Welcome to the end of the week and another edition of Happy Hour! Just sit back, relax, and enjoy your end of the week roundup of all things interesting in the land of money.
Chromecast
The age of tying the internet to your TV is getting closer. Google introduced the Chromecast this week. It’s now the cheapest plug and play streaming TV device available. It also allows you to control your TV directly from your smart phone, notepad, notebook, or desktop.
Now you can sit in your comfortable recliner and access internet stuff directly on your TV with your smart phone. You can even stream video and music from your desktop to your TV. And it will have its own app ecosystem around it.
This is the direction TV is going. The potential of apps is endless. From the start, this means any TV network or production company can build an app to stream their products, maybe charge a small monthly fee, and cut out the middleman.
The best part is, Google benefits by bringing the internet into the family room. It’s search/online ads business will compete directly with TV ad revenue. I just wish I never sold those Google shares I bought in ’08 for $290/share.
Keeping It Simple
I ran across this friendly reminder to keep investing simple. This is one idea that is easy to stray from. It’s easy to accept that because investing is hard, we need more information, more models, more plans, more answers, and more complicated ways to invest. While, yes, information is good, it can bog down our process and thinking. It certainly can affect our behavior and timing.
As Seth Klarman points out in Margin of Safety – information follows the 80/20 rule: you’ll get 80% of any available information in the first 20% of the time spent studying it. After that its diminishing returns, wasted time, and lost opportunity.
We don’t need every last nugget of information to invest. Perfection isn’t possible. And simpler is better.
Last Call
- Trader, Should You Fire Yourself as Your Own Wealth Advisor? – its specifically written for advisors but applies to everyone.
- Bucketing: It’s in Your Head (in a Good Way) – some benefits of a bucket strategy for retirement planning.
- Municipal Bonds: Equipped to Weather Rising Rates – great info on muni bonds affected by rate changes.
- Kick the Dogs – for the fund investors out there, why you shouldn’t hold poor performing funds.
