Gas With Class

A number of years ago I remember reading about a group of guys at a party in Silicon Valley trying to guess the make of an exotic sports car.  None of them got it.  The car was either a Ferrari or Lamborghini.

This perplexed me because, living near some very wealthy neighborhoods, I get to see some expensive cars through the windshield of my 22 year old Honda Civic.  I would have expected that the guys in Silicon Valley would have seen more than their share of expensive cars.  Perhaps they do, but they don't remember or try to match the image with a label.

All this as a preface to say, hey, guess what pulled up next to me as I was getting gas (click the picture for a larger image):
I don't know if there are boasting rights associated with gettng gas the same place as a guy with a Lamborghini, but if there are I'd like them.  (The guy didn't take offense at being photographed. I appreciate that. A lot of people are bothered by photographed in public.)

I Get Dumped On

Or more accurately, a tree service offered 6 yards of wood chips fr free on Craig's List.  It turned out to be more chopped up pine boughs than chips.

I was concerned that Scott, guy with the truck, would arrive at the house, not see me, decide it was a hoax, and take off.  I was truly surprised to see that he'd backed his dump truck into the back yard and was dropping his load.  It wasn't as easy as it sounds: it had rained the night before and frozen so that the chips and pieces of branches at the bottom were frozen so they had to be scraped from the truck bed.  Also, being that he had an older truck the bed didn't angle as steeply as newer trucks so Scott had to leap with a rake to pull the stuff closest to the cab.  

I had a good time standing on the mounds as the pine scent rose about me.  It's been a long time since I've been in pines.  I asked them to keep me in mind the next time they had a load of chips.

Reading History in Barrons

I'm a little behind in my reading:  I just finished reading "Numbers Game" by Johnathan R. Laing from the September 13, 2004 edition of Barrons.  In the article he dissects the numbers at SPX, pointing out the artful accounting behind SPX's financial statements.

My general sense from the article was that the company boosted their numbers by overvaluing the "goodwill" of acquired companies, moved poorly performing businesses into "non-continuing operations", and other fancy financial footwork.  While the numbers were on the balance sheets, the ramifications would elude myself and most people in the stock market.

I'm hesitant to use the term "investors" as I think most people in the market have only a general idea of how businesses work.  Money rolls in and get spent.  We know that, but how does that relate to the price of the stocks we purchased.  "Investing" may be no more than trusting others by purchasing funds.  As Howard, my broker, likes to point out, people don't buy stocks, they buy stories.

I did some web searching to see that John Blystone, the CEO in the article, left the company 3 months after the article came out.  His retirement package was somewhat less than the bonanza he might have been expecting.  How did the company fare?  I took a look at finance.yahoo.com.  The stock price about the time the article was written seemed to be falling from $60 to about $40.  Pretty sickening, but nothing compared to its plunge from ~120 to ~33 in October of 2008.  I have no idea what that means.  I expect that  there is plenty of material for financial writers and social writers.

 

 It would be an interesting exercise to have finance students write a paper explaining the article for those like me.