Archives for November 2007

There are quite a few controversial stories about people getting tased lately. Controversial, because they’re incidents that never should have happened.  I look at some of them and I can’t figure out whether they’re more attributable to a lack of training. Or just plain laziness.

There’s no reason that 4 or 5 guys can’t easily subdue and arrest one person without using a taser.

The big problem is that tasers are not being used the way they were intended to be used. They’re supposed to be used in situations where the only other alternative would be to draw a gun. The taser is supposed to be a non-lethal alternative.

But they’re being used (increasingly) in situations where authorities would never think of drawing their guns.

Of course, some people need to be tased. We just need some rules. In 1942, Isaac Asimov gave us the Three Laws of Robotics. So here’s three new laws for this century …

The Three Laws of Tasering

1. A taser may not be used to injure an unarmed human being or, through non-use, allow an unarmed human being to come to harm.
2. A taser must be used to subdue armed human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A taser must protect its user’s existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Those are the rules.

Follow the rules. Bro.

Again and again I hear talking heads on the boob tube talking about how sitting on a diversified portfolio over the long haul is a great way to invest your money. And while that’s a safe bet, unless you get lucky, the chances are pretty good that you’ll never make a ton of money doing that.

If you want to make good money you have to catch the waves. You have to keep your money moving in and out of the opportunites as they come along.

It’s not fire-and-forget. You have to get in the game. You have to get involved in your own investing.

There are two kinds of stock plays I really like:

1. Buying small to mid caps on bad news
2. Can’t-lose IPOs

Both of those plays will give you better than average returns. And you can make anywhere from 200% on your money in a couple weeks to 500%+ in a year or two. A lot better than the run-of-the-mill 10% annual return you’ll make in a diversified mutual fund.

IPO Plays

There are lots of IPOs, but every once in a while something really good comes along.

It’s been 3 years since Google went public and it’s rocketed up 700% since then. And it was pretty much a sure bet from the very beginning. The barrier to getting in now is the high price and the question of how fast Google can continue to grow. They will grow, but how quickly they grow is what will determine the price (and the returns) over time.

Another great play happened last year. Mastercard, the number 2 credit card processor went public in May 2006. It opened up at around $40 a share and after a year and a half it’s up to almost 200 bucks. Sweet. But again, how fast will they keep up this pace of growth.

Don’t you wish you got in at the very beginning. Enter Visa …

Visa is the number one credit card payments processor in the world. And they’re set to launch their IPO early next year (February I believe). I haven’t read too much about the pricing but I would guess it’ll be anywhere between $60-100 a share.

Now I know what you’re thinking … credit card debt is a bad scene right now. The bottom could drop out of the stock if people don’t pay their CC bills right? Not so fast.

Like Mastercard, Visa is a payments processor. They collect fees for processing the transactions but they don’t lend money. They don’t take on that liability, the banks do. So if the economy is good, people are out spending and using their credit cards … yay Visa. If the economy is bad, then people rely on their credit cards to weather the storm … yay Visa.

If you’re looking for a place to park some cash for a couple years and get a good return, the Visa IPO is looking like a good place to do that.

Who says credit cards are a bad thing.