The first one is a stock appearing on my screen a second time. I owned it years ago and lost half of my money on it–I’m going to give it another chance. It is Consumer Portfolio Services, Inc. (CPSS), which is in the auto financing business.

The second one is CalAmp Corp. (CAMP), which does something with wireless communications–internet, etc.

Good luck!

First up, I am going to venture back into Triumph Group, Inc. (TGI), which I picked up about 4 years ago and made decent money on. I sold it a couple of years ago and it kept going up and up (about quadruple what I originally paid for it), and now it’s back on my radar.

Irritated that I didn’t just hold onto it all this time (but that’s not what I do–I generally sell after a couple of years) I decided to lose all of my moral compass and pick up some stock in gun manufacturer Sturm, Ruger & Co. Inc. (RGR). I am an adamant anti-gun guy, so this is a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” decision on my part. Maybe I’ll give all of my bloody earnings to charity or somesuch. Hold your nose and pick some up.

Good luck.

Lihua International, Inc. (LIWA) is my pick–it’s a Chinese copper manufacturing company.

I did well with my first Chinese stock: doubled my money in a few months on some automotive company. But since then, on the two or three occasions I’ve invested there, I’ve done poorly.

This one does intrigue me, though.

Good luck!

I’m going to purchase some Homeowners Choice, Inc. (HCI), which provides home and casualty insurance in, of all places, Florida. Wait a second! Is that right?

Mumble…mumble…yeah, FLORIDA.

Don’t they have hurricanes down there and stuff?

Well, nevertheless, it has doubled this last year and still has an appealingly low P/E ratio, so…who am I to question what pops up on my screen.

And for some reason, I actually feel pretty good about this one. We’ll see…

Good luck!

The unusual one is Delta Galil Industries Ltd. (DELTY), which is an Israeli company making undergarments and socks. I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere–a really, really offensive one–but I’m going to pass. It showed up on my screen, it’s been on a bit of a run since late summer, and so I’m going to pick up a little.

A couple of more sane (I hope) choices: I’m going to pick up some Tenneco Inc. (TEN), which makes emissions control and ride control products for vehicles, and Wabash National Corp. (WNC), which makes truck trailers.

Good luck!

My second pick is RF Industries, Ltd. (RFIL) which is in the electronics business (even though I think I have plenty of electronics stocks already–I may have to take a closer look at my diversification soon).

And lastly, I’m going to get some iGATE Corporation (IGTE), which provides outsourced information technology and IT-enabled operations services.

Good luck.

I’m taking a pass this time. No new pick. I did take a hard lock at Agrium Inc. (AGU), which makes agricultural products–fertilizer, chemicals, etc.–and that is what I’d be buying this week…if I was buying.

But this time around my screen just wasn’t finding much of interest and I think I’ll just hang on to what I’ve got until the next time.

Let me know how you do with Agrium, if you end up buying it.

Showing up on my screen for the first time is The Female Health Company (FHCO), which is in the, ahem, condom business apparently. Catholics will want to take a pass on this one, I guess.

I picked some up today, and maybe you should too. Or not.

Good luck and Happy Holidays!

I don’t expect much action from it for a while, but hope that it outperforms the market long-term. Again: Be careful.

Good luck!

I’m also picking up Telecom Argentina S.A. (TEO), which also has a pretty small p/e ratio–something I always look for.

The market tanked Wednesday (as I’m writing this) after having been pretty decent to me over the last month or so. I’m optimistic about the economy “getting better”, regardless of who was elected. It’s time!

Sorry about the sparse posting of late, but I’m doing a little traveling and haven’t been logging on as much as usual.

Let’s hope these two stock picks work out for us.

Good luck!

Faith plays a major role in many Americans’ lives, affecting their outlook on morality, politics and even – according to a new study – investing.

The study, conducted at the University of Georgia and Southern Methodist University, found that the predominant religion in a community affects the decision-making process of mutual fund managers in that community, specifically when it comes to risk.

Mutual funds in counties with larger Catholic communities tend to embrace risk more than those in majority-Protestant counties, the study found. Earlier studies have found that Catholics are generally more prone to take speculative risks than the average population, while Protestants are more risk-averse than the average population.

The findings, which will be published next month in the academic journal Management Science, could help provoke a re-evaluation of how investing works, its authors said….[Rest of article]

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Catholics are less risk averse? Must be all of that bingo…

First up is CNH Global NV (CNH), which mostly manufactures agricultural and construction equipment around the world. The other one is Delek US Holdings Inc. (DK), which has been doing well all year–I wish I had discovered it sooner, and I hope it still has some returns to give.

I’ll be dividing my purchase funds equally between the two.

Good luck!

So…HOLD.

My methodology is to run my screen and then sort the results by sales volume. I like looking through the “lower volume” possibilities, figuring that this is where the “nuggets” can be found. This time around though, everything showing up on the screen was something I had already owned. I just wasn’t finding anything new and exciting.

So, I’m going to pass.

We’ll look around again in a few weeks.

Good luck!

The U.S. economic recovery has been anemic by almost any standard. But for Americans with just a high school degree or less, it’s been worse than anemic. It’s been non-existent.

This week, Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce published a new report breaking down job growth during and after the Great Recession by education levels. And as it illustrates in the graph below, employment has been essentially flat since January 2010 for adults who never went to college. (The center’s analysis only extends through February, but according to similar data from the BLS, employment has barely budged for the demographic since)…[Rest of article]

I’m going to be buying a little CVR Energy, Inc. (CVI), which is in the oil refining and marketing business.

I’m also picking up some Silicon Motion Technology Corp. (SIMO), some semiconductor company whose business I don’t quite understand, but is showing up on my screen for the first time.

While I’ve got your attention, all of you economics junkies should pick up a copy of Nobel Prize in Economics winner Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. I am reading it now and learning a lot.

Good luck with your investments!

***
EDIT: At the last minute, I decided to also pick up some United Therapeutics Corporation (UTHR).

Back in 2008, I bought some LSB Industries Inc. (LXU), which does something like make heat pumps, but as I recall I got rid of it soon thereafter, since the market was tanking at the time. I’m going to give it another shot. (And I note that it has done well, ever since I sold it. Sigh…)

My other pick is Titan International Inc. (TWI), which manufactures and sell wheels, tires, and assemblies for off-highway vehicles such as earth moving equipment.

Good luck!

Two hours after the bomb explodes in Oslo, Adrian Pracon hears two sharp bangs, like a hammer striking metal. The noises come from the lawn down the hill, between the main white building and the jetty where the ferry docks.

The island, named Utøya, pokes out of a glacial lake called Tyrifjorden twenty-five miles west of Oslo. It slopes up steeply from the jetty, and Adrian is at the top of the hill, near the cafeteria. He is 21, though it’s only his first year at the summer camp for young liberals. Already he is charmed, almost smitten, by the place. This, he thought after he arrived on a clear Norwegian day, really is a piece of heaven on earth.

There are three more bangs. Adrian sees six or seven people—he’s not counting—sprinting up the slope toward him. “Run,” they’re screaming. “He’s shooting! Run!”

Another three bangs. But Adrian does not run. He does not recognize the noises as gunfire, and the words being screamed are so implausible as to be fantasy. People simply do not shoot one another in Norway. Adrian is not so much afraid as curious…[Rest of article]

***

As horrific as this event, and the recent Auroro, Colorado event are…there is still hope. I read this book earlier in the year–and you might want to also:

Sure, we as a nation have always killed people. A lot of people. But no president has ever waged war by killing enemies one by one, targeting them individually for execution, wherever they are. The Obama administration has taken pains to tell us, over and over again, that they are careful, scrupulous of our laws, and determined to avoid the loss of collateral, innocent lives. They’re careful because when it comes to waging war on individuals, the distinction between war and murder becomes a fine one. Especially when, on occasion, the individuals we target are Americans and when, in one instance, the collateral damage was an American boy.

You are a good man. You are an honorable man. You are both president of the United States and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. You are both the most powerful man in the world and an unimpeachably upstanding citizen. You place a large premium on being beyond reproach. You have become your own deliberative body, standing not so much by your decisions as by the process by which you make them. You are not only rational; you are a rationalist. You think everything through, as though it is within your power to find the point where what is moral meets what is necessary.

You love two things, your family and the law, and you have surrounded yourself with those who are similarly inclined. To make sure that you obey the law, you have hired lawyers prominent for accusing your predecessor of flouting it; to make sure that you don’t fall prey to the inevitable corruption of secrecy, you have hired lawyers on record for being committed to transparency. Unlike George W. Bush, you have never held yourself above the law by virtue of being commander in chief; indeed, you have spent part of your political capital trying to prove civilian justice adequate to our security needs. You prize both discipline and deliberation; you insist that those around you possess a personal integrity that matches their political ideals and your own; and it is out of these unlikely ingredients that you have created the Lethal Presidency….[Rest of article]

Cocaine Unwrapped – The Machine from Platige Image on Vimeo.

I have three stocks I’m buying today. I’m not particularly enthusiastic about any of them and the first two are pretty thinly traded, so beware. First up is WSI Industries Inc. (WSCI), which is in the manufacturing sector, as is Coleman Cable, Inc. (CCIX), my second pick. Well, I’ll be darned–so is Columbus McKinnon Corporation (CMCO), my last pick. Sorry that I’m not that diversified this time around–but this is what my screen came up with. I wonder if that means our manufacturing sector is getting ready for a big turnaround? I certainly hope so.

Good luck!

FORTUNE — In the annals of impossible assignments, Dave Voth’s ranked high. In 2009 the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives promoted Voth to lead Phoenix Group VII, one of seven new ATF groups along the Southwest border tasked with stopping guns from being trafficked into Mexico’s vicious drug war.
Some call it the “parade of ants”; others the “river of iron.” The Mexican government has estimated that 2,000 weapons are smuggled daily from the U.S. into Mexico. The ATF is hobbled in its effort to stop this flow. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking, so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws. For six years, due to Beltway politics, the bureau has gone without permanent leadership, neutered in its fight for funding and authority. The National Rifle Association has so successfully opposed a comprehensive electronic database of gun sales that the ATF’s congressional appropriation explicitly prohibits establishing one.
Voth, 39, was a good choice for a Sisyphean task. Strapping and sandy-haired, the former Marine is cool-headed and punctilious to a fault. In 2009 the ATF named him outstanding law-enforcement employee of the year for dismantling two violent street gangs in Minneapolis. He was the “hardest working federal agent I’ve come across,” says John Biederman, a sergeant with the Minneapolis Police Department. But as Voth left to become the group supervisor of Phoenix Group VII, a friend warned him: “You’re destined to fail.” [Rest of article]

As we wait for a Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act this week, there is one urgent, overriding moral question at the heart of the health-care fight. Paradoxically, and maddeningly, there has not been any open moral debate over it. That question is whether access to basic medical care ought to be considered a right or something that is earned.
Several reporters have recently filed dispatches showing in human terms what sort of conditions we would be perpetuating in the event that five Republican Supreme Court Justices, or a potential Republican-run government next year, partially or completely nullify the Affordable Care Act. A man will watch the tumor in his leg grow to the size of a melon, and his wife will sew special pants to fit the growing bulge, because he has no insurance. A woman will hobble around for four years on an untreated broken ankle she can’t have repaired. People will line up in their cars and spend the night in a parking lot queuing for a rare free health clinic.
Maybe these stories sound like cheap emotional manipulation. They are actually a clarifying tool to cut through the rhetorical fog surrounding the health-care debate and define the question in the most precise terms…. [Rest of article]

EIGHTEEN MONTHS INTO my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.

As the evening wore on, I ran into a colleague who held a senior position in the White House. She has two sons exactly my sons’ ages, but she had chosen to move them from California to D.C. when she got her job, which meant her husband commuted back to California regularly. I told her how difficult I was finding it to be away from my son when he clearly needed me. Then I said, “When this is over, I’m going to write an op-ed titled ‘Women Can’t Have It All.’”

She was horrified. “You can’t write that,” she said….[Rest of article]

I just received an email from Marketocracy–of which I’ve written here frequently, just not recently–confirming that they are depositing a check to my PayPal account for having two funds in their m100 (Top 100 “fantasy funds” followed on their site). I’m not sure how my old “flagship” fund is still on their list–it’s been underperforming the market for years now, after a terrific initial run–but my energy fund has been doing well (and was even in their Top Ten most of last year)…so maybe these two new stocks will do well, energy allegedly being my forte and all.

This is what I saw through my camera lens: Pastor Randy “Mack” Wolford, tossing and turning on the couch in his mother-in-law’s West Virginia trailer, suffering from the pain of a rattlesnake bite he had received earlier in the day. Parishioners surrounding him in prayer in the stifling heat. His mother stroking his feet, her expression a mixture of concern, sorrow and, eventually, acceptance: This is how her eldest son — a legend in the local Pentecostal serpent-handling community — would die.

Camera in hand, I watched as the man I’d photographed and gotten to know over the past year writhed, turned pale and slipped away, a victim of his unwavering faith, but also a testament to it. A family member called paramedics when Mack finally allowed it, but it was too late. Mack Wolford drew his final, labored breaths late Sunday night. He was 44…[Rest of article]

Regarding Facebook: I didn’t buy any, of course, because I’m mostly into low- and mid-cap stocks with a low P/E ratio. The $38 IPO price (for banks–you would have had to buy at the actual opening price of $42) capitalized the company at over $100 billion. Ehhhh… I don’t think so. I do think Facebook is going to be around for a while and will be a more or less successful business–I use it all the time myself to keep in touch with old high school and college friends that I would have otherwise completely lost touch with. But…are they really going to make enough money to justify a valuation at $100 billion in the near future? Ask yourself this question: Have you ever even clicked on an ad in your Facebook sidebar, let alone made a purchase from an advertiser? I thought not. So, apparently, did General Motors, who decided to quit advertising with them just prior to the IPO–citing poor results from those ads.

Also, in one word: “Timeline”.

Now, having said that, my analysis of the GOOGLE IPO was exactly the same–and proved that I’m an idiot. So…pay no attention to me. Nothing to see here. Move along…

***
But wait:

Wurzelbacher said he had a couple of plumbing jobs scheduled for today and hoped he would get more calls before the day was out.

He will need the money. Wurzelbacher’s new notoriety has brought to light the fact that he owes nearly $1,200 in unpaid taxes.

“There is a judgment lien against him for nonpayment of income tax,” Barb Losie, deputy clerk of the Lucas County Court of Common Pleas, told ABCNews.com. “The state files hundreds of liens a day. It means he owes that money.”

Losie said Wurzelbacher owes $1,182 from January 2007, but no action has been taken against him outside of filing the lien.

“There is no judge pulled, there is no attorney assigned… There is a 99 percent chance he doesn’t know about the lien, unless he did a credit report or was ready to pay his taxes,” Losie said.

A second lien has been filed in the courhouse against Wurzelbacher for $1,261 that he apparently owes St. Charles Mercy Hospital. That lien was filed in March 2007…[Rest of article]

THE FIRST TIME THAT principal Jim Sporleder tried the New Approach to Student Discipline at Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, he was blown away. Because it worked. In fact, it worked so well that he never went back to the Old Approach to Student Discipline. This is how it went down:

A student blows up at a teacher, drops the F-bomb. The usual approach at Lincoln – and, safe to say, at most high schools in this country – is automatic suspension. Instead, Sporleder sits the kid down and says quietly:

“Wow. Are you OK? This doesn’t sound like you. What’s going on?” He gets even more specific: “You really looked stressed. On a scale of 1-10, where are you with your anger?” [Rest of article]

My lukewarm recommendation today is Aircastle LTD (AYR), which acquires, leases, and sells aircraft to the passenger and cargo plane industries.

Tata for now. (Groan…)

A nice low price/earnings ratio and some “analyst support”.

I did take a close look at Diamond Foods, Inc. (DMND), but couldn’t get excited enough to pull the trigger.

Good luck!

Disturbing results of a recent Gallup Poll on the Trayvon Martin tragedy:

PRINCETON, NJ — Black Americans’ views differ dramatically from those of nonblacks regarding the circumstances involved in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., on Feb. 26. Blacks are paying much closer attention to the news of the incident; overwhelmingly believe that George Zimmerman, the individual who shot Martin, is guilty of a crime; believe that racial bias was a major factor in the events leading up to the shooting; and believe that Zimmerman would already have been arrested had the victim been white, not black…[Rest of article, including results]

***
I’m upset with both sides, mostly with whites as is my custom (although I am white), but also with blacks when the majority answer that Zimmerman is “definitely guilty” of a crime. “Probably guilty” is a much more reasonable response.

Anyway, not recognizing that we are all a little racist is the new racism.

Rear Window Timelapse from Jeff Desom on Vimeo.

***
From the creator’s website:

I dissected all of Hitchcock’s Rear Window and stiched it back together in After Effects. I stabilized all the shots with camera movement in them. Since everything was filmed from pretty much the same angle I was able to match them into a single panoramic view of the entire backyard without any greater distortions. The order of events stays true to the movie’s plot.

Software used: After Effects / Photoshop / Coffee

We are getting fatter. In Australia, the United States, and many other countries, it has become commonplace to see people so fat that they waddle rather than walk. The rise in obesity is steepest in the developed world, but it is occurring in middle-income and poor countries as well.

Is a person’s weight his or her own business? Should we simply become more accepting of diverse body shapes? I don’t think so. Obesity is an ethical issue, because an increase in weight by some imposes costs on others.
I am writing this at an airport. A slight Asian woman has checked in with, I would guess, about 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of suitcases and boxes. She pays extra for exceeding the weight allowance. A man who must weigh at least 40 kilos more than she does, but whose baggage is under the limit, pays nothing. Yet, in terms of the airplane’s fuel consumption, it is all the same whether the extra weight is baggage or body fat.
Tony Webber, a former chief economist for the Australian airline Qantas, has pointed out that, since 2000, the average weight of adult passengers on its planes has increased by two kilos. For a large, modern aircraft like the Airbus A380, that means that an extra $472 of fuel has to be burned on a flight from Sydney to London. If the airline flies that route in both directions three times a day, over a year it will spend an additional $1 million for fuel, or, on current margins, about 13% of the airline’s profit from operating that route…[Rest of article]

Grassroots political movements such as the Tea Party are a mainstay of American society. But do they really make a difference?
According to one view, the Tea Party is a powerful new force reshaping our politics. The alternative view is that it’s all signs and fury, a bunch of like-minded individuals who gather to cheer on their favorite political causes, but whose activities have no more effect on the outcome than sports fans getting together to watch their favorite team.
What makes it hard to assess these competing views is that the Tea Party is strongest in highly conservative, born-again, Republican communities. So how do we know whether the movement actually influences these people, or merely reflects their changing views and behavior?
If medical researchers were trying to sort this out, they might randomly infect some areas of the country with Tea Party mania, and leave others untouched. By comparing the political evolution of these treatment and control groups, they might hope to learn about the true effects of the Tea Party.
Fortunately, nature sometimes meddles much as our hypothetical experimenters would.
The Tea Party came into prominence in a series of protests around the country on tax day, April 15, 2009. Sunny skies in some parts of the country encouraged large and boisterous rallies, while in other places rain suppressed the attendance. If the areas that nature randomly selected to have good weather that day subsequently became more conservative, that would suggest the Tea Party had a real impact beyond what would have happened in its absence….[Rest of article]

Oddly, my second favorite is another ethanol provider, The Andersons (ANDE). These two picks make me a little less diversified than I generally like, but…both look intriguing to me.

Also intriguing, but scary because it is a Chinese stock and I haven’t done all that well with those, is Jinpan International Limited (JST), which does “…designing, manufacturing, and marketing cast resin transformers and other power control and distribution products in the People’s Republic of China, the United States, and Europe…”, whatever that means. I’ll be taking a smaller position in that and keeping my fingers crossed.

Good luck!

From Roger Ebert:

Even as I write on Thursday night, a screening of “Bully” is taking place in Washington that may or may not result in the film’s MPAA rating being changed from R to PG-13. Jen Chaney suggests in her Washington Post blog that a compromise might even be possible. The film is a documentary about how bullying affected five families, and led to two suicides. It was slapped with an R, because of its use of the F-word. Chaney asked Lee Hirsch, the film’s director, “whether there was any chance he would consider bleeping out one or two of those expletives if that guaranteed a PG-13 designation for the movie, thereby allowing teen audiences to see it.” [Rest of article]

***

As a mathematics major AND a former divorce lawyer…I love this! From THE NY TIMES:

In 2006, Garth Sundem and I confronted one of the great unsolved mysteries in social science: Exactly how soon will a given celebrity marriage blow up?

Drawing on Garth’s statistical expertise and my extensive survey of the literature in supermarket checkout lines, we published an equation in The New York Times predicting the probability that a celebrity marriage would endure. The equation’s variables included the relative fame of the husband and wife, their ages, the length of their courtship, their marital history, and the sex-symbol factor (determined by looking at the woman’s first five Google hits and counting how many show her in skimpy attire, or no attire).

Now, with more five years of follow-up data, we can report firm empirical support for the Sundem/Tierney Unified Celebrity Theory.

The 2006 equation correctly predicted doom for Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher; Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock; and Britney Spears and Kevin Federline. It also forecast that Will Smith and Jada Pinkett would probably not make it to their 15th anniversary, in December 2012; so far, they’re still married, but gossip columns are rife with reports of a pending split…[Rest of article]