Investment Advice

After all, you are on the internet. Is there a better place to find it?

Keeping track of my company's stock price is easy. We all used to do it once a day with a newspaper. Our eyes must have been much stronger to find it printed within the financial section. Now it's just a screen tap or a few keystrokes away.

Beneath those stock quotes on my financial webpage are the "headlines." Actually that word is in capital letters because where else but on the World Wide Web does something that isn't exactly true have to be so conspicuously mis-labeled?

Mixed in with what used to be considered "news" - that is, a reporting of events that are allegedly fact checked and edited - are opinions and what you might have been looking for when you started reading this blog: investment advice.

Check out this article from "Motley Fool" in Friday's 1/25 Yahoo news:

One Company to Avoid...

I found it under the stock quote from my own company: LUV. If you skip through the article to the paragraph discussing Southwest, you will find interesting advice and would doubtless be, a fool to use it.

Apparently the author talked to a few LUV employees in a bar. They expressed their "extreme dislike of the company and the way it treats its workers." Of course we are all entitled to our opinion. But try this next time you are at a party. Tell someone you hardly know that you're really unhappy with your auto mechanic, or doctor or the health club you belong to. Like me, most people might listen patiently for a few minutes. Then try telling us how you feel you're being "mistreated" by these same people or businesses. I'm sorry, but I see my wife waving at me across the room...

Part of my point is this: We all have choices in life. Who you work for is very important . Airline employment is unique in that it is extremely seniority-based. We join one and usually stay on as long as we can. We work less as time passes (more vacation time) and get paid more. Doesn't exactly seem like it makes sense from a management point of view, but that is the system. I guess it works, except when some guy shows us all a chart (from the internet, no doubt) that claims to show that more money has been lost in the history of the entire airline business than made.

The potential to be tied for much of one's working life to one airline is a double-edged sword. Longevity with a quality company makes you a fortunate worker, but it can be a nightmare when the company fails and you are stuck or leave to start over with another.

Which leads me to four or five unhappy employees in the bar. They work for an arguably in-between company at the moment. A lot is changing for them. They get a constant datastream of news and opinions off the internet. One or two may see the world coming to an end. The other three or four take the path of least resistance and nod in agreement. Ever try being the one person being positive in that group dynamic? Most people hardly think it worth the effort.

I have to defend the company I work for. A few years ago I lost a nephew to gun-violence. I needed a couple of days off to attend the funeral. Although my labor contract did not cover leave for a nephew's funeral, my supervisor arranged it. And a couple of weeks later I received a condolence letter from the Southwest CEO. Of course, events happen and decisions are made that negatively affect me as an employee. But mistreated? Are you kidding? Never ever, not even close.

And what about the guy listening to grumpy employees in a bar? I suppose he got what he deserved, wasting a few minutes of his life  - listening to their opinions, digesting them as germane company data and then regurgitating them into a bucket of financial blog. It appeared last Friday in the "HEADLINES" (!) and now gets to float there for a news-less weekend like bad gas in church.

Buy or sell those stocks with all that web-info at your fingertips. Motley Fool is clear that the blogs (like mine) are just opinions and unedited. Read them and use them if you wish. Then head off to the bar and find a tool that is useful (relative to the internet) for stock picking: It's called a dartboard.

Disclosure: I own and regularly buy LUV. Also, in 5 minutes I became a credentialed Motley Fool blogger.

Do You Believe?

Once again, we have been innocently, comically and completely misled by the mainstream media. Thank goodness for the internet. If you haven't read the Deadspin.com article on Manti Te'o, it is an absolute must.

All humans tend to be 'go-along' consumers of news. If it is said and heard enough times with a reasonable tone, we buy it. When it is proven to be untrue and suddenly blows up, nobody can believe they were duped. They swear it won't happen again. Until it inevitably does.

When significant sections of your own government fabricate or perpetuate a dishonest narrative, the ultimate result is a corrosion of our ability to believe anything. Or worse. Do you think every German or Japanese citizen in World War 2 was evil? Of course not. Do you think their leaders did everything they could to make them believe?

My friends on the left are consumed by the idea that our biggest problem right now is access to "assault rifles," lack of federal backgound checks, and high capacity magazines. Ugly images of  "military-style" weaponry conjoin with the horror of the events at Sandy Hook Elementary. Now, they say, our main focus should be to restrict access to tools that efficiently kill. Trouble is, those same tools are designed to defend and whether you like the wording or not, their ownership is afforded protection by our constitution.

Consider 9-11. Not 2001, but 2012. It is a fact that one of our ambassadors and his colleagues were murdered on this sacred anniversary. A week later, a direct representative of our government was publically spinning the story that the violence in Libya that day was a result of a Youtube video. Innocent mistake or lie, it was, we now know, not true. No doubt, though, one more conscious effort to get us all to believe.