Teleidoscope

Sat, Nov 22, 2008

Sub 2 Dollar Gas

Posted at 1:03 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I ran some errands at the big box stores before settling down to work on the server. I needed printer ink and label-maker tape from Office Max, and while I have the server open I might as well use some canned air to clean the dust off the CPU-cooler fins.

Costco has Foster Farms turkeys -- fresh and minimally processed -- for 87 cents/pound and they even had a couple of small ones left. I got a 14.8 pounder. Now I need to figure out if I want to try brining it. And what to have with it. I've got a business meeting Wednesday afternoon, so I can pick up any ingredients I'm missing on the way home. No eggnog this year -- raw egg might be pushing it and I think goat's milk would make it taste funny. Maybe I'll mull some cider instead.

Costco Gas had gas under 2 dollars even for Premium. Regular unleaded was 1.769. I can't remember the last time I paid so little for gas. This is good for people in the East who heat their houses with fuel oil: fuel prices this winter should be a lot more reasonable than people were predicting even a couple of months ago.

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ETFs and Stocks

Posted at 12:33 am MST to Miscellaneous

The money from my old IRAs and 401Ks is now all consolidated and invested. We went for a 60/40 split between stocks and cash&bonds, but actually most of the cash and bonds money is going into a 6 month CD. Hopefully the bond markets will be more stable by the time it matures, 4 months into the new presidency: the current bond market is pretty horrible.

My new stock holdings are a mix of individual stocks and funds, including ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) which are supposed to be a more flexible kind of mutual fund. I like funds because they let me invest in areas I think should do well in the future (like 'clean energy' or 'biotech and genome') without having to guess which specific company in the area is most likely to take off (or least likely to fail). I don't have enough money to invest to get as much diversity as I'd like without using funds.

On the down side, investing in funds means I now have small positions in some companies I would really rather avoid, like Microsoft. But at least I don't directly own Microsoft stock. They may be able to change course and reinvent themselves as ethical and competent software creators but I haven't seen any signs of it yet. And there are signs that the monopolistis super-tanker is heading for the rocks.

I'm not a day-trader: I expect to hold the stocks I buy for months or years, so when choosing between stocks that seem to be good buys, I prefer to spend my money on stocks that I feel glad about owning.

I do own Apple directly now, in addition to what is in the funds. Also Cisco and AT&T, and the shares of McKesson I acquired via the employee stock purchase plan from when I worked for the company they eventually bought. And I have invested in RedHat (at about 100 points less than its price at the peak of the dot-com bubble, but that's why I could afford to buy some) and a company that makes silicon wafers for chips and photovoltaics (WFR), and in stocks from a few other small companies. There are advantages to buying in a week when the market has been bottoming out.

I did not buy gold: it is too expensive and it feels too much like speculation as opposed to investing. Companies do things (admittedly often stupid things, but not always), gold just sits there. It is overvalued for an industrial material, and I don't think the people who flee to it as a hedge realize that its value other than as a material is as arbitrary as the value of paper money or the electrons in a bank computer. Unless you actually have the physical gold buried in your backyard or where ever, you are just playing market games with something that can't even be productive.

I did not buy XCel, because I can't see directly owning a company that can't process a change-of-address in nine years.

I did not buy VMWare: I like their products, but the virtualization market has gone squirrelly in the past year or two and I want to see it shake out a little before I put money into that niche.

I did not buy Archer Daniel Midlands directly (I think it is included in one of the funds). I don't think I need to be more strongly associated with drowning the country in corn and soybeans.

As a food stock I bought HainCelestial (organic foods and tea), which sells stuff I buy and is more or less a local stock. My transportation stock is UNFI, a company which hauls organic food to supermarkets. And my heavy industrial/infrastructure stock is a company that makes cranes for building bridges and things.

My holdings are tech heavy -- forward-looking tech, I hope -- because tech is what I know, and light on financials because no one sane is doing fresh investing in financials until things stabilize. At this point I'm going to leave things alone at least until after the holidays and the inauguration, and probably until that CD matures in May

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