My Desultory Blog

Posted By RichC on February 13, 2012

Every once in a while those interviewed on widely watched financial television channels have an opportunity to mention individual stocks … not a big deal when the companies are larger. Unfortunately mentioning a couple lessor known companies can move the prices.

Today CNBC’s Bill Griffeth on his Closing Bell segment interviewed an analyst from Oppenheimer who suggested that shippers might be undervalued. Carter Worth compared the trend to the Dow and suggested trading a couple of the laggards. Bill pressed him for a couple of names and Mr. Worth complied (can you tell by the charts when he mentioned these two stocks?)

… one way to then, you know, sort of get involved here is to try to play transports by those that have lagged by shippers. Are there shippers that you like or should you buy the group? There are groups that I like but the Baltic Index is at an all time low. So the cost of leasing a boat is going down to record lows the stocks themselves are actually starting to come up off the bottom and there are two that looked good among others, but DryShips (DRYS) is one, and if you look at the chart, it shows that a well established down trend, 7-2, and then we are breaking above the downturn, an important development, stock leading the the way, while shipping rates stay down.

Another one, Genco (GNK), 25-5 and here too, you see the down trend and moving above the down trend, there’s wisdom in price. the prices of these shippers and many others are starting to move up while the shipping rates are at lows. what you are acknowledging is that there’s strength in the key sector, you are trying to find the bargains. again, everything else is robust …

Category: Financial | No Comments »
Tags: charts, cnbc, finance, investing, stocks, trading

Posted By RichC on February 12, 2012

Although we had a relaxing week “on the boat” … we opted to spend our last day in Orlando and visiting the Epcot center and dinner at the California Grill atop Walt Disney World’s Contemporary Hotel (thanks Gary!)

Category: Archive, Personal, Photos | 2 Comments »
Tags: family, Personal, Photos, vacation

Posted By RichC on February 9, 2012

Just archiving a few photos from our wind blown day on the beach Wednesday and rough day sailing on Thursday – winds were a bit strong from the NE and 4-6 foot waves not all that much fun. Cloudy mornings – sunny early afternoon turning back into overcast and clouds later. We had a good time even with the green water on the decks a few times.

Category: Archive, Personal, Photos, Sailing | No Comments »
Tags: archive, beach, encore, florida, sailing

Posted By RichC on February 9, 2012

The expected Volkswagen Beetle TDI made its appearance at the Chicago Auto Show Wednesday all squished down and sporty looking. It is to be offered as a 2013 model and will have the 2.0 liter diesel. The new model will be offered with the manual six-speed transmission or the VW six-speed DSG automatic and will deliver 236 pound–feet of torque with its 140 HP TDI engine.

Prices haven’t been announced for the Beetle TDI but Volkswagen expect fuel efficiency numbers to be 29 mpg city and 39 mpg highway. The TDI will have 17-inch alloy wheels, additional exterior chrome along with special badging and instrument pod with a turbo boost gauge, oil temperature gauge and a stopwatch.

Category: Automotive, Diesel, Volkswagen | 1 Comment »
Tags: 2013, beetle, diesel, tdi, volkswagen, vw

Posted By RichC on February 8, 2012

As for sun and sailing, we did head out in the morning … but between the rain and the associated wind gusts with every batch of wet weather we gave up “the fun” and headed back to our home port. We did visit the fuel dock to both pump out and top of our fuel tank, but by afternoon decided to head to Delray Beach for a visit with Brenda’s parents and a dinner out at Duffy’s … a very nice time (and they are doing great).

Category: Personal, Photos, Sailing | No Comments »
Tags: delray beach, florida, howard, sailing

Posted By RichC on February 7, 2012

All is good so far as some R & R goes, but the drizzle and rain has been with us for the past 48 hours. I’m looking at the forecast and current radar (Encore’s radar photo on the right) and it looks like less rain with isolated thunderstorms tomorrow. We’ll see.

While the girls watched a rented movie from Redbox, I tinkered on a longer term shower project as well as reseated the seals of a couple of ports … really need to order new seals — West Marine didn’t have them. I did get around to putting the propane grill and new outboard motor mount on the stern … I’m ready to grill something. Unfortunately at 10PM I’m tired again, so we’ll be heading to bed shortly – vacations do that to me.

Category: Personal, Photos, Sailing | No Comments »
Tags: encore, florida, sailboat

Posted By RichC on February 6, 2012

It is great to be vacationing with Brenda and my daughter on Encore over Superbowl weekend. We’re having a good time despite a few rain showers, but we used the drizzle as an excuse to help with the deck washing. One of the highlights was a visit from “Mr. Manatee” who enjoyed the fresh water dribbling off the deck (video below).

 
Mr. Manatee pays a  visit our boat

 
Cape Horn self steering gear on Encore and moi relaxing

Category: Personal, Photos, Sailing | No Comments »
Tags: encore, family, Photos, sailing

Posted By RichC on February 5, 2012

Although I’m not claiming to be a New York Giants fan, I’m definitely not a New England Patriots fan … so enjoyed the 21 to 17 win by the Giants. A great game for the NFL fans and one of the better Superbowl I can remember. Congrats to all for a great game right down to the end.

I was thinking that those watching the final minutes of the 4th quarter coaching strategy could definitely agree with  soccer=checkers and American football=chess comparison. Great job by all.

Category: Sports | No Comments »
Tags: 46, football, giants, nfl, patriots, superbowl

Posted By RichC on February 4, 2012

Fred Smith, CEO of Fedex, spoke on Thursday this past week and simplified his thoughts on turning around the economy and creating jobs. He supplied a chart which doesn’t necessarily clear up the “chicken or the egg” discussion associated with which comes first, but his chart does show that capital investment and private sector employment track, and have tracked, each other pretty close.

Now IF we can all agree that business owners and managers respond negatively to disincentives like higher taxes, more regulation and government control, then we should be able to conclude that they will be less likely to invest in their companies and probably won’t be hiring employees. On the other hand, IF they are given some kind of capital investment incentive, lower tax rates and are burdened with fewer regulation from government … they will be more likely to invest in their business and therefore hire employees … just as the graph indicates. If the goal is to create jobs, how about applying what works?

The  free enterprise policies that have created jobs throughout the decades in America will work again today. We are still the same country and have the most innovated people and ambitious workforce. Come on Mr. President, just acknowledge that your administration policies of growing government, centralized control and adding programs have not worked well over the past 3 years. The improving numbers (very weak) over the last couple of months are happening despite the bloat … and has only seen improvement AFTER the mid-term election slowing even a bigger federal intrusion. Thank goodness for gridlock (although reversing the spending and shrinking government would have been preferred).  Let’s open up the free enterprise system as it is the way to create jobs; just borrowing and taxing more out of the economy to fund your bloated federal government isn’t going to return America to greatness.

Category: Business, Financial, Politics | No Comments »
Tags: Business, cnbc, employment, fedex, fred smith, Politics, taxes

Posted By RichC on February 3, 2012

I’ve been using Gmail for years and recently found a hidden gem for filtering email. It works particularly well for me while using the Mozilla client Thunderbird, although is equally useful with any other client or the Google’s web client (BTW the upgrade to 10.0 was pushed out this past week). 

Without getting overly detailed as to how I’m using it, let’s just say that when I want to filter and saved something to a certain folder, I make sure the email address used has an appended plus (“+”) sign and correct folder name (or special word like “+toss”).

Of course a filter needs to be set up in the client to automatically sort, but that is something I’ve been doing for over a decade. No doubt most heavy email users have set up dozens of filters, labels, spam control, etc. (the address above actually works better than the old dodgeit.com address)

The beauty of adding the “+” to your email account name is that whatever is added doesn’t affect the mail going to your account and “could” be even given out to someone in order to have  their mail filtered automatically or even forwarded as needed. I’ve successfully used one that sends me out a text message trigger since the above address isn’t monitored as regularly or received on my phone. Hey … go crazy since whatever is after the plus sign isn’t significant.

Another less attractive but simpler technique is to use the Gmail ignored “dot” or period (“.”) somewhere in your address. Before I learned about the + sign, one my earlier tricks was to use my GMail address without the “dot” for all the less important website sign-ups and to include the “.us” part for the emails that I wanted kept in my inbox or to be filtered appropriately. This worked for a while, but over the years and to my lack of discipline ends up tossing too many emails.

Gmail doesn’t recognize periods as characters in addresses …

***

Category: Computer, Technology | 2 Comments »
Tags: email, filter, gmail, google, techfriday