Twitter (TWTR) is a Serenity level holding in the Freedom Portfolio. They released fourth quarter earnings Thursday morning and the market’s reaction is a great example of why I prefer buying and holding for the long term and not worrying about short term fluctuations. Like Amazon (AMZN) recently, Twitter reported what looked to be a great quarter which beat expectations, yet dropped the next day for reasons I don’t fully understand.
The First Ever Rampant Discourse Podcast
A few weeks ago, the founders of Rampant Discourse got together to record our first ever podcast. It was a discussion that touched on a number of topics, such as: Politics, Owning vs Renting content, Marie Kondo, Star Wars, and the proper way to drink Guinness. We recorded so much content, that we decided to take a cue from the movie industry and pull a money grab by splitting it…
What do Razors and Blades have to do with Investing?
Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) is a Serenity level position in the Freedom Portfolio (one of the many). It’s a leading provider of robotic surgical systems, which help to increase the number of minimally invasive surgeries, which in turn “results in fewer complications, shorter length of hospital stay, a trend toward lower mortality and a trend toward more effective removal of cancer when compared with open surgery”.
The Check Deposit Rule of Social Media Reaction
If you follow the news at all, you’ve no doubt heard about the deplorable, MAGA-hat wearing, march for life attending group of white catholic high-schoolers who surrounded and taunted an elderly native american veteran this past weekend. The image of a smirking student staring down a drum playing native american went viral over social media, along with the veteran’s account of how he tried to defuse the situation. Widespread condemnation…
Fantasy Investing – My 2019 Portfolio
The 2019 Fantasy Investing season is underway and we’ve already had a fast start out of the gate with a few portfolios already seeing double digit gains. If only I had decided to start the Freedom Portfolio now instead of 3 months ago…
Activision Loses its Destiny
It has been a rough 3-4 months for the market in general, but especially for Activision Blizzard. They’ve lost not just one, but two CFO’s. Their latest earnings report showed some troubling trends with their engagement numbers. The normally universally beloved and unassailable Blizzard encountered some pretty strong negative reaction to the announcement of Diablo: Immortal. Blizzard has also seem some talent leaving along with some formerly popular games nearing the end of their life. At the same time, there’s been precious little good news to offset all of the bad.
Rampant Recap of the 2018 NFL Season
The 2018 NFL regular season is over, and so it’s time to take a look back on my division winner picks to see how I did. Since I have nobody to compete against this year, I’ll be competing against my score from last year when I get a respectable 10 points. As a reminder, here is the scoring system: 5 points are awarded for correctly picking the division winner 1…
The Freedom Portfolio – January 2019
Ouch. It’s hard to think of any other way of describing the start to the Freedom Portfolio. It’s also hard to think of a better way of describing the performance of the stock market over the past month. As of the time of this writing, the all-time high for the S&P 500 was September 20th, 2018. That was about a week and a half before the official start of me tracking the performance of the Freedom Portfolio. I couldn’t have picked a worse starting time if I tried.
Recklessly Bold Predictions for 2019
I enjoy investing and think it’s a lot of fun, but sometimes responsibly buying and holding a diversified portfolio of companies can admittedly get a little dull. Fantasy Investing can help with that a little bit, but sometimes I just want to make utterly irresponsible and recklessly bold predictions without having to actually risk any money on them because, well, they’re most likely going to end up being wrong.
Where do you put your emergency fund?
Have you heard the doomsday stories about how unprepared Americans are for unexpected expenses? The numbers vary: 40% can’t cover a $400 expense, most would go into debt over a $500 expense, only 39% can cover a $1,000 emergency. They all tell a similar story, though: many Americans don’t have any significant source of savings that they can draw upon.