), and MasterCard (MA) are leaders in the industry, but Square is gaining market share, and working on their banking side, making loans to small businesses and building a customer base that will either make the company a strong independent processor or make it an attractive take-out candidate.  Either way, investors (like me) win.  So far, it’s been a nice ride. Meanwhile, Pfizer (PFE) struggles along as almost dead money, and while it’s a nice dividend play, at 3.6%, young-at-heart investors (like me) would like t...

I try to stay modern. I'm holding onto the Internet, online stuff, and my iPhone with all 8 fingernails in an effort to keep up with those goddamned kids who find this stuff so simple that they can walk, text, drive, and talk on their phone at the same time.  By the way, if you think you can ... you cannot. I'm with you on a lot of this junk.  The whole "text instead of call" thing is right up my alley.  When my phone rings, I dread picking it up. "Just text me, or send an e-mail," is my usual response.  And this comes from a person who grew up on rotary dial phones and looking for change to use the phone when I was away from home. How quickly I learned your ways, Millennials. The one thing I cannot join you in is this movement back to vinyl records.  I don't remember what year it was, but at some point, somebody (probably Sony) invented the Compact Disc player.  I was so excited.  No longer would I have to store giant 12-inch recordings...

It's Earnings Season again.  And as such, it's a little daunting to keep track of it all, but I'll give it a shot.  So, how am I doing?  I write a lot about my investments, and I'll quickly tell you if I fail, but this last quarter and the last six months have been mostly positive. While I still eschew big-time growth names that I find over-valued, I tend to stick with stocks with one of two potential issues: 1 - There is a growth story, and we are at or near the beginning of it. 2 - There is value in a mature company. As in life, I don't like to over-pay for anything.  If I think a stock has run-up into a valuation that is either "priced for perfection" or just plain over-priced, I'll pass - and I'd advise you to do so, too.  It's not that I don't appreciate the risk, but I don't necessarily want to pay for it.  Tesla, Facebook, Nvidia, Google - are some of the names that, if I had a 5-year-old, I would happily invest in. At m...

When the summer night has changed its warmer breezes to the icy cold of silent winter freezes Will you be there? When the cloudy skies are blocking out the Sun and suddenly your nose has begun to run Will I see you there? Will you stand by me beside the cold night? Or are you afraid of the ice?  - John Palumbo "Ice" Crack the Sky, 1975 Apparently, not.  At least that's the feeling I got from the last woman I gave my heart and time to.  She dumped me like a bag of trash left out on the sidewalk.  (sorry if that isn't as poetic as the lyric I posted) I put myself out for people, on occasion.   In some cases, the effort is reciprocated.  In others, it is met with a stunning lack of recognition.  Mind you, it's not what I'm in it for, but the idea is that - at some point, the effort has to be recognized.  Gifts, time, effort, and companionship are expended and the time and effort are virtually (or literally in this case) not reco...

“I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him... The land of tears is so mysterious.”  ―  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ,  The Little Prince Yes, the land of tears is mysterious, whoever you are.  The land of tears is mysterious.  If you do not  believe that ancient idea, consider one more current ... “The only time you look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don't look in your neighbor's bowl to see if you have as much as them.”  ―  Louis C.K. Take that,  millennials. That's the difference between sympathy and empathy.  Most of you probably don't know.  You can sympathize with someone with whom you have not shared similar experiences, but you can only empathize with someone with whom you have shared similar experiences with.  And, therein lies the problem - at least as it is with this. Most of you cannot empathize with me because you have either (a) been with someo...

If this wasn't an honest appraisal of my life, then it's worthless - and I don't want this to be worthless. Whether I'm recommending investments or letting you in on my otherwise private thoughts, there is a sense that this is an opening of my mind, such as it is, and hence, the title. I'll stand by my investment recommendations, DelTaco and Extreme Networks among them, and so let's move beyond that and delve into the inner workings of my (egad) mind. Love has eluded me over the years, and it continues to do so.  I find it oddly interesting that so many have found it so easily, while it betrays me at every turn.  It's at the point now where I see someone and think, "Oh well, that's never going to happen."  The sense of doom is paramount.  Lately, I thought that the soul mate that I so desperately seeked was in Alabama, of all places.  As it turned out, she was there physically, but not there in form or spirit.  I don't mi...

It’s been a while since I have opined on the stock market.  Mostly because I have had other more important things to say.  Nevertheless, I still pay attention, and I think you should, too.   Recently, Morningstar rated 20 stocks as “Undervalued and Sustainable,” which appeals to me because I hate overpaying for things, and want whatever I buy to be around in a decade or so - since I plan on that, too. I went over the list (as you should, too) and found five that appear to be attractive in today's environment, and have some risk involved, with the requisite reward at the end of the supposed rainbow. Mattel (MAT) looks like a disaster now, but t heir capital-allocation program has committed an incremental $250 million-$300 million to business improvements in 2017, potentially helping speed up the profit turnaround. So, if  you  are confident in their ability to turn the existing portfolio into a profitable enterprise, you could find a bargain h...

Eighteen hundred and some-odd posts on this worn-out site.  Sometimes, I think I've covered it all - and other times, I think I haven't covered anything at all.  Or maybe it's both?  So, there's that.  Meanwhile, my fascination with how people connect lingers. There's this story about the Las Vegas lunatic that shot-up a concert.   LAS VEGAS (AP) — The girlfriend of the Las Vegas gunman said Wednesday that she had no inkling of the massacre he was plotting when he sent her on a trip abroad to see her family.    Marilou Danley issued the statement after returning from her native Philippines and being questioned for much of the day by FBI agents still trying to figure out what drove Stephen Paddock to open fire on 22,000 fans at a country music festival from his 32nd-floor hotel suite. "He never said anything to me or took any action that I was aware of that I understood in any way to be a warning that something horrible like this was going to ...

Oh hell - we knew that, right? Aren't we all? Sometimes we think we aren't worthy, even though we know we are flawed. And it makes me wonder ... How some couples get along with being flawed and arguing over things, and others (me) can't make it through one disagreement without separating and parting ways for a lifetime. Perhaps I watch too much TV - or not enough - that I believe couples can argue over things and still exist as a couple.  Or, perhaps I think that couples can form to begin with, which seems to be a problem, so why am I concerned with keeping something together that isn't together to begin with? There is supposed to be a lid for every pot, but I wonder if some pots are English and some lids are metric?  It doesn't seem as simple as the lid/pot analogy makes it out to be.  I'd guess that somehow, the lids and pots that fit each other go undiscovered and their owners go a lifetime without knowing that there was indeed one of them ...

"You have to move on," they say.   That would be easy if there was something to move on to.  The moving part is not the issue.  It's the "on" part that is difficult.  It's not like picking up another book or watching another movie. There's a human element that makes the moving difficult, and the on worse. Once I get my sights set on something, it is difficult to re-focus.  Mostly because there is nothing else to focus on.  Things come one at a time in my world.  I'm not a social animal (quite the contrary) and the sights are few and far between. Now, I find myself staring down the gunsight at the horrible four months from November to February, where the world's focus shifts from the mundane to the holidays.  Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and Valentine's Day - a marketer's dream and a lonely man's dread.  I realize that 95% of America has something to do on most of those days, and I can't begrudge someone ...

As I said in a previous post , I recently returned from 11 days in Alabama.  Now that I have had significant time to reflect on that experience, allow me to share some of my thoughts on the trip and the indelible impression it has left on me. ONE: The more desperate we are, the more we tend to lean on hope. When sentences start with "I hope ..." rational thought takes a back seat to chance and irrational ideals. It's a suckers game, and rarely does hope work for the betterment of those who hope.  Hope goes hand in hand with faith.  It relies too heavily upon someone or something else, and that has no place in the needs and desires that we all have.  If you have hope and faith, you will almost certainly be disappointed.  As it turned out, I cannot depend on hope, because hope relies on someone or something else.  I read that somewhere.  I will leave that between me and the one on whom my hope rested. TWO: Would this be the eventual home i...

At least for now, and the past 5 days.   The problem with people from the north (like me) is that they tend to stereotype people from other areas by whatever we think they are, based on ... accent, body type, or some other pre-conceived notion that lends itself to whatever style we assumed. What generally happens is, we get there, and realize that, other than some accent (it turns out, I have one, too) or some other oddity, they are ... people.  Go figure.  People with jobs, lives, wants, needs, and desires.  No different than the rest of us.  What a culture shock! While I realize two things:  (1) Travelers face different types of people than residents.  I have mainly dealt with service people and wait staff, and (2) I have only been here for 5 days, I still can tell the things that make us the same as people - God forbid.  It's the other things that make me wonder how much better life would be here than in New Jersey. For one thing, the lack of t...

... when all about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you ... Noted liar and exaggerator (President) Donald J. Trump was at it again today.  In an unhinged and ranting press conference at his digs in New York, he (among other oddities) compared Robert E. Lee to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, proclaiming that we may be tearing down their statues too, someday.  Well now.  One can only assume that we will never be tearing down a statue of Trump. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,  But make allowance for their doubting too. In other news, Dick's Sporting Goods (DKS) reported horrible earnings today.  The stock has lost half its value in a year, and is a perfect example of a great store and horrible investment.  They cited weakness in hunting and outdoor gear as a reason for the disappointing earnings.  OK, then.  If your margins are that thin, I guess that's the reason investors have suffered. ...

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned Extreme Networks (EXTR) before.  I've been holding this stock for a while, and wondering why it has been down over the past 3 months.  Sometimes, the market doesn't know what's going on, and investors have to trust their instincts a hold onto stocks that they bought because they believed in the company when they made the purchase. In the case of EXTR, I fell in love (bad to do, I know) with the company when I figured out what they did and how if worked-into the way companies are doing business today.  It's a growth industry, and as such, one has to endure a certain amount of doubt from the so-called "investors" when something happens that they find a reason to sell. The stock went from the $11 range down to the $9 range in the relatively short time period of three months, on almost no news - other than the fact that the company was signing-up new businesses and otherwise moving their business forward.  I had to tune-o...

It's earnings season [again] and you know that gives me a stiffy.  Aside from the financial mumbo-jumbo and forecasts of such, there is some interesting stuff going on in the media sector. CBS reported a few days ago.  Mega-Chairman Les Moonves said that they will be forming a streaming channel for sports.  He did not have any details, but said it would be along the lines of what NBC does with their streaming content.  OK, then. Disney reported earlier today.  Bob Iger said that their ESPN branch is going to be streaming content on the Internet, but like Iger, had little in the way of details - price, actual content, or accessibility - but suffice it to say, the idea is to form an Internet-only portal for sports similar to what ESPN does on the cable end.  Oh and, they'll be pulling their content from Netflix (NFLX) in 2019.  So, if you want to see a Disney movie, you'll have to subscribe to their channel. In addition, he suggested that the...

... listen to these lyrics from songs older than you.  Gain some perspective, and stop worshipping celebrities of any age. Gary Puckett and the Union Gap - 1968. "Young Girl" Y oung girl, get out of my mind My love for you is way out of line Better run girl You're much too young girl With all the charms of a woman You've kept the secret of your youth You led me to believe you're old enough To give me love And now it hurts to know the truth Young girl, get out of my mind My love for you is way out of line Better run girl You're much too young girl Beneath your perfume and your make-up You're just a baby in disguise And though you know that it's wrong to be in love with me. w OK, then.  That's one.  How about this Beatles' classic, "I Saw Her Standing There" 1964. Well, she was just 17, You know what I mean, And the way she looked was way...