If you’re like me then you’re probably very excited this time of year due to the annual startup of the biggest roller coaster in all of sports, March Madness. Starting off with a conference championship week of the top ranked contenders defending their home court and looking to improve their seed while unranked mid majors look for that signature win which will punch their ticket into the big dance. Then after the conference champions are declared and the hope of those on the bubble are either dashed or dotted, the dance begins. Cue the All State commercial because as soon as that first game is tipped, the mayhem begins. If you’re also like me then you’ll find yourself sitting down with a pen and printed bracket, penciling in those teams you think will win each week. More than 40 million Americans will submit a bracket whether it be a friendly neighborhood competition, a $25 buy in with the guys in the office or a ESPN official bracket submitted in hopes of winning Warren Buffett’s infamous $1 billion perfect bracket prize. As a spectator, we enjoy these games for the action packed, high intensity environment where young student athletes compete in a ‘Hunger Games’ type tournament where the name of the game is simple; survive and advance. As a bracket owner, we stress and panic when the 3 seed we predicted to go to the Final Four needed double overtime to beat the 14 seed and we cringe when we watch the 12 seed beat the 5 seed in the game that the ESPN experts said was supposed to be a “lock”. Between the good, the bad and the Cinderellas the games are finalized, we throw away our brackets and the tournament of tournaments is concluded with One Shining Moment for […]

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Last week, while perusing one issue of the Wall Street journal I was able to read about micro-hospitals taking their services directly to their patients homes, an article about the grocery industry embracing home delivery, and the thrill of rocket launches here and in New Zealand.  It feels like a throwback to the early sixties, when doctors made house calls, every town had a milkman that dropped groceries at the house, and the Apollo astronauts were treated as huge celebrities on the scale of LeBron.  We may not see typewriters again but investors have to look at every idea with an open mind…

                The ground is still covered in snow, but the sun is shining bright and there isn’t a cloud to be seen in the sky as we hit the mid-point of March here in Upstate New York. It is still cold for T-shirts and the golf course still doesn’t look accessible for quite some time yet there is a good feeling in the air. It is the feeling that spring is just around the corner. Soon enough we fill find ourselves watching the rapid scenic transition from white to brown to green and there will be an oddly satisfying feeling because of it. We’ll notice a storm of college students flock to their campus quads playing Kan-Jam and cornhole to find another excuse not to write their 10-page paper due Monday. We’ll find ourselves cleaning up the yard work left over from another long winter and reading arguments between Yankees and Red Sox fans on social media as baseball is resurrected again. Soon enough will we complain that it is too hot during the day and watch the summer sunsets fade into the night… but this is getting too far ahead.                While in this annual transition period you may have a lot to do and a lot of questions to answer, however here is one that you may want to ask yourself. Are there any ways in which I can save money as the weather gets nicer? Of course, there are! Here are the Dollar Investment Clubs 5 best ways to save money as the weather gets nicer! While heating your house during the long winter nights is pretty much unavoidable, you can now start to eliminate that cost as the weather gets warmer and you don’t have to use it. Perhaps use a programmable thermostat in which it […]

There is a lot of talk about U.S. company market caps this week as Apple Inc. nears the trillion dollar milestone.  A trillion dollar company, why not?  We had the first billion dollar company, U.S. Steel in 1901, over 117 years ago.  We had the first 100 billion dollar man, Jeff Bezos, last year.  It is just a well-deserved number for Apple Inc. now.  Not to bring people down, but GE had a market cap of $594 billion in August 2000 and unfortunately that number is $118 billion today, down about $476 billion.  To put this into a weird  perspective, $1,000 dollar bills would need to be stacked 63 MILES high to equal a trillion. Has your mind been blown yet?

In the year following a company being removed from the Dow, the stock performance is surprisingly positive.  Exiled from the Dow, Goldman Sachs instructs us that Aloca (AA) was up 96% in the year following, AT&T (T) was up 15%, Bank of America (BA) rose 17%, and Hewlett Packard (HPQ) rallied 73%.  Those are pretty impressive numbers to consider as GE, the last of the original Dow 30 members, is booted to the curb after more than 100 years.