I just departed Clearwater, Florida, home of two retirement experts. I had a great time and learned a lot.
Where am I? Where do I want to go? How am I going to get there? Write it down!
Thomas Aquinas’ “uncaused cause.”
Don’t cross the “church” of Scientology.
Winter the dolphin, check out the movie Dolphin Tale.
Madonna took me on one final bike ride in the states for 20 miles. I couldn’t ask for a better final bike ride for the year. Picture to follow, the Mega Bus Wi-Fi is too slow!
Aunt Madonna and I at Dunedin on our bike ride.With Uncle Fun in Clearwater.
The new new management company is doing really well. This is our 4th—my brother Thad started, then Renting Ohio, then North Point Asset Management, and now Panzera Realty. Changing managers 3 times sounds like a lot and sounds like we might be the problem and not the manager, but each manager has been better than the previous. We have found that timely and effective maintenance is the #1 most important thing, followed by accurate accounting. They all charge basically the same price.
Notice the new pavement in the parking lot. Also, the front lights are now on a dusk to dawn sensor, so they are on all night.
Simple Kneads Gluten-Free Bread
The team in North Carolina is growing and the company is taking shape as it begins to hire employees. Sales began in August and, though there are challenges, demand for the excellent quality gluten-free bread makes meeting those challenges well worth the effort. It is now available to buy on Amazon, and will soon be available directly from the company website.
Kineomen
Nothing significant to report!
The Stock Market
With my available money, I am still “all-cash,” and have been since December 2013. However, I spent about a week last month nerding out on the internet to sort through all the news, economists’ opinions, indicators, and general stock market chatter to find some sources that I can understand and trust to make sense of the market and use to make confident, informed buy and sell decisions. I came up with four sources that, in order, tell first when to pay attention, then once the market is primed for buying, what to buy. Those four items are listed in this post.
My bike versus truck challenge is finished. It ran from August 2015 through January 2016. In the final 3 weeks of the challenge, I biked almost zero and drove my truck everywhere doing projects at my apartments and moving my stuff into storage. The final score was a crushing defeat by 250 miles:
Truck: 1924 miles
Bike: 1674 miles
The bike wins in the end, however, because I sold the truck! In addition to getting estimates from local dealerships, I put the truck on Craigslist and a dealership from North Carolina found it and sent an inspector by plane to inspect, buy, and drive the truck back to North Carolina. He had a refundable return plane ticket in case he found something wrong with the truck. I may have had to accept the local price of $2,000 less if my brother had not offered to buy it and sell it for me enabling me to hold out until the last day. It was a great truck, but I’m glad to have the cash!
Rule #1: maximize time on skis, so get in shape. Every time down the hill you learn something!
Monday
Watch a skiing YouTube video.
Go down the hill without hurting yourself.
Tuesday
Keep skis together (easier said than done) and put weight on the downhill / outside ski.
Should be able to lift inside ski off the snow. Rotate hips, tighten core.
Wednesday
Rotate around the inside pole, not the outside! Use it to lift weight and shift.
Mogul drills: point out each mogul with pole and negotiate them half-speed.
Thursday
Don’t land on top of moguls to control speed. Moguls are a horizontal obstacle. Center of gravity goes over mogul, skis go around.
Weight transfer up and down to shift skis side to side. Center of gravity travels in a straight line.
Friday
Get off your heels. Press toes of foot on the outside ski. Ski on the ball of outside foot.
Inside ski with no weight goes forward of outside ski. Do this by pushing inside knee forward with hip flexor.
Week 2
“Walk” down the hill with poles. Keep “3 points of contact.”
Expert Source:
We took a family ski vacation to Stowe, Vermont last week. Stowe was awesome and the vacation was perfect. The snow came just in time.
I hadn’t skied since 1995, so I started from scratch and took notes. It was a blast and I’m hooked. Next time I go I want to pick up where I left off, so here is what I learned:
Bike leads truck by 158 miles, 1626 – 1468. I’m hanging on to that lead.
I was trying to catch a bus on High Street on Friday from behind. Sometimes you can catch them if they are in traffic or while they stop, but generally they go faster than a bike. I have pedaled myself to exhaustion before only to see the bus continuously pull away and stop just ahead of me like a carrot on a stick. This time, however, I was more bold. I call this move the “Tiananmen Square.” The bus stopped long enough for me to catch up, but was closing its doors as I overtook it. Rather than hope the driver would see me pull up to the stop and be nice, I passed the bus on the left and stopped in front so the driver couldn’t ignore me. He stopped. I loaded my bike quickly and had my fare ready to go. Total delay for the bus, 30 seconds. Saved me a lot of work!
I am renovating the steps at our apartments. This bird was hiding from the wind and let me get really close. I don’t think he was OK.
This week’s quiz question: what kind of bird is that?
That puts biking holding steady to 159 mile lead over the truck, 1,593 miles – 1,434 miles. The weather has been unseasonably warm, I have only gotten a little wet riding my bike, and biking isn’t that cold anyway.
The other factor in keeping my driving miles down has been completely nerding out on the internet for days on end systemizing where I get my news and market indicators. See the result here.
Answer to last week’s quiz question: the Scioto River empties into the Ohio River near Portsmouth, Ohio.
This week’s quiz question: to blog or not to blog? Answer here.
Then why did I submit a claim? I submitted a claim because it is the only way to not be forced to pay for medical coverage that is falsely expensive because of your involvement.
For the record, I did not lie on my claim. I listed all my aches and pains–which thankfully are minor–and let the system decide. I got 10%. I really don’t know all the politics behind this issue, and I’m not a health care professional, but there is no way that I should be receiving free money.
I will be at my first annual check-up at the VA medical center, where the nurses and doctors have been very accommodating and professional, on the 16th because that is what I need, annual check-ups. I will continue to live a healthy lifestyle for myself, and to fulfill my responsibility to not drain the system.
I will continue to save my money when I can. I hope you can do the same. You can start with my two hundred some dollars a month. It would be nice to cash the check and throw it on the big pile that I’ve saved by not buying into the American consumer society that you’ve promoted, but I really don’t need it.
*Instead of using actual market cap value, I used “Nonfinancial corporate business; corporate equities; liability, Level” from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis because the data is available since 1945. That number is only reported quarterly, so the Wilshire 5000 index is used to extrapolate to find the current value.
**The GDP is used by some reports instead of GNP, but Buffett uses the GNP. GDP and GNP are very similar, within about 1% of each other, and don’t fluctuate like total market cap does.
Buffett Indicator chart with various standard deviation lines based only on past data.
I have to pick an economist. My pick is John P. Hussman. He posts straightforward charts showing strong correlation between current indicators and future results. He uses the S&P 500 to measure performance and he has consistently posted weekly since 2003. All of his posts are available for quick reference: Hussman Funds Weekly Market Comment.
236 = current Consumer Price Index. This number is adjusted so that it averages 100 from 1982-1984. For the first year this number was calculated, 1913, the value was 9.9 (BLS)
6.42 = Chinese Yuan Renminbi for 1 US dollar (x-rates.com)
My Market Tools, Long-Term to Specific
Buffett Indicator from above
My economist pick: John P. Hussman, referenced above.
Investor’s Business Daily Big Picture
CANSLIM checklist for picking individual stocks
Energy
All energy data here is in petajoules = 1 quadrillion joules = “1-with-fifteen-zeros” joules, which can quickly be converted to other units of energy for comparison:
See also the US energy flow graph, Section 1.0, for a visualization of energy use.
10,100,000 petajoules = energy contained in the 1,656 billion barrels of proved world petroleum reserves (US Energy Information Administration), using the above conversion as an estimate of the energy equivalent.
7,578,000 petajoules = energy contained in the 6,973 trillion cubic feet of proved world natural gas reserves (US Energy Information Administration). This is probably a very rough estimate because of variance in the energy contained in different natural gas.
$39.93 / barrel = current price of WTI crude oil (US EIA) = $6,527,000 / petajoule of energy
$2.11 / million BTU = Henry Hub spot price of energy from natural gas (US EIA) = $1,942,000 / petajoule from natural gas
6.527 / 1.942 = 3.4: oil energy currently costs 3.4 times as much as natural gas energy.
252 million = US civilian noninstitutional population
59.3% = employment-population ratio, which is the percentage of civilian noninstitutional population who are employed. Total employed is 149 million people. This is 46.2% of the total population.
5.0% = “unemployment rate” the most-often-reported percentage that does not include people who are not seeking employment, whether receiving unemployment benefits, welfare, or otherwise.
Going into the last full month here in Ohio, biking has a commanding 170 mile lead over driving. December is pretty much going to be a victory lap!
Thanksgiving was awesome. I brought the keyboard and gave some lessons to my cousin-in-law. We both know enough to make some pop-music noise now.
Of note also, I finally got the call from a local basketball team so I’m briefly coming out of retirement tonight for two 20 minute running-clock halves.
Answer to last week’s question: the Olentangy River was supposed to be named the Whetstone River because its Delaware Native American name meant “stone for your knife stream,” based on the shale found along its shores. Olentangy means “river of the red face paint,” and was the name that was supposed to go to what is now Big Darby Creek.
This week’s quiz question: near what Ohio city does the Scioto River empty into the Ohio River?
