My Barber Shares Secret of His Wealth
(In the years leading up to the dot-com boom, I freelanced an investment column to the Sunday San Francisco Examiner. Following is one of my favorites. It tells how Louie Piro, my barber when I lived in Mountain View, became a multimillionaire by investing his spare cash – amounting to all of $5 a week – in promising companies when he started cutting hair in the 1950s. Louie was still cutting hair long after he could have retired, but his weekend getaways were anything but ho-hum: marlin fishing in Cabo, golfing in Las Vegas and Hawaii, and casino junkets to Atlantic City. RA)
If there is a single word to sum up the success of investor Louis Piro, that word is “dull.”
Piro has never made a killing on a stock. He doesn’t play hunches and he runs from hot tips. He says he passed up Pfizer not long ago because its shares were too pricey even before…
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Diamonds, E-Mini S&P Dance to Our Tune
The Diamonds and the E-Mini S&Ps followed our script precisely yesterday, allowing Rick’s Picks subscribers to get short from the intraday highs in both. Because the E-Minis were raising some hell Sunday night, we allowed for a rally to as high as 1046 on Monday – equivalent to about a 200-point thrust in the Dow Industrials. However, we saw an opportunity to get short at a lower target, a Hidden Pivot at 1034.00, and put out the following trading recommendation: ”…a lesser target at 1034.00 can be shorted by scalpers with a 1.25-point stop-loss provided it’s hit in the first hour and 1020.50 hasn’t been exceeded…
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A Timely Apocalypse Could ‘Save’ Debtors
If nothing else can stop a runaway stock market, there’s always the astrologers. Pick any day of the year, and odds are it’s circled in red on some star-gazing guru’s End of Days calendar. The higher stocks go, the louder their predictions of disaster. Not that we haven’t joined the chorus of despair ourselves from time to time. How else is a guru supposed to gin up business during the dog days of summer? At the moment, the sexiest prediction out there is the Mayan apocalypse slated in 2012. Perhaps the Mayans would have pushed…
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Abolish the Fed? That Dream’s Dead for Now
There was discouraging news yesterday for anyone hoping that Rep. Ron Paul’s bill to abolish the Federal Reserve might make it to the floor during the current Congressional session. The way things look right now, H.R. 2755 may not come up for a vote for quite a while – at least for the duration of Mr. Obama’s presidency. By nominating “Helicopter Ben” Bernanke to a second term, the President made clear that the political champions of a so-far catastrophically unsuccessful status quo will continue to rule our economic lives, at least for the foreseeable future. If that weren’t bad enough, Mr. Bernanke’s “success” is…
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DJIA Winning Streak Just a Warm-Up?
It’s been more than two years since we’ve seen the Dow Industrials rally for eight consecutive days, but it happened yesterday with a little help from Boeing, which gapped almost $4 higher on the opening bell. If you’re wondering how the Dow’s winning streak in April of 2007 fared, it turned out to have been just the beginning of a spectacular run-up that carried the blue chip average to its all-time high six months later, in October. The rally stalled along the way and went into a nasty dive in July, but the recovery was…