The sad thing about the human brain is that sometimes it’s hard to rid it of really unnecessary or annoying memories. The other bad thing is that there comes a point that it’s all to easy to get rid of them without having given consent.
I hope that you’re too young to remember the summer of 1974 when a truly insipid song, Seasons in the Sun, by Terry Jacks, was forever being played on the radio.
On the other hand, if you’re not too young to remember and you don’t remember, well, congratulations.
Fortunately, back then there was no MTV, nor YouTube, but the radio rendition provided the creators of South Park all the reason they would ever need to dislike Canadians.
In later years Celine Dion and The Canadian Tenors would cement the feelings. Toward that end, readers should be advised that 3 Canadians were harmed in the writing of this blog article.
The Terry Jacks version itself was an adaptation of a song by Belgian Jacques Brel and American poet Rod McKuen. Luckily, there’s enough dislike to go around the globe. To think that McKuen was once “cool,” but there’s a lot about the 60’s, that if they could be remembered, would seem to not make too much sense.
Maybe it was just the bizarre and affected pronunciation of “Papa” as “Paw paw,” that makes me cringe. when the song invariably pops into my mind.
It’s almost like pronouncing Microsoft as “Meecrosoft.”
Crazy Belgians. Putting mayonnaise on their French Fries.
Speaking of Microsoft, I just sang my ode of goodbye to one of my favorite stocks.
“We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun,
but the hills that we climbed were just seasons out of time.”
I wasn’t never a fair weather friend. I believed in Microsoft through thick and thicker.
Over the years Microsoft has been the biggest whipping stock out there. Only flat lining idiots invested in Microsoft.
“Present.”
“Dead money,” is probably defined in the dictionary as being an investment in Microsoft. When you hear words or phrases occuring in juxtaposition so often the mind can’t help but to set that correlation and then believe in it.
You couldn’t possibly escape believing the same, at least not based on every single talking head’s opinion over the past few years regarding every single thing that Microsoft has done since Terry Jacks fell off the planet.
Ballmer? Blasted at every opportunity.
Gates? He’s no Steve Jobs, that’s for sure.
Not only was Microsoft “dead money” but it was also dead technology, unable to respond to the marketplace, uninspired and out of touch.
I think for about a year most every monlogue joke on The Tonight Show had “Zune” as its punchline.
Microsoft was insipid.
For the longest time what Microsoft was good for was being the stock that cold calling “pump and dump” bolier room guys, posing as legitimate stock brokers would recommend just to get your trust. Back then, Microsoft was growing unchecked and was essentially a guaranteed profit machine.
But a funny thing happened and Microsoft hit middle age sometime after WIndows 95 and the “sexy” was gone. The jokes began and using Microsoft as a way to get into your pockets proved to be ineffective.
And then another funny thing happened about 15 years later.
Microsoft suddenly has won over every talking head.
Now, if you want definitions, look up “Johnny come lately,” as no one was a fan until the obvious was obvious.
Following a recent 20% or so move, Microsoft is suddendly everyone’s darling stock.
Conveniently, no one has to remind the world of their years of disdain for its ownership.
This may be the third or fourth time I’ve written about Microsoft as the main theme, in addition to discussing it at length in my Option to Profit book.
Did I mention that Amazon Prime members can borrow the book for free on their Kindle.
Parenthetically, I don’t particularly like the way the book is formatted for the Kindle, as the smaller page doesn’t treat the charts and tables very well, but a sale is a sale.
Unless is a free Kindle download.
My oldest son actually chose Microsoft to be his topic in the very first guest blog I could scam anyone into writing for me.
The fact that the only stock that he had ever bought and only recentlyt had done so, mad eit fairly easy to choose Microsoft for the theme.
You’ll just have to see for yourself how he weaved Lysol into the discussion.
When doing a search for “Microsoft” mentions in my blog entries, it actually turned up 20 times.
That may border on obsessive.
But that was in the past.
Microsoft has now moved on without me and without my Lysol wielding son. Assignments come and stocks go, but at least my shares went to someone who believed in ownership and not just in the thoughts of leveraging themselves through options speculation.
But still, it was that newly re-found popularity that wrestled Microsoft away.
First, a brief reminder on why Microsoft was never “dead money” to me.
If you’re reading this blog for the first time, I write calls on just about everything I own.
If you’re a daily reader, sorry.
Point is, that those who write calls, or as Barrons Magazine recently referred to the strategy as being the only winning one in 2011 and perhaps 2012, the over-riding feeling is that stock prices are just perfect where they are.
Let them go up, let them go down and then let them come back to where they started.
I once had a friend who justified infidelity by saying “what matters is that you come home for dessert.”
It’s nothing like that, so I’m not certain why I bought that up.
But coming home is the sweet spot.
Sell the options, collect the premiums and maybe even get some capital gains when assigned. I’ve always referred to Microsoft as being a “2.5% per month annuity.”
Then just re-purchase shares after they inevitably return home and repeat the process.
Hopefully often.
And so, that’s exactly what Microsoft was good for.
It was the main course and the dessert.
But now Microsoft has lots of new friends, just like the impoverished nerd in high school does once he became a dot com billionaire.
So right now, I sit bereft of Microsoft and with a little whole in my heart.
But like the seasons, stock prices are cyclical.
Given the fact that everyone has pretty climbed aboard the Microsoft train, it can’t be very long for that down cycle to begin. There’s no better predictor of the loss of popularity than popularity itself.
When that season comes around and Microsoft finds that its ne’er do well friends have abandoned it, that’s the time to open up the doors and welcome it back.
Microsoft goes ex-dividend on Valentine’s Day.
I can’t think of a better time to reconcile.
“And everytime that I was down
you would always come around
and get my feet back on the ground.”
You’re welcome. I’ll leave the key under the door mat. You can let yourself in and I’ll always understand if you answer their calls again.
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