Foolish Mutterings

As this blog continues to mature, I expect that my favorite topics will include the economy, investing, and, in particular, the stock market.  I may write about the stocks of certain companies occasionally, but more often, I’ll publish general comments, observations, and other items of interest rather than fundamental or chart analysis.  That being the case, I thought I would share how I became interested in the market, including an early failure and some early successes.  Nothing in this post should be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any particular security.  I have no current position in any security mentioned.

Growing up, I had almost no exposure to stocks and bonds.  I’m from a working class background, my parents were children of the depression, and all they knew was the bank.  My mom actually became interested in the market later in life, but that’s a story for another day.  We had a lesson on the stock market in middle school social studies, but it would be an exaggeration to say the class was superficial.  In college, I took a few economics classes, but they were mostly philosophical rather than practical in focus.

It wasn’t until my first real job that I got turned on to the stock market.  I was fortunate enough to work with some people who were into it in a big way.  I got involved in their discussions, they were kind enough to explain things to me, and soon I was ready to take the plunge.  Since I was still living at home, I had a lot of disposable income.  I subscribed to the Value Line Investment Survey and started reading The Wall Street Journal.  In short order, I picked out something I wanted to try.  And so we come to my first mistake.

I had read in the Journal about a new type of investment called a royalty trust, specifically the San Juan Basin Royalty Trust (NYSE: SJT).  As I know now, this was not buying the stock of a company, although the shares trade like a stock.  To make a long story short, shares in a royalty trust entitle you to receive a portion of the royalties paid when a natural resource is extracted from the earth.  For SJT, the resources were oil and natural gas.  The investment also carried certain tax advantages.  Looking back on it, I think it caught my eye because one of my co-workers was involved in oil and gas limited partnerships.  I thought we could bond over the energy markets.  Needless to say, for a new investor, this was NOT the place to start.  Factoring in the distributions I received and the tax benefits, I lost about $50 on the deal.  Quite an inauspicious start.

Sometime later, after a few more false starts, I decided to buy some shares of Conair, the hair product and (back then) telephone handset company.  I hadn’t owned it for too long when it suddenly became a big winner.  I always checked the quotes first thing in the morning and one day, I saw Conair had jumped about 50% the day before.  It turned out that the company was being taken private.  It was an exhilarating moment.  Other early successes followed.  My investment in Ford (NYSE: F) helped me make the down payment on my first house.  My friends had tipped me off on what was then a little-known pharmaceutical company that had an exciting pipeline of new drugs.  That company was Glaxo (now GSK plc, NYSE: GSK) and after a few years and a couple of stock splits, my $1,400 investment was worth just over $30,000.

In closing, allow me to offer a few items of advice.  If you want to get started in the markets, it’s best to stick to well-known companies with which you are familiar.  Don’t go for something obscure (like yours truly did).  Start small; avoid going all in.  Don’t “set it and forget it.”  Keep an eye on your investments.  Remember, it’s your money.  Not all of your holdings will be profitable.  You will make mistakes.  Cut your losses early, and try to determine what went wrong.  Was you analysis faulty, or did the company fall short?  The nature of the markets has changed since the early 1980s, when I purchased my first shares.  There are fewer opportunities to “buy and hold,” with every industry subject to disruption.  The rise of hedge funds, and programmed and quant trading strategies have brought increased volatility to the markets.

I’m privileged to live in one of the best public school districts, both in New York State and in the entire country.  In the 2021-22 state standardized testing, Herricks placed sixth in English Language Arts and seventh in Mathematics out of 686 districts for grades 3-8.  In grade 8 Math (Algebra) it ranked FIRST.  Way to go, Herricks!  I’m proud to say that I am a product of that school system.  I graduated many years ago, it’s true, but the schools were excellent even then. Reading the recent newsletter, I believe the district has upped its game even more.

I can’t help but reflect on what has made Herricks Public Schools so good for so long.  It’s driven by many interdependent factors: motivated students, devoted faculty and administration, involved parents, great facilities and resources, and effective communication with and by all stakeholders.  Of course, none of this comes cheaply.  Our school tax levy is roughly twice what we pay for all other town and county services combined.  We pay the tax gladly, as our contribution to keeping this tradition of excellence going strong.  While funding alone cannot provide or ensure a top-notch education, a top-notch education cannot be provided without adequate funding.

One of my pet peeves is when I hear someone say, “I don’t have children in school, why should I have to pay?”  My former neighbor used to spew this nonsense regularly, and we got into several arguments over it.  Already, American education lags behind that of most of the developed world, with China and India catching up fast.  If the United States has any hope of remaining an economic superpower, then we need to leave these ignorant viewpoints behind and start moving toward a world-class educational system that is forward-looking, student-centric, and devoid of culture wars fought by the extremists on both sides.  These are abstractions, and often prove to be unconvincing debate points.

The best counterpoint to the “why should I pay” complaint is that good schools boost property values.  If you want your house to command a good price, then support your district.  I guarantee that if our schools here deteriorated, home prices would soon follow suit.  That can be seen in other parts of Nassau County.  Those complaining about the Herricks tax bill now would really have something to gripe about then.  Or how about when YOUR kids were in school, others supported them even though their children had already graduated, or perhaps they had had no children at all.  Pay it forward, bro!

In this final entry on my personal social media history, I want to make a few observations and share the impact my experiences have made on this blog.  First, I believe that at their core, social media platforms have the potential to be positive, useful tools to bring people together and foster communication.  As things are, though, these ideals exist only in the abstract.  Whatever benefits Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. might offer are subverted by their ownership and management, a significant minority of the users, or both.  The drive for profits, political polarization, and a general breakdown of civil society exacerbate these problems.

I acknowledge that some readers of this series might come to the conclusion that I overreacted to some of the situations I described.  Perhaps I did.  However, I created my accounts to have fun, gather information, and maybe exchange ideas.  I did have fun, for a while.  I can’t say that I learned much that was lasting or enlightening.  The real rub, though, was the nature of the communications.  It wasn’t ideas that were exchanged, it was mere words.  Too often, those words were angry, ignorant, intolerant, or lacking in self-awareness.

Ultimately, I felt that none of the platforms were safe places to express myself.  It wasn’t fear for my physical safety, but rather my mental and emotional well-being that were at risk.  I could see myself getting sucked into these rabbit holes of discord, disagreement, and derision.  There was a time when I might have reveled in that, but that was a long time ago.

I fully expect that I will address controversial subjects and heterodox opinions in future posts.  Some might say I already have with my comments on Jack Welch, Elon Musk, and the 2012 presidential election.  My writings would be fodder for the types of communication I have just deplored.  Therefore, comments on my posts will be disabled or severely restricted.  There are already too many places on the internet where people can insult one another, call each other names, and otherwise act like idiots.  I am determined that I not host one more.  Instead, if you disagree with me, I would encourage you to think within yourself and perhaps re-examine your own opinions.

I had high hopes when I signed up for Mastodon.  I had read about the content moderation, the bans on hate speech and promotion of violence, and the decentralized nature of the platform.  I took my time selecting an instance, and finally found one devoted to genealogy.  That’s a hobby of mine, I work on my tree a couple of nights a week, so I joined.  In a matter of a week or so, I had over 40 followers.  Everyone was very nice, I had some positive exchanges, and I thought, “this is how it’s supposed to be.”

I started to feel a little awkward, though, because while I did post on my family research, most of my posts were on other topics: New York City, history, economic observations, and an occasional joke.  Meanwhile, the other “geneadons” were way more into genealogy than I was.  They were posting about webinars, new records coming online, different sites, etc.  In retrospect, I should have left well enough alone.  No one was objecting.  And it wasn’t stopping others from posting cutesy cat pictures several times a day.

I decided to move my account to a history instance.  Whether that led to my demise on the site, I can’t tell.  What I soon found out was that many Mastodonians have an unhealthy obsession with Elon Musk.  I guess they resented him because they felt he forced them off Twitter.  I get it, and I sympathize even though I wasn’t a bird site refugee.  I despise Musk as much as they do, perhaps more.  I’ll probably devote an entry or two to him down the line a bit.  So you can imagine my discomfiture when I found myself in the position of defending him.

I woke up one morning to find Mastodon all aflutter because Musk had suspended some reporters for publishing the comings and goings of his private aircraft.  I thought then, and still think now, that that’s creepy.  I wouldn’t like to have my whereabouts constantly tracked (nobody would), and I don’t have millions of people who hate me.  At least not yet.  I called it out, stressing that I was no Musk lover but I understood his objection to it and that I saw no practical purpose to it other than harassment.

You can probably guess what happened next.  I was bombarded with the argument that his flight paths were public information and they had the right to track him.  True enough, but that didn’t address my point.  One person argued that it was a way to call out his eco-hypocrisy.  That Teslas are “greener” than ICEs are a big selling point, but in the meantime he flew to Qatar to party at the World Cup.  She believed he should have flown commercial.  (Reference my comment about millions of people hating him).  It was well-known that Musk was in Qatar.  He posted all kinds of pictures from there.  It was hardly necessary to track his flight to find out.

Someone else claimed that Musk’s outrage in another case was not justified because he wasn’t on the plane.  However, Grimes and their child were.  In my opinion, that makes the tracking even more objectionable.  I daresay that many people, myself included, would be even more concerned if their loved ones were being stalked rather than just themselves. 

I will acknowledge that everything was civil.  There was no name-calling or ad hominem attacks.  In fact, I had a very nice exchange with a gentleman who disagreed with me.  Civil exchanges or not, drivel is still drivel no matter where it comes from on the political or economic spectrum.  And at the end of the day, creepiness is still creepiness no matter how civilly it is expressed.  And, while I think Musk did genuinely dislike the tracking, he probably derived a modicum of pleasure from “owning” his critics and haters.  Why give him that?  And, with apologies for the cliche, he’s not paying rent to live in your head.

After reading how I struck out on LinkedIn, FourSquare, and Facebook, we now come to my experience, or experiences, on Twitter.  Let me begin by emphasizing that my relationship with the bird site ended long before the recent controversies.  When I was tweeting, Elon Musk was just a charming billionaire rogue with an enormous following.  I didn’t follow him, or any politicians, sports figures, or entertainers.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The first time I tried Twitter was a flop.  It was just becoming popular then.  I thought it would be a great way to let my colleagues and customers know what I was up to and how I was working for them.  I emailed a bunch of people, letting them know I was on the site and what my handle was.  It was a good idea, but there was one major flaw…none of them joined, or, if they did, they didn’t follow me.  Correction, one person did follow me: an old friend, Ms. Mississippi.  Thus, my first account expired sad, lonely, and neglected.

It would be many years before I would try Twitter again.  In fact, it was long after all the abject social media failures I’ve already detailed.  Now retired, I had more time to devote to all things Wall Street.  I started following companies in which I had invested, along with select CEOs.  I also added some of my favorite talking heads from CNBC.  I thought this would be a great way to stay on top of business news.  I vowed that I would focus on reading tweets, retweeting where appropriate, and being judicious in my own posts.  For example, when my wife and I would explore some obscure corner of NYC, I’d post a few pictures.  Old factories in Brooklyn, tattoo parlors in the Bronx, Buddhas from Staten Island…you get the idea.

I was a good boy for awhile, but inevitably things slowly unraveled.  I quickly learned that most companies used their accounts for marketing purposes rather than posting material of interest to investors.  CEO accounts were generally plain vanilla, more likely to retweet something than to post their own thoughts.  Disappointing, but there was upside in that the retweets directed me to people who were genuinely interesting.  That, in turn, led me to start offering my two cents.  That was fine, as long as I stuck to business affairs.  The trouble didn’t start until I began tweeting on other matters.

I’ll cut right to the chase.  One of the CNBC on-air personalities I followed posted very little about the market.  Instead, he liked to observe pop culture milestones.  One day, he noted that it was the anniversary of the release of The Blues Brothers.  I responded that I was “proud” to say I’d never seen it.  I was promptly eviscerated by a whole bunch of people, including the CNBC personality.  I thought, “Wow, just because I hadn’t seen an effing movie?!  What if I’d said something REALLY controversial?”   This wasn’t an isolated incident; I was chafed by some other things too, but this was the worst (and the last).

A year or two later, I tried Twitter one more time.  I’ll simply say that my third go-round reminded me of why I had quit the platform the second time.

As we left off in my previous blog entry, I was beginning to enjoy posting to Facebook with content that amused me, and hopefully anyone else who saw it in their feed.  Little by little, though, things began to appear in my feed that were not amusing, and instead were somewhat irritating.  I learned things about some people that I would not have expected.  Then, when an extended olive branch devolved into personal nastiness, it was time to pull the plug.  The period of time we’re talking about was the middle of 2012, overlapping with the LinkedIn incident I described earlier.

I was Facebook friends with two of my former employees.  One still worked in the office where I had managed him; we got together for coffee every couple of weeks to catch up and have a few laughs.  The other worked remotely, from Mississippi (if that tells you anything), and had retired some time before.  They had done good work for me, and hence our relations were cordial.  Then politics reared its ugly head.

It wasn’t so much that they were Republicans.  I had suspected as much from Ms. Mississippi.  It was more that Republican policies were anathema not only to the work we were doing, but to our personal financial well-being.  I found this impossible to reconcile.  I remember getting into a back-and-forth with Ms. Mississippi about her retirement security.  She had worked long enough to max out her annuity.    When I asked her what she would do when Paul Ryan came after her pension, she responded, “What makes you think Obama won’t?”  That was an ignorant response; I’ve never read or heard anything about Obama supporting a reduction in or elimination of ANY American’s retirement benefits.  That was more Ryan’s claim to fame.  In fact, one of her friends who had apparently seen our exchange privately messaged that she agreed with me.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, though, involved one of my cousins.  I had been close to this cousin on and off through our lives; by this time, we had been “off” for many years.  When we had been close, she sounded off to me about some talk that had been making the rounds in my father’s family regarding my mom.  It was not true, but if it had been, my mom would have been justified in her action.  Perhaps some day, I’ll go into more detail about this.  Still, the comment rubbed me the wrong way.  I ghosted her.

After I joined Facebook, she showed up on the list of “people I may know.”  I don’t remember who friended who, but we became connected.  After Superstorm Sandy hit, her beach house on the Jersey shore had been washed away.  She posted that she’d lost many emails, and requested that everyone send her their addresses, privately of course.

With the passage of nearly 20 years since our last conversation, I wasn’t as pissed off as I’d been.  I tried to reconnect by sending her my address, noting that she hadn’t had my address but I’d like her to have it.  I was ill-prepared for the vitriol that came back.  She tore into me for not contacting her, where had I been, she needed me, and so on.  I guess she was still pissed off.  (At least Ms. Mississippi had been civil).  If this is what it was going to be like, I wanted out.  I quickly deleted my account, and was now 0-3 when it came to social media.

In the earlier posts on my social media misadventures, I noted that I willingly signed up for both LinkedIn and FourSquare.  Facebook, however, was something I never wanted to get involved with.  There’s just something about Mark Zuckerberg that doesn’t feel right to me.  He impresses me as either a cyborg, or perhaps a member of that race of lizard-people that conspiracy theorists always invoke.  So it was a sequence of unfortunate events that led to my creating an account.  I’ll have to break up the Facebook saga into two parts to keep the blog length manageable.

My mom asked me one day if there was anything on the internet about some long-lost relative.  (I’ve noticed that older people think the internet has the answer to everything.).  I googled the person, and lo and behold, there was a then-recent picture of him…on Facebook.  Of course, I couldn’t access the pic without having an account, so I signed up.  I figured what the heck.  I wouldn’t post anything, or spend any money, so there was no harm in it.

In short order, I received a friend request from a high school classmate.  In most cases, I probably would have blown it off. In this case, though, I remembered what she wrote in my yearbook: “you should always stay as nice as you are and even if you have great success, don’t get conceited.”  (Yes, I still have my yearbook!). Even though I’m not particularly nice, I had an image to live up to.  I accepted the friend request, we exchanged catch-up emails, and that was that.

A day or two later, I got another request, this time from a semi-estranged aunt.  As I learned later, that was a request I should have TURNED DOWN but did not.  A list of “people I may know” soon followed, and bada bing, it was off to the races.  I limited my friends to people I actually knew—family members, co-workers, and the like (pun intended).

I started using my Facebook account as a platform for observational comedy.  I’ll quickly share two that I remember.  The first was from a shopping trip to Whole Foods, a veritable warehouse of absurdity if you pay attention.  I wanted to buy some seafood.  As I was browsing the case, I couldn’t help but notice that one sign contained the shocking revelation that the fish contained…wait for it…fish!  I whipped out my phone, snapped a pic, and later posted it with the comment that I certainly hoped so.

On another occasion, my wife and I were visiting a park.  As we passed the tennis courts, a sign on the fence warned that golf was not to be played within.  They weren’t even grass courts!

I was finding and posting so many crazy things that my wife started referring to my opposable digits as “my famous thumbs.”  I kinda liked that, actually…

In the first installment in this series, I covered my “rise and fall,” as it were, on LinkedIn.  In this entry, we’ll take a more light-hearted look at my time on FourSquare.  I don’t remember how I learned about FourSquare, but it seemed like fun to check in everywhere I went.  At the time, I was becoming serious with the woman I would later marry.  We were going out to many different places in the Washington, DC area, so my check-ins covered a wide range of places, from restaurants to battlefields to cemeteries.  She saw that I was having so much fun with it that she downloaded the app and started playing too.

FourSquare is an excellent case study in how gamification can take a simple, everyday task (e.g., going somewhere) and turn it into an adventure.  In so doing, we become addicted.  In a way, the check-ins and badges became just as important as, if not more important than, where we were going in the first place.  A few examples will illustrate my point.

We began attending my gym together 4-5 times per week.  Once the car was parked, the first thing we did was check in on FourSquare.  The gym already had a “mayor.”  The mofo had his picture on his profile; he didn’t look familiar to either one of us.  After about two weeks of this, I got the exciting message that I had replaced mofo as the mayor of Gold’s Gym!  In that moment, I don’t think I could have been more excited if I had just been elected President of the United States.  I held on to this virtual “city hall” until we stopped playing a few months later.

Since we worked in the same building, the race was on between my fiancée and I to become the mayor of our office.  The challenge was to be the first to check-in each morning as the mayoralty was neck-and-neck.  I was relieved when I was designated the mayor upon check-in, and couldn’t resist rubbing it in a bit.

“I’m still the mayor,” I proudly announced.

“I know, I saw your mug,” she replied, with some distaste.

The badges were another thing, although I was much more into winning them than my fiancée, given my obsessive personality.  For some reason, I took a special pride in being awarded the “Crunked” badge, which, as I recall, involved checking in at some ungodly hour of the morning.   I even announced it to my office mate, who didn’t play herself but found me amusing nonetheless.

Great fun, right?  So what happened?  One reason was the increasing risk of letting bad actors know where we were at any given time, increasing the possibility of a burglary or some other criminal mischief.  I suppose I knew that all along, I just chose to ignore it.  The main thing, though, was that we were just becoming bored with it.  My fiancée quit first, then I followed suit as it wasn’t as much fun without her.  I find that boredom eventually sets in with most online obsessions, at least for me.  I have to be mindful of that, and be sure not to get burned out with writing these blog entries.  Anyway, that’s two networks down.

I often say, proudly, that I’m not a “social media” guy. Then what the hell am I doing here? The short answer is that I have an unending stream of thoughts rattling around in my on-the-spectrum brain. I can’t incessantly burden my wife and daughters with my foolish mutterings. It matters not to me whether anyone reads a single word I write. It’s enough for me to have this outlet. I find myself here after a stop at many of the leading social sites. Join me then on the first step in this virtual travelogue.

My introduction to social media came many years ago, when a co-worker emailed an invitation to join LinkedIn. I had never heard of it. I wasn’t even sure it was legit. I called her to ask about it. She briefly explained that it was a new site for professionals to network. It didn’t sound like my style, so I demurred. However, as time went by, I heard more about it and decided to give it a try. Ultimately, I wound up with a few dozen connections. All were either colleagues or extended family members. I didn’t derive any benefit from LinkedIn, but it was inoffensive enough.

Inoffensive, that is, until LinkedIn began promoting a slate of “thought leaders.” First on that list was the late Jack Welch, former Chair and CEO of GE. I have many reasons to despise Mr. Welch, enough to fill a college-ruled spiral notebook (my favorite!). The one that irritated me most at the time was his ridiculous accusation in 2012 that the Department of Labor was fudging the employment data to help Barack Obama get re-elected. He had no evidence of such tampering. When he was called out, he not only refused to apologize, but doubled and tripled down on his unfounded allegation. He thereby anticipated by several years a tactic that has become a staple of a large swath of the Republican Party. But I digress…

It was not clear at the time that Welch’s management style and policies had set the stage for the subsequent meltdown of GE that occurred under his successor. LinkedIn undoubtedly viewed him as an astute business person. However, in my opinion, Welch forfeited any claim to thought leadership, or any kind of leadership, with his irresponsible claims of data fraud.

If LinkedIn loved Jack Welch, they could have him. I was so disgusted by the spectacle that I deleted my account and never looked back. One down.