These won’t make you a better investor, but they offer some insight into parts of the world that are changing. And they’re really good.
Brat (Brother) (1997, Russia): This is a film about life in St. Petersburg after Perestroika. I was in St. Petersburg in 1992, and it all looks terribly familiar to me although, obviously, it’s an entirely different city now. The movie is about dislocation, family relationships, and navigating a world with new rules – with a little violence and mayhem thrown in.
The blogathon comes with a list of assignments, and today’s is to write about five favorite movies. I decided to twist the topic a little and list five movies about money. All of these are great fun, for different reasons (Bonfire of the Vanities, for example, is a train wreck), and they all talk about bubbled that happened long before this last one.
Today’s selection is:
Trading Places (1983), with Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, and Jamie Lee Curtis, is a great story of social class and commodity trading both. And, of course, it has a hooker with a heart of gold. This is a lot of fun, and it’s explanation of commodity markets is pretty good. And yes, traders are known to make all sorts of ridiculous bets.
This is a manifesto for a Sunday. And it’s a big one, so pay attention:
Girls can do math. It is okay to get a low grade in math. Math opens the doors to many well-paying careers. STOP SELF-SELECTING OUT OF GREAT OCCUPATIONS JUST BECAUSE YOU WANT TO HAVE A 4.0!!!!!!!
AND STOP BRAGGING ABOUT HOW YOU CANNOT BALANCE YOUR CHECKBOOK!!!!!
The caps and exclamation points are there for a reason. Whenever a woman (and it is always a woman) tells me that she cannot balance a checkbook, I assume she is an idiot. I want to ask if she knows how to read, too.
Forget Fifty Shades of Gray; these ladies must be struggling to get through US Weekly.
The lovely and talented Kayt Sukel wrote about this issue earlier this week. Too many mothers act afraid of math, for dubious reasons that are probably culturally determined. They pass this on to their children, especially their girls. Kayt is a little more violent than I am, of course; but both of us find women who think it’s cute to be bad at math to be really annoying – and that’s when we are being nice.
I have a terrible problem staying focused. I don’t know why, and in a way, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I need to stay focused.
A few years ago, my lovely friend Anne Ford told me about Freedom. It’s software that blocks Internet access for a predetermined amount of time, such as half an hour, so that you can work without interruption. It’s just $10, and it is $10 well-spent. Many days, it’s the only thing that stands between me and complete dissipation.
I cannot recommend it enough.
Despite the URL, Freedom works on PCs. Now, if only someone would make something like it for Droid, because I have developed the nasty habit of checking my phone when Freedom is running on my PC.
The April 30 issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating article about the Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Trivandrum, India. Over centuries, people have made donations to the temple’s deity, Vishnu, and a huge fortune has accumulated. As in – possibly $20 billion in gold and precious stones.
Indian property law has an interesting twist. The gods are allowed to own property, but they are considered to be minors and therefore must have a legal guardian who oversees it. In the United States, churches are owned by groups of people who are organized into non-profit institutions. The land, buildings, and bank accounts are held by a congregation, a parish, a diocese, or whatever structure the denomination has. The fiduciary responsibility is toward the institution, not the pastor and not the god. In many countries with a national religion, the taxpayers own the buildings and pay at least some of their expenses. This is the case with the Church of England.
I often do stories on different frauds or lawsuits in the investment industry. You can rarely find information about court cases on Google. If a newspaper or blog picked up the story, then you’ll see some naughty bits, but the full Monty will be hidden in the courthouse website, behind a paywall. It is public information, however, so you don’t have to be a lawyer to use it.
What you do is go straight to the courthouse’s website. For example, suppose a disgruntled ex-convict threatens to sue you in Los Angeles Superior Court because he doesn’t like that you reported on his case. Well, you can to to the court’s website, register, and search for the party’s name. The fee is $4.75 per search in LA, charged to your credit card.
For federal court, the system to use is PACER. The fee is just $0.10 per page (although some cases have hundreds or thousands of pages). Each court has its own data repository, so first you have to find out where the case is located. Still, there is a lot of good stuff here.
In some jurisdictions, especially smaller counties, you may have to go down to the courthouse yourself. You will also need to go to the courthouse to read transcripts. In most courts, one transcript is kept on file, and anyone wanting additional copies has to buy them directly from the court reporter.
The most important point is this: just because you can’t find it on Google doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You can find tons of great public information available behind paywalls, once you know where to look. A neighbor who is a lawyer explained PACER to me, and I’m glad he did.
Likewise, just because you can find something on Google doesn’t mean that it’s real. Years ago, I had an editor assign me a story about people in a particular profession who became CEOs. I couldn’t find anyone, and he was surprised. After all, when he Googled “occupation” and “CEO”, he got thousands of hits!
However, I Googled “CEO” and “puppies”, and got even more hits. Google is wonderful, but it isn’t perfect.
I hate Internet passwords. I understand why they are necessary, but I get so tired of having to come up with different passwords for different sites. I have worked out a standard system, but it doesn’t work with sites that don’t recognize symbols, and I can never remember which are which. Therefore, I have a lot of my passwords written down, which I know is a bad idea, but that’s reality. About half the time, I just click on the “Forgot Your Password?” link and start over. That bothers me, too, because then anyone who hacked into my email could get access to about 50 million of my other accounts.
But what really hacks me off, no pun intended, are the “security questions” that people are asked to enter in order to get their passwords recovered. These make a little too easy for someone to hack your account. Relative with a gambling problem? Bitter former spouse? Anyone with halfway decent Google skills? I wrote about this a year ago, and Gawker just wrote about it this weekend.
I’m proud of where I went to high school. My mother, aunt, uncles, brothers, and sisters went there, too. It’s not a big secret, nor should it be. Network security administrators, in trying to make things simple, are actually making the situation worse.
My advice is to make up answers to the questions. Don’t tell Vanguard that you are a graduate of Cardinal Mooney High School, unless you didn’t go to Mooney, of course. You went to Rydell High! Or Cooley High. or Sky High. Or something else. You’ll probably have to keep notes about what fake answer you gave to what website, but that’s okay. Your information will be a lot safer.
Michelle Rafter, the proprietor of the blog WordCount, organizes a blogathon every year to encourage writers to get into the habit of blogging. I’m a reluctant blogger, but I’ve actually kept it up longer than I thought I would when I asked Ron Doyle to include a blog when he designed my website. I’ve made 29 posts since the site when live a year ago. I’m no Andrew Sullivan, but I get by. So far, this isn’t one of those too-many blogs that is abandoned after just a few posts.
That’s fine and all, but now I need to come up with 31 posts in May. Yikes! My goals for the blogathon are first, to get into the habit of posting more often, and second, to create more content on my site for readers to find when they are doing research on different topics.
This is the first post of 31. If you have any great ideas, send me a comment!
This Monday brought news of suspected bribery at Walmart and fraud charges against the former head of CalPERS. It’s a useful reminder about the limits of human frailty and of social investing. Walmart is one of the most environmentally conscious companies out there, and CalPERS runs a great shareholder activism program. But both play in governments known for corruption, Mexico and the US. (In the US, bribes are laundered as “campaign contributions” and “Super PACS”. We have plenty of corruption here.)
We all (should) learn about ethical behavior as children, and it is (should be) reinforced in school, by professional organizations, in society, and on the job. That doesn’t mean it always happens that way. People go off track, usually do to some combination of greed and the belief that “everyone else is going it”. Sad, huh?
Bribery should not be a necessary element of doing business anywhere. As an Illinois taxpayer, I find “pay to play” politics disgusting. As a market observer, I don’t buy the idea that bribery is simply the custom in some markets, no different from tipping a waitress or buying someone a birthday lunch. If it were an accepted customer, there wouldn’t be investigations and there wouldn’t be qualms about publicity. Ironically, one of the reasons that Rod Blagojevich believes he is innocent is that he was doing business as normal.
I once had a boss who said that you should behave as though anything you do will end up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Naturally, ruthless behavior in business is rewarded just as corruption is punished. Or, as the traders like to say, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
Recently, my publisher received an inquiry from a reader about day trading stocks. He said that his broker told him it was illegal to hold stocks for less than three days. What’s going on?
Here’s the deal, and it’s complicated:
Federal securities laws, and FINRA, call for a three-day settlement period for stock trades in cash accounts. If you trade a stock today, the money will actually clear hands three days later, so the funds will be held in your account until then. You can certainly day trade, but only as long as your account has the funds for your trades to clear. This is known as Regulation T, and your broker can’t make an exception for you no matter how nicely you ask. Continue reading “Limits on Day Trading in Stock Accounts?”
Editors of national, trade, and in-house publications like my thorough research, deep understanding of business subjects, and my ability to hit word counts and deadlines. Some even enjoy my snappy, sardonic style.
Ann Logue is a freelance writer and consulting analyst who is fascinated by business and technology. She is the author of “Socially Responsible Investing for Dummies” (Wiley 2009), “Day Trading for Dummies” (Wiley, 2007), and “Hedge Funds for Dummies” (Wiley, 2006), and has written for Alpha, Barron’s, Newsweek Japan, and Business Week Chicago, among other publications. She is a lecturer in finance at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her current career follows 12 years of experience as an investment analyst. She holds a B.A. from Northwestern University, an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, and the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.
The April 30 issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating article about the 
I hate Internet passwords. I understand why they are necessary, but I get so tired of having to come up with different passwords for different sites. I have worked out a standard system, but it doesn’t work with sites that don’t recognize symbols, and I can never remember which are which. Therefore, I have a lot of my passwords written down, which I know is a bad idea, but that’s reality. About half the time, I just click on the “Forgot Your Password?” link and start over. That bothers me, too, because then anyone who hacked into my email could get access to about 50 million of my other accounts.
