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.
Overhyped
We read into things. We raise expectations. We over hype possibilities. Businesses are built around products that help us cut down our daily tasks. Think TV dinners and the 8 minute exercise video. It simplifies things. Makes it easier. It frees up time. And the possibilities become endless.
Except it doesn’t.
At the same time this is happening, other businesses are being built around products that distract us from that free time. That drain every free second of our attention.
Which brings us to Facebook. The biggest of the time sucks created in the past decade. With glazed eyes and rose-colored glasses we bit. Wasting more time on the site than any other. In the process, over hyped its possibilities and potential for what it could do. Not what it does.
It’s a lesson in building up high expectations while ignoring the truth. Many investors get hurt, lose money, because they bought a company for something it didn’t do. Facebook isn’t alone in this. It happens with all types of businesses. We invest in companies for what they do now. Anything else is speculation.
When Meteors Attack
Asteroids aren’t at the top of our worry lists. A big rock circling the sun isn’t really a concern. Until it enters Earths atmosphere and becomes a meteor. Yet they exist and have some very impressive, scary, and deadly side effects as happened in Russia last night. Thanks to technology those side effects were caught on video.
Last Call
- Duration—What an Interest Rate Hike Could Do to Your Bond Portfolio – how duration affects bond pricing and your bond fund returns.
- How Overpriced Were Stocks in 1929? – a look at valuations in ’29 and how it relates to today.
- Shares deliver the best long-term returns, so why invest in bonds? – gives some very good answers to this tough question.
- US Is on Fast-Track to Energy Independence: Study – A nice report about US oil production and the potential impact and opportunity it could have here.
- Value Stocks are in the Eye of the Beholder – everyone has a different view on value and how to measure it.
