A Test of Faith

You often hear stories about deathbed conversions or returns to faith near the moment when there's not much left to lose by professing one's faith.

So what if an unexpected profession of faith leaves your followers and fans behind in a world of even greater uncertainty?

Screw them. When you see the white light, it's every man for himself and the adoption of the Captain Schettino rules applies, whereby woman and children have to fend for themselves while the captain of the ship trips his way past those pearly gates ahead of the rest.

Who knows, there may be limited seating.

Many famous and infamous people have purportedly had deathbed conversions, including Darwin and Stalin, but the reports of other such conversions may just be wishful thinking or generated for proganda purposes alone.

Based on the appearance of the term "ProShares UltraShort Silver ETF" in the word cloud that accompanies this blog you might be lead to believe that I worship at the feet of some silver idol.

Not really, but you would be right to have that suspicion, as it does seem to appear with great frequency.

By the same token, the constant "God Damn" refrain doesn't necessarily reflect belief in a diety.

I'm not particularly religious, although I don't know if I'll be one of those undergoing the end of life "seeing of the light" experience.

At the moment, there is a 24 hour "Yahrtzeit" candle burning in our household, as is the Jewish tradition to mark the anniversary of a close relative's passing. Still, nothing really religious, just adherence to tradition and maybe trying to keep my options open in case "The Big Man" chooses to exercise an option over whether those last minute attempts to enter the Kingdom will be honored.

Szelhamos, who wasn't particularly religious would probably be pleased that he's remembered. In the slight chance that such a possibility exists, then "why not?"

Click to read more ...

What the Hell? (Part 2)

Most people go through two stages of life when they really like certainty and predictable patterns.

Really young kids and really old people. Both tend to get very cranky when their schedules are thrown off or they don't get what they were expecting when they were expecting.

I'm neither of those demographics, being uncomfortably in-between, but I do need the predictability in life to keep my balance intact.

I, too, can get cranky.

For as long as I can remember, ever since I've been interested in the release of the  "Federal Open Market Committee" (FOMC) statement on those Wednesdays, they have one of their eight annually scheduled meetings, the statement has been released at 2:17 PM.

The regularity of the timing led me to scoff at the reports that would cite the release as being anticipated at 2:15 PM.

Amateurs.

I never particularly cared why they chose an odd time, perhaps because it is a prime number and, after all these are economists and numbers wonks, but that was the routine.

By contrast, I do care why Comedy Central starts many of their shows at bizarre times, yet I've never been able to uncover an answer. I doubt that the prime number theory applies. Math is frequently not a strong suit for those in the entertainment end of the entertainment business.

In fact, I've always been so attuned to the FOMC announcement that it became a reason for regular party giving with a countdown to 2:17 PM among me and my many friends and admirers, although most of the time it was just me.

And by most of the time, I mean "always."

Comfortably seated at 12:28 PM, the characteristic voice of CNBC's Hampton Pearson cut in with a reading of the statement.

My first thought was that Pearson had gone rogue and decided to flip the middle finger to the embargo on the statement and  decided that he alone would control the markets.

I thought we'd hear doppler like screams coming from Hampton Pearson as he was being hauled away by SEC security people further away from the microphones.

But no.

Click to read more ...

Scared Straight

Given the fact that we've never even been able to teach any of our puppies any trick at all, the saying "you can't teach an old dog new tricks'" while perhaps not true in every situation, is definitely true in my household.

Maybe I can blame that on "Low T," as it seems that just about everything else is being piled on its shoulders. Besides, that would make sense, especially if both trainer and trainee suffered from that malady.

In Laszlo's case, his descent into "Low T" came fairly suddenly, so I do  wonder whether his reluctance to learn any tricks is just a manifestation of his passive-aggresive behavior.

Although I'm at the point that I'm not likely to learn much new anymore, I'm getting increasingly proud of my ability to adapt, if not learn.

I've certainly recognized my advancing limitations as I've completely given up on the idea of learning even the most simple of technical analyses.

I don't even do cost averaging anymore, but I continue to be able to count by "fives."

But over the past few years, I've noticed the ability to make some behavioral changes as push would come to shove.

Monday was a good example.

Armed with lots of cash due to the assignment of about 60% of my portfolio, in the past, I would have felt compelled to burn through all of the funds, regardless of where prices were headed on that day.

If they were heading down, that often was fine, as given the market's behavior, there would be a predictable bounce upward sooner rather than later and then why not buy at a presumed bargain price?.

On the other hand, there really was no rationale reason to rifle through the money chasing rising share prices.

But I did, over and over again.

Not yesterday, though.

Restraint and judgment helped to start this morning with a decent amount to still play with, looking for what appeared to be bargains that weren't there yesterday..

Had retraint not been there, I would have picked up shares of Deere at about $2 more than where they were purchased today.

I felt good about that, although that's just a small step resuting in a small advantage. Mostly, I'm proud of that small step because I did it all on my own.

Learning how to exercise restraint to prevent premature speculation is a big achievement.

But sometimes you need others to help you and sometimes they have to take drastic actions to scare you straight.

In my case, I needed to be scared straight into inaction.

Do you remember that series of specials describing the seemingly drastic and harsh measures taken to deal with hardened bad boys. Lots of yelling, lots of crying and then success.

Okay, maybe a suicide or two, as well, but by the end of the episode, all we saw wa success.

Click to read more ...

Under the Radar

This Monday morning, which was just a dreary and cold mid-Atlantic day, there wasn't too much to cheer about.

Over the past three years, I've been drafted into the culture of football and now find myself, somewhat uncharacteristically, actually caring about games.

Culture. Football. Talk about oxymorons.

Just a few short years ago my only foray into football would have been to watch about a half's worth of the Super Bowl and take the occasion to excuse the non-stop ingestion of deep fried anything.

I looked at the Super Bowl as being Saturated Fat Sunday.

Now, I even have four pro football games under my belt, although if given the opportunity to go to a game, the weather is still a factor in my decision process, as well as who's going to be singing the National Anthem.

I'm still far from a fanatic. I even turned off the New York Giants game last night during overtime and never even bothered to go down to the basement and turn on the big screen TV to get a more real-life feel.

It's not as if I had to be up early the next morning, it's just that I was probably depressed because Simpsons episodes had been pre-empted in favor of the football game and I'd already seen that eposode of Chappelle about 300 times.

I did take the Baltimore Ravens loss harshly, though, particularly knowing that my kids are big Ravens fans. The manner in which they lost the opportunity to tie the game and force it into overtime was especially hard to accept, as an easy field goal was not as advertised.

The big news this morning was that loss and the resignation of the co-CEO's of Research in Motion and the subsequent appointment of a new CEO.

The two items are not in any way related, but then did become so.

The question of the day on CNBCm tied it all together as they asked who likely got more sleep last night, Billy Cundiff, the Raven's kicker or Thorsten Heins, the new RIMM CEO?

Ordinarily, being named new CEO is a pretty positive thing, unless you're Leo Apotheker.

In this case the market didn't react terribly kindly to the announcement of Heins' ascension, especially since he was considered to be somewhat of an insider who may have also been asleep as the ship was sinking.

Oh, and the accent didn't help either as the prevailing joke was that RIMM hired Leo Apotheker's son.

I don't know what kind of jokes are circulating today regarding Cundiff's miss, but I doubt that there are many. People take their football more seriously thatn they do their stocks.

One was tragic, the other just business going about business.

Click to read more ...

Experience is Meaningless

Everyone knows that "history repeats itself."

That must explain why we keep making the same mistakes. After all, since we all know that you can't change history, why even bother?

Unless you're Newt Gingrich. In that case revisionism seems to work, as long as he remains the victor and in charge of re-writing history.

For example, Newt's current position, which seemed to make hostess candy Crowley's eyebrows rise about 5 inches, is that his congressional reprimand for ethics violations occured only because he convinced Republican members to vote for the reprimand so that they could get back to the business of working on a balanced budget.

He credits himself with getting the Congress back to work and selflessly sacrificing his reputation.

After all, is there any politician that wouldn't put nation before self?

History tells us that the victor writes history until the next victor comes along.

Once you call yourself an "historian," you get a free pass and can alter immutable laws of time and place and make the details of the past fit nicely into the current version of the past. Again, being ascendant helps.

But we're also said to be able to learn from history and especially to learn from our mistakes. In fact, "fool me once...." speaks to the expectation that we won't make the same mistake a second time.

Sometimes, though, the past may lead us down the wrong path.

My guess is that it would be a grave mistake, perhaps literally, were Newt Gingrich to ask Callista to accept an "open marriage." The fact that she reportedly supported the concept before their marriage probably has little predictive capability in 2012.

There's no greater indicator of our pre-occupation with the concept of changing the past and our mistakes than the fact that the single most aired movie on broadcast television and cable is "Groundhog Day."

I may have made that statistic up, but right now, I'm the one re-writing history.

Had we really been able to learn from the past there would have been Stephen Tobolowsky film festivals competing with Sundance and Cannes.

So clearly, we are all idiots, but at least Tobolowsky is front and center on Twitter and forms the basis for a more hopeful view of the future.

Not so long ago, only the spoken word was available to document our history and experiences. Life spans were short and there were people whose sole reason for existence was to maintain a culture's hold onto its past and pass it on to the next generation.

During those days mistakes were often fatal. That's a strong motivator to not repeat some dead guy's mis-step.

Click to read more ...

It's a New World (Szelhamos Rules Archive February 1, 2008)

The original Szelhamos Rules ran for precisely 1 year, from February 2007 - February 2008. This article originally appeared February 1, 2008 on the occasion of a Google share price plunge and the announcement of Mcrosoft's bid for Yahoo!.

As a Google shareholder, I haven't been very happy lately. In fact, I was upset about some of what I considered to be Google's disregard for its shareholders even when it was approaching $750. Imagine the rants that are going through my mind now that Google is pointing another $40 points lower in the pre-open following yesterday's earnings release.

Why exactly were we spending money on space shots?

Focus guys. Focus.

I understand why Richard Branson does it, but Google? Is there something to search for on the moon? Maybe they can use the lunar surface to house their servers in an ecologically friendly fashion.

So the word comes out today that Yahoo received a so-called "unsolicited" bid from Microsoft for $31, a hefty premium to yesterday's close. It will probably take all of 10 minutes for Yahoo's board to meet and accept this "unsolicited" offer. But just a few short months ago, Yahoo was at $31, without any takeover rumors propping it up.

Click to read more ...

Reconnaissance

If you're a purist, you know that "reconnaissance" is a term that is applied to the gathering of information regarding an enemy. Although typically done covertly, it isn't considered espionage since it's carried out by combatants or agents of combatants.

Today started a period of reconnaissance for me, but I really wasn't trying to gather information on enemies. The great thing about being anti-social is that you usually are short on the enemies side of the ledger as you are on the friends side.

Reconnaissance today started with evaluating the prospective daughter-in-law population.

As the first half of an 11 hour roundtrip today, I drove to New York City very early this morning to meet my son's 6 AM flight returning from Israel. He had spent the last 10 days there as part of a great program called "Birthright," which allows college and recent college graduates to make that trip at no cost along with others.

No strings attached.

When I initially dropped him off to begin the trip, I immediately noticed that within his group there seemed to be a very favorable female to male ratio.

Did I mention that all of the girls were Jewish? Did I mention that "favorable" meant many more females.

Click to read more ...

Life's not Fair

It doesn't take many cycles of watching the nightly news to realize that there will never be a shortage of unspeakable tragedies. As soon as you hear about some horrible personal or global event that sends chills down your spine, along comes another, giving you barely a moment to catch your breath.

Unbelievably, each successive wave of bad news just gets worse and worse, yet as we become hardened to the bad news experienced by others, we just channel surf to escape the burden of our emotions.

It's hard to deal with an unending flow of examples of how unfair the world can be, but the world became an infinitely better place for all that could afford a television with remote control.

For the ones who couldn't, it's just like a final nail in the coffin and further proof of just how unfair the world can be when you can't even shield yourself from news of the realities gong on around you.

By virtue of your birth place, by virtue of your DNA and by virtue of where you may be standing at the moment, you may never have had a chance in life.

I mentioned Woody Allen yesterday and his eminently quotable line from Annie Hall, a movie that had more than it's fair share of quotable quotes.

“I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.”

"Fair share?"

Actually, "fairness" had nothing to do with the surfeit of great lines from that movie. There was nothing coincidental about their occurence and nothing was there to pre-ordain their success or failure.

They were all earned.

Click to read more ...

What's Next?

Most successful business leaders and individuals would agree that your business has to keep constantly moving forward and even re-inventing itself, if necessary.

In hindsight, some less than successful corporate shepherds will agree that moving forward is a better idea than just "seeing what develops" and then finally reacting.

As the case of Kodak has shown, nothing really develops anymore and no one really wants to buy cheap printers from among a plethora of cheap printers available from established market leaders

Treading water isn't a very good option, because sooner or later, you end up sinking or being eaten by a shark. As so poignantly stated in "Annie Hall," a shark..... has to be constantly moving forward or it dies.

Sears anyone?

But just look at IBM.

How much does the 2012 iteration resemble that of 1985? The change at IBM was more than just a move away from the obligation to wear white button downs.These days, if you seen an IBM logo on a laptop, you can be certain that it's not going to be anew ultra portable.

Been there, done that and moved forward.

Whether through acquisition or playing to the strengths of your key players, successful companies manage to be ahead of the curve and anticipate the movement of the marketplace.

They don't ask you for your zip code when you buy a pack of off-brand batteries

Click to read more ...

Third Party Candidates

A lot has been said about the recent Jockey underwear survey regarding who people would rather see in their upcoming ad campaign. Hurriedly arranged, the alternative new campaign had to be launched when news came that Chaz Bono would not be ready in time for the spring collection, due to some unfinished business left dangling.

Reportedly, the nation was evenly split in their opinion, but voting continues.

What a surprise. Although in our very recent past, evenly split is an apt description of just about everything with regard to our positions on political, social and economic policies..

As it would turn out at the end of Saturday evening, in the playoff faceoff between the two undergarment models, the "Brady Bulge" easily beat the "Tebow Twinkie."

By "beat," I meant was victorious over, as this is a family friendly site.

As someone who has long supported the cause of third party cadidates, I'm going to cast my vote for either Ed Asner or Danny DeVito, if the survey ever gets past my Caller ID defense mechanisms.

I'm really having difficulty trying to get the image of Tebow in his tighty whities doing his genuflection and then being greeted by the inadvertant escape of his He-bow. You know, the thing he uses when he needs to Wee-bow.

As I think back to my voting record I've voted for the following third party candidates: George McGovern, John Anderson and H. Ross Perot,  while ignoring the likes of Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan.

I know that strictly speaking George McGovern doesn't qualify as a third party candidate, but I think his performance that year was on par with the likes of Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Robert LaFollette.

To a very large degree anyone running as a third party candidate has to have large doses of narcissism and denial running through their veins. So much so that they're willing to see the side that they're more closely aligned with lose, due to the siphoning of votes.

Neither Asner nor DeVito would ever do anything like that. They could just as easily lead or be a team player. Having appeared in an underwear shot in "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," DeVito has already proven that he has the literal and figurative goods. He is also willing to supply a wide angle lens for appreciating the full effect.

John Anderson may not fit into the narcissistic category either, but the other recent candidates certainly have changed election outcomes. Although I'm not really certain who Ed Asner would take votes away from, unless the mainstream dichotomous choice was between Tim Tebow or Danny DeVito.

In that case, Tebow slips in, but not before matrimony.

At this point who knows where Ron Paul is heading, but theres no doubt that he would receive lots of support in making that decision from those on the left side of the aisle. From purely a conceptual bais, probably no one would be more in favor of dropping the unwritten rule that ours is a two party political system than Ron Paul.

Click to read more ...