Who would have thought World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) would be a well-run, financially healthy company with practically no debt and an 8.8% dividend. I didn’t, that’s for sure, until I looked at their numbers.
I recently bought some Nordic American Tanker (NAT) and Frontline (FRO), having traded them on and off for years. They are oil tanker stocks. The daily rates their ships charge are generally pegged to the Baltic Dry Index, which has been soaring lately.
They tend to be volatile stocks, so maybe they aren’t for the faint-hearted, but in addition to growth in the stock prices, they pay a whopping dividend. NAT currently yields 12% while FRO is at 17%, numbers which are not excessive for them. (I’ve owned NAT when it was consistently yielding above 20%.)
If you’re looking for big dividend yields, you might want to look at the tankers, especially oil tankers.
Twitt(url)y, or twitturly if you prefer, is a service for tracking what URLs people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter.
Send Tweets by dialing a local number and speaking your message to TwitterFone.
WiFi Rail gets a nod from the Bay Area Rapid Transportation (BART) authority’s board: The board of the giant SF bay people mover has given a kind of tacit go-ahead for negotiations with WiFi Rail, a company that has been testing a unique form of delivering Wi-Fi using coaxial cable as antenna extensions. Cooper Lee, founder and CEO, told me that the approval lets them focus on nailing down a contract with the authority, which he believes should take just a couple of weeks, as WiFi Rail is eating the costs of the project.
Works for me. As for those who don’t want to be available and online all the time, do what my wife does, turn the device off. As for me, the more wifi, the better!
Holy Taco has the list.
My favorite: “Complicated Order Guy Who Needs his Coffee Right The F*&K Now.”
The corollary to this is, “The more makeup a woman has on, the more complicated her coffee order”
What better way to pass the time on a long flight than by being online? Multiple airlines are experimenting with wi-fi now and in a few years, I bet it’ll be commonplace. Good.
Microsoft expects corporate customers to accelerate their shift to the cloud computing model over the next five years, bringing changes in the company’s financial model.
Has any company that created a new paradigm ever dominated the one that replaced that paradigm? Nope. And Microsoft won’t either. Whether or not they buy Facebook and / or Yahoo Search.
TweetLater allows you to schedule tweets to post in the future, plus it can automatically send a Thank You to new followers and follow them.
Escrow on the sale of our house closed today 16 days late. While we will never know the complete reasons why, it was at least in part to vastly increased checking by mortgage companies. The days of the NINJA (No Income, No Job or Assets) loan are long gone and will probably never return. Today, mortgage companies check and re-check everything, multiple times too probably.
Yes, there are still areas where real estate prices are going up. We sold our house in CT for more than we paid it for 16 months previously. Whether such price rises will continue there is uncertain. My guess is, no.
The house we sold in Los Angeles 16 months ago has dropped at least 30% in value. The particular area we lived in has gotten clobbered, with foreclosures now common.
So, we dodged the subprime bullet. Many, including friends have not. There’s a lot of pain out there now. Let’s hope it starts to lessen.
(We live near SF now and are renting…)
By this time next year, Google’s search business will be larger and more profitable than the most profitable and legendary monopoly in history–Microsoft Windows.
Microsoft still has Office, their huge cash cow, with Google Docs no threat for now. But the definite and irreversible trend is towards computing in the cloud, not on the desktop, so Microsoft long-term is vulnerable there too.
Before it was on CNN, before MSNBC, before the BBC, even before the USGS (The United States Geological Survey, which handles earthquake data) had the information, Twitter was on it
This could become an entirely new way to report the news, a decentralized network of millions across the globe reporting the news real time. Twitter is still a pup, imagine where it could be in a year or so.
With detailed instructions on how to bundle pack, which apparently is even better than rolling clothes up tight.
