Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Synergism

Synergism

I picked up the ‘40 Ford Tudor Sedan from Pfeiffer’s and brought it home. My rod buddy, Terry Hogan, helped me do an assessment and said to order some new floor panels on line and put them in. I’m not sure whether to do it that way or go buy the sheet metal and do it. If I order the components it will wind up costing me ten times as much and I will still have to do the fitting. To use a sewing analogy it would be like using a pattern for an item of apparel or buying one ready made and altering it. There is enough of the old rusted floor to see how it once went all together and replicating that should not be too hard. What I need to do is weld in some braces to make sure the body doesn’t shift when I cut the rotten floor out. What remains is still providing some structural integrity.

Yesterday I went to the Dentist and he took final impressions on a crown he is putting in… I have a dentist who is a good tooth fixer. My grandfather used to get more boozed up than usual and do his own extractions…. Can you imagine that? Pulling a molar with a pair of vice grips? Ouch! Then again there is nothing worse than tooth pain in my opinion. Kidney stones come in a poor second and as the years go by and half a dozen big ones rip through, they must widen the orifice because they don’t hurt as much now as they used to. I found that Motrin works best… Narcotics, not so good. I remember one night banging my head into the wall…

Sometimes when I come into the house I get hooked into the Fox Business Channel. Linda always has the TV blaring, in addition to the cellphone, IPAD, magazines, and Kindel which are all being used concurrently. My wife is an extremely bright multitasker with a broad range of interests, one of which is the business news. I make the investment decisions and she follows the averages reporting to me what is happening… It is like she is watching a baseball game and when her batter strikes out she groans and when he hit’s a home run she rushes out into the shop to share the good news. Linda is not exactly your “typical” woman, whatever the heck that is.... but she makes funny faces, is a teriffic mime and belongs on Saturday Night Live.

Anyway I get frustrated listening to the commentators who are extremely smart reporting on the myriad of factors and criteria that drive fluctuations in the market and for each one they show very keen insight, for the most part. What they don’t seem to do well is connect the dots… For example when one stock or commodity goes up there is a corollary that usually goes down. That an investor should not just have a diversified portfolio but holdings that run counter to one another…. So when one is going down another is going up. Duh! It sounds so simple but many really smart people are incapable of thinking in these terms. They can take a single criteria and worry it to death, but can’t see the synergism of everything working at the same time.

For example take the definition of "Leadership." Some will define it as "Charisma," while others would define it as consistently knowing the best way to do something and still others as power to influence others through fear or incentives... Actually it is one of those words easily defined but one involving multiple criteria. I define it as... Knowing best and getting others to do it. There are elements like a crankshaft and a piston working together and if you don't see the dynamic you are missing the point.

Often I imagine myself being interviewed by the commentator and what I would say about the "Market" is almost the direct opposite of the advice they are providing… not that I would ever advise people on investments because I would feel bad it they turned out in the short term to be poor performers.