ozymandias888

Mercury General - 6% Dividend Deal or Total Wreck?

I personally don't know much about the insurance industry. Maybe it's not uncommon for insurance companies to have detractors who are angry enough to compile and publish lists of negative points.

Questions of ethics apart, I would give due consideration to the potential ramifications of potentially bad business practices.

www.consumerwatchdog.o.../

My Coming Dinner With Barrack Obama

I'd like to have dinner with the Obama. First I'd make him bow to me. Then get down on his knees. Finally, I'd have him lay on his back and I would scratch his tummy.

13 British ADRs Increasing Dividend Payments

I don't know - isn't the UK even further up the creek than we are? Isn't the Pound Sterling pretty much the one currency which will lose value against the dollar? Maybe Brazilian or Australian dividend plays would be better.

Policy Lessons from the Great Depression

Thanks very much for the review.

George Soros: The Guru Outlook

"In general studies have shown that liberals and progressives are smarter"

No doubt that, in general, those conducting such studies are themselves liberal.

I've always considered people who agree with me to be smarter, too.

Earnings Will Sink Blue Nile's Stock

NILE is where shorts go to die.

Which is not the same as saying its a good stock or a good company.

The Coming Food Crisis is Getting Closer

Perhaps we shall see OFEC (Organization of Food Exporting Countries). It would be a smaller club than OPEC. And who would be the most desperate customers? Perhaps desert nations with exploding populations enabled by massive oil revenues. Time for all those dollars to come home, and for those societies to focus on earning money to feed themselves rather than causing problems for everyone else.

Time to Replace the 'R' in BRIC?

How about BICK? Swap out Russia for Korea?

The Saudis' Odd Plan

Maybe the Saudis should have invested their huge windfall of the past two generations in building a durable economic base rather than having fun and causing trouble.

The Saudis' Odd Plan

My God, look at the damage the Saudis have done to civilization with the export of radical islam (the literal deal with the devil in which they bankrolled the fundamentalist, imperialist Wahhabis in exchange for their political support).

The only thing we owe them is the nuclear cauterization of Mecca, Medina, and Riyadh. We will do it eventually, and we will wish we'd done it sooner.

The Nobel prize in economics is awarded Monday, and two even-odds finalists couldn't be more different (one an efficient-markets Chicago-schooler; the other an Austrian behavioral economist). Christopher Swann says no one economist is that valuable; let's dynamite the whole prize.

These Nobel prizes are just political statements by wealthy crack pots - completely irrelevant. I wish the media would ignore them.

Analyzing Dividend Capture Strategies

Interesting discussion, but I think retailers get killed on the bid/ask spread on the options, not to mention commissions.

And I agree w/ the earlier poster that pros would almost certainly arbitrage away any riskless profits.

Is the World Conspiring Against the U.S. Dollar?

"It's amazing how unsubstantiated facts get propagated throughout the media without anyone checking original sources."

This may be a case of 'cui bono' - who benefits? I.e., follow the money. It's possible someone with a vested interest planted that story. If you had known with very high certainty that the dollar was going to tank today, you could have made quite a bit of money.

The Nine Best Natural Gas, Oil Pipelines for Income and Capital Gains

Storage is all but topped out. Industrial demand is weak, hard to tell about residential at this point. Would these factors make much difference in MLP earnings and ability to maintain distributions?

Freight Traffic Down

Another measure is the Baltic Dry Freight Index. seekingalpha.com/artic...