Great overview and background on Gold as a Commodity over at Crossing Wallstreet.
The summary for current investors is…
My view is that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates earlier than expected. I don’t know exactly when that will be but it will put gold on a dangerous path. For now, my advice is to stay away from gold, either long or short.
… but you should read the whole thing for a lot of interesting tidbits on the history of gold and how to track and trade it. Here’s another quote …
Category: InvestorGeeks
“Payback Time†Analysis for GOOG
I still own a few shares of GOOG. It’s felt overpriced recently, but I’m holding onto a minimal amount at all times and trying to add more over time. So I’m hoping the price drops a bunch so I can pick up more cheaply.
Do a search here for GOOG for my previous thoughts (years old), but I basically think that the world will continue to be drowned in data. Google’s goal to organize the world’s information and their expertise at scaling Internet apps puts them in a great position to …
Yes You Should Refinance. But How?
With mortgage rates dropping like a brick, it’s becoming a no-brainer for us to refinance our home loan. Even though we just got a 30-year loan 2 years ago at 5.875%, we can get 30-year loans now for around 4.5% or lower. You might be in a similar situation.
Rule of Thumb
The rule of thumb I hear thrown around a lot is that if you can drop 1% off your mortgage rate, you should refinance. To get a more precise idea if refinancing is good for you, you should really take …
The Snowball. Warren Buffet and the Business of Life.
I am currently reading The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life in bits and pieces. It’s very entertaining.
This is not the type of book I would normally purchase or maybe even pick up at the library. I’m as interested in Warren Buffet as anybody, but this thing is pretty thick and daunting. Lucky for me, publishers send me books to review all the time. (And there just hoping for a link like the one above and maybe an Amazon review. I should give them that more often.) So …
Christian Gross Still Blogging Great Stuff at DevSpace.com
Christian no longer crossposts here, but he’s still an investor geek, blogging great stuff over at his blog at devspace.com.
Here are a few articles I found interesting:
Why “You Should Have Known Better†Does Not Cut It!
Why The Republicans are Wrong To Block the SEC!
Why We Are Not Buying Apple IPads
WRT to the Euro: CNBC Talking Heads are IDIOTS!
Interview with Herb Greenberg at KirkReport.com
There is a great QA with Herb Greenberg over at TheKirkReport. A few snips from the article:
…
Kirk: For good or for ill, how do you see financial journalism evolving with the use of blogs and other social media?
Herb Greenberg: The good: Leveling the playing field with an enormous amount of information. Bad: Zero accountability. Beyond traditional journalists, anybody can say anything under any name – real or assumed – and in the end those same people can disappear.
…
Kirk: In all of the research you’ve done, what are …
4 Most Underused Projects We’ve Launched
4. MoneyShui.
The Idea: Find reviews for finance and investing books
The Problem: Not enough content yet.
The Solution: We need to get things going. I still haven’t copied all of the InvestorGeeks reviews over. Getting a fresh blogger there would help too. So would marketing it as an SEO scam… you need a review here. You need to link here. You need a link from here.
3. DietShui.
The Idea: Find reviews for diet books. a.k.a. MoneyShui for diet and health books.
The Problem: Same as MoneyShui. It needs content to be of use to people.
The Solution: Same as above.
2. NoteTrain.
The Idea: Take some prose writing and convert it into a “train” of sentences presented one line at a time.
The Probelm: Two fold here: (1) We haven’t been spreading the word on this one and (2) It’s kind of pointless.
The Solution: Let people know how fun this is and how useful it can be. I use it to send Kim love notes. It’s different.
1. SearchRascal.
The Idea: Keep track of search result rankings for keywords your tracking.
The Problem: Just launched and no one knows about it. We need some people using it to justify the server costs.
The Solution: Push on our SEO buddies to spread the word a bit. I’ve submitted the site to some blogs and stuff but no one is picking up on this. Perhaps the idea isn’t as awesome as I thought it was. Nah, I doubt that. We need a little bit of publicity to get this going. The site really is useful to SEO professionals and anyone who wants to track search rankings for a website or group of queries.
What I’m Up To
Been very busy lately. Looks like it’s going to be like this until after the wedding.
When you work for yourself, you can do things like take the whole month of May off. However, you have to work like a dog February through April to make it happen. It’s probably worth it though.
InvestorGeeks
InvestorGeeks, which is now donating all profits to charity, has made it’s first donation to a blogger who will be riding for the Arthritis Foundation this fall. If your feeling generous, take this direct link to donate to Steve’s cause.
In other InvestorGeeks news, I was interviewed by Kristin Friedersdorf, of WallSt.net (look for the “recent episodes” list in the right sidebar). I talked about my investing philosophies and shared some of my lessons learned trying to start a blog network with InvestorGeeks.com.
WineLog
On the WineLog front, our potential features list is growing faster than we can knock stuff out. There is a lot of work to be done there. Still, there is time to drink a bit of box wine. I had some Hardy’s 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon, and it wasn’t bad.
One exciting bit is that we’re nearly finished helping Ryan Opaz become the most prolific Wine Logger ever. We are importing his 600 or so wines and tasting notes from out of CellarTracker. We’re about halfway through his wines. It’s a crazy process that we’re trying to streamline and automate as much as possible. In the future, it should be fairly easy for anyone to leave their current wine tracking software and join the dark side over at WineLog.net.
I’ll throw this out there right now. If any competitors are working on similar importing schemes and trying to get data out of WineLog, just let me know. I’ll seriously help you as much as possible. If people want to take their data to another service, I want to help them. Perhaps more, I don’t want any developers wasting their time doing stuff that would be much easier for us to do. I know our system probably looks as confusing to others as you-all’s stuff looks to me.
Fatness
I didn’t weight myself today. I’d guess somewhere between 220 and 222. Kim and I took our car for inspection and ended spending the whole day over at the car dealer waiting for new tires to get shipped in. We took a nice 1.5 mile stroll to a nearby Cracker Barrel for breakfast. Then a nice 1.5 mile stroll back later for lunch at Pizzeria Uno.
So a decent workout there with all the walking, but I doubt it made up for the extra calories I had today. (ham and cheese omelet, hashbrown casserole, sourdough toast – “ranch chicken” salad, two sausages on rolls for dinner with chips = about 3500Calories at least.) I’m getting a bit too content, and even fat blogging isn’t motivating me. I’m going to have a day of reckoning at the gym tomorrow… really going to beat myself up. ‘should be fun.
Peace.