The Most Useless Time In America
What To Do Instead of Watching The Super Bowl Halftime Show Introduction The most useless, wasted time in America is the 30 minutes which constitute the Super Bowl halftime ‘extravaganza.’ Kid Rock wearing the American flag like a poncho . . . rapper M.I.A. giving the finger wearing, of course, Egyptian head dress and fishnet
The Book of Business
David R. Evanson Forward: I wrote this book for students of business, and maybe students of human nature too. I say students because, for better or for worse, the people covered in these few short stories, all of them clients, taught me a lot of what I learned on both topics. It’s a gallery of
2020: It Was A Very Good Year?
That’s a sentence you don’t see too often. However, if you like dividends, it was with the 500 largest public companies in the U.S. paying nearly $500 billion to their shareholders. Any way you measure it, $500 billion is a big number. Net of the defense budget ($616 billion), the dividends paid by the
Media Exposure By The Numbers
Since November 2010, I’ve sent out 12,471 queries to the media. I know this because the software platform I use keeps track of them. That’s about 5 a day for a decade. The learning comes not so much from what I’ve sent out, but rather from what comes back. Based on the responses I get,
Why The Tax Cut Bonuses Ring False
Every once in a while, when a baseball player hits one out of the park at an away game, the fan who catches the ball throws it back on the field. Why celebrate the opponent’s achievement? As rebukes go, it’s not subtle. Sometimes I wonder if the rank and file employees who got $1,000 “tax cut”
The Feminine Touch, Hopefully
Jane Fraser was selected to be the next CEO of Citigroup, the first woman to run a “money center” bank. One can only hope that she will best the performance of her predecessors. Aside from a decade of irrational exuberance in the price of Citigroup shares (see graph below) any time frame in which one
Bullet Proof Balance Sheets
This post was based on an article I wrote for Kiplinger with my client Ken Berman of Gorilla Trades. I negotiated with Kiplinger to designate Mr. Berman as a contributor and deliver original articles to them on a regular basis.
Reminiscing The IPO Market
The unicorns are filing one after another for initial public offerings and the excitement in the IPO market is taking me back to 1982, when I was working at a publication called Going Public: The IPO Reporter, the pre eminent journal tracking initial public offerings. I joined the staff in late 1982, and the total tally of
Elon Musk’s Mark Twain Moment
Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens. Clemens was a very clever writer. So it should come as no surprise the very name he chose for himself — Mark Twain — would be steeped in mystery and uncertainty. Since time immemorial sailors have marked the depth of by throwing a weight in the