I'm handsome, and I know things.

Me, too. Nah.

Storm did little damage around here. A few trees down and some without power, but not bad.

Spending another weekend in Newport, relaxing, reading, preparing for the upcoming semester, and visiting friends. Social distancing of course.

The next semester will be all online?

Phat,

Completely online. And I'm far too flamboyant to be contained by a small screen.

Truthfully, I can't stand teaching online. It would be okay, I suppose, if we were doing regular distance learning classes, but all of mine will need to be synchronous on Zoom or some other platform. Hard to read the room like this, especially with students who don't or can't turn on cameras.

You might consider coming up with a list of Zoom rules before classes start. Things like: Turn on camera; must wear or some kind of covering below waist; no flushing toilets; no TVs on in the background; kids and dogs go outside, etc. etc.

I knew someone that took a class by online/remote, but the classroom/teacher had live students etc. Essentially a normal class but some could log in and view remotely. This created a plethora of problems not the least being the teacher would, by nature, concentrate on the in-person students and lose the sense that others were veiwing remotely via camera - sound quality was often poor, viewing the "screen" (blackboard) for notes and generally following along were all very difficult for the remote viewers. The teacher should be put on a box with a noose around the neck to preclude prancing about and causing other viewing and sound quality problems. That would help. And in more ways than one.

that is totally incongruent with John's flamboyance

I watched a YouTube video on how to wire an electric cooker, it was followed by a commercial for cheap funeral plans. This amused me.

An Aston-Martin V12 Vantage can really move from 55-121 mph in a hurry. Just saying.

Nearly all of my education was online learning.

We have tons of data from Coursera, EdX, and other platforms that show how poorly students do with this format of learning, even as they are paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for these courses.

A friend's girlfriend teaches some college courses online. It sucks for her, but she is a music teacher. She probably manages better because she has small classes. I don't think this would scale well at all, and considering how poorly Zoom does even for a one-on-one interview, 100+ students is going to be a horrible. (I hate Zoom)

Anyways, just temper your expectations and hope for the best. I feel for the teachers and students who have to go through this.

the younger students i agree suffer and feel sorry for. the older ones( not fully grown up) are the ones not doing any recommendations and flaunting it, they deserve what they get. i have little sympathy for them. you know the saying you make your own bed now go lie in it.

lol

On I burn!

may i suggest not including this particular tidbit on your curriculum vitae?

I would have thought the protesting would have accelerated the spread, and while it's unpopular to say this, I suppose it did. R0 in LA is below 1 now, so the spread has slowed, about a month after most of the protesting has stopped.

I mean... they are still protesting every day in downtown, and there is a chaz-style camp in front of city hall, but in general, it seems to be small crowds, not the thousands it was before.

I don't know, I come from the perspective that the only way out is herd immunity, but I don't want to see or hear of people dying either, so it's a shitty spot for everyone.

I hate that any talk of "the thing" requires discussion of politics.

I have no listed education on my resume. My policy is "I keep my mouth shut and look wise." (until I'm asked, then all bets are off)

So, not sure about legit colleges, but EdX and Coursera are MOOCs (massive open online courses) ran by MIT an Stanford respectively. Being successful in them requires the ability to self-learn, which isn't something people are very good at (see social media for a fine sample of this fact). Personally, I've found them to be unsatisfactory to learn from; OCW and other sites are so much better, and I think that's one key to this. In OCW, you are watching a real-deal lecture, while the MOOC format is different. The OCW requires much more self-learning, but is more thorough.

This doesn't mean that all colleges will fail at online teaching, but I'd guess the social aspects of college are critical to learning. I would guess the online colleges would be more successful at it, because you know... they've been doing this for a decade now.

***

In other news, I'm really enjoying this stock market stuff. Investor relations pages really give you a new perspective on things. The earnings calls are super interesting.

how's the investing going??! does it require more than looking wise?

Unless you bought in on top of the recent uh... pump and dumps, it is nearly impossible lose money over the past few weeks. With that said, I truly think part of the 2020 retrospective will be about people losing their life savings on the stock market. Lose a few grand here, then decide to short, then do options, and busto. (*)

The tech train went way overboard and now it's correcting itself, so I guess, long term, we shall see.

I won't touch tech or medical stocks. I'm partly ETF, but individually investing as well. Variance is on my side right now and I have no illusions about what is happening.

(*) As an example, a lot of people get their accounts locked because of day trading and market timing violations. Really... you couldn't do the bare minimum research on this?

should I invest in Amazon?

gimme some stocks to target!

I'm not a proven entity, so you probably wouldn't want to take stock tips from me...

I don't want to invest in tech stocks because there is a massive game of VCs shuffling shares beneath the stock market. By the time these stocks get on the market, you are dealing with and overpriced, massively diluted company that is working on negative equity. This is an over-generalization, but given time and a chance to prove a profit, these can be enticing companies.

Amazon has two main sides: amazon.com and AWS. Both have shown very good profits, but...

Amazon.com depends largely in 3rd party suppliers. They also will fall apart once people slow down their online shopping. Amazon makes money by charging a percentage of their sales (and many other fees). These fees are already pretty darn high, and I don't think they can keep those high fees when things slow down. FBA is a massive cash cow for them, but once again, expensive as hell.

This cascades further down. Who else is growing like crazy? Shopify, who has integration with Amazon. Shopify depends largely on selling fictitious hopes and dreams to single mothers, telling them they can drop ship trash off Alibaba and make millions. Ethics aside, this isn't sustainable.

A lot of people are worried about their future, and decided that starting their own business will be the best way forward, and ecommerce looks like an easy bet. Of course, many are going to fail, which removes a lot of inventory from amazon.com.

People are dying to get into any sort of brick & mortar store, restaurant, venue, etc. Online sales is great for companies that have capitalized on the current situation, but this isn't going to last forever, and I think that companies with a powerful brand and physical presence will do very well in the future, as long as they can do well with online sales on top.

You also have the looting, which forced a lot of shoppers to buy online. All the stores in my area are under-supplied, if they are open at all. I'm buying things off Amazon that I never ever bought from Amazon, and I don't want to continue doing so. I certainly don't think looting will continue for the next year or two.

Then you have to look at the state of multichannel software, and ChannelAdvisor is doing excellent as well (up 17% this past year), but these companies profit by taking a percentage of sales. This is a strong indicator that the more established ecommerce companies are doing well, for now.

Then there is the AWS side. The largest client is Netflix. Obviously, they are doing very well since people have little choice but to use Netflix if they want to see a movie. While subscription on Netflix may not drop too hard, the compute will drop off as people decides that doing anything, anything at all, will be more exciting than staying in and watching Tiger King sequels. The lower compute means less money for AWS.

And now this goes back to tech. Despite the news, technology is getting absolutely destroyed right now. Unemployment in this industry is massive, way worse than the news lets you in on. New hiring has been frozen since April, and if you aren't currently working, it is very difficult to get any sort of interview, contract, or any sort of work.

This is happening because VC money has dried up and many startups are closing down. Most startups use AWS.

So, the massive growth of online stuff and lack of direct and indirect competition in multiple sectors has been very good for Amazon, but I personally don't see how it sustainable. much less a vector for growth. There is way too much complexity with Amazon for me to really understand the company and how it would maintain profit growth in the future.

Mind my thoughts are colored by the fact that I'm not a millionaire, and I wouldn't feel comfortable taking a position on any company that would cause me to invest such a large chunk of my bankroll. Kelly Criterion, money management, and all of that.

good write up dave. a little scattered and lost your point but to those that arent following using acronyms doesnt help.

schlitzy

start out by picking big companies you believe will still be there 30 years from now. and you go to and like what you see as far as their business.
you will have less home runs but no strike outs

walmart
amazon
starbucks
costco
microsoft
apple
etc. for a uninitiated start for holding a long long time and not looking at their prices day to day. that is investing rather than speculating.

best investment anyone can make is to own a house to live in and a rental property.
which allows you to begin massive write offs in business expenses if you dont have them already. and in a long time, price will grow and you will have it paid off and all the rents coming in which will have gone up.

I agree with taking the long term view, which is why I don't want to deal in tech stocks. They have, historically, been way to dependent on the flavor of the day, and while Amazon will probably be around in 30 years, they aren't exactly bullet proof either.

Google is probably the only tech stock I would think is bullet proof. The amount of human-hours they have put into their search product cannot be replicated.

I'm taking about a 5 year view on everything I have, but there are definitely things I'll be holding for much longer.

I'll throw in my $.02, with a huge caveat: even though this worked out for me, I'm no professional.

I started investing back in the days of DRIPs, before online brokers (or maybe I just didn't know about them yet).

I started by looking at Berkshire Hathaway's holdings, figuring if it was good enough for Warren Buffett, it was good enough for me.

From there, I threw out things I wasn't interested in. I think, at that time, they were into oil stocks and maybe RJR, for example.

They, like Ray mentioned, I looked at company's financials, compared them to others in their sector, and tried to find something I felt would be around long-term and had a good dividend history. Started sending checks (yes, that long ago) to their DRIPs and over time built up shares of different companies, almost all large-cap US.

Once I discovered TD, same plan. Folded in my existing shares, so I could dump money into that one account & then purchase when it built up enough to be worth it & I liked something's price.

So no early google/Chipotle/whatever, but generally buy and hold. Sometimes a company does something to upset me and I sell, but mostly just pour the dividends back in.

This is outside of 401k-type things, which are in funds for more diversification.

I'm probably going to shift to 100% ETFs, SPY, QQQ, etc in the future.

Picking stocks is fun to see what's happening under the hood, and I can do that now because I have more free time than usual and I love learning about new things.

I like reading everyone's ideas here. It's super interesting to me and great food for thought.