Dividends = Stock (default option) or Cash

Yes, it has happened again.

Certain DWS Closed-End Funds Declare Yearly Distributions New York, December 20,
2011 – The Central Europe and Russia Fund, Inc. (NYSE: CEE) announced today that its Board of Directors declared a total distribution of $2.4860 comprised of $2.1150 long-term capital gain and $0.3710 ordinary income. The total distributions will be paid in stock except that any stockholder of record as of December 30, 2011 may elect to receive such distribution in cash.

And TD where I have the brokerage account informs me of the options I have (stocks or cash) in a letter that I receive on January 25. The deadline for client instruction was January 23 (!?!), so again I will receive shares (the default option) instead of the much-awaited cash.

It is a big bank, why don’t they have an e-mail system that sends an e-mail saying to log on to your account and read a ‘Corporate Action Notice’. They would save money on paper and stamps not to mention they would not have to deal with irate customers like me. ‘Interactive Brokers’ has this system and it is very convenient.

And yes, it is the second time this happens. After it happened first time (you could read the story here) I moved my brokerage account to TD (there were other reasons, but this was the last straw).

If ‘Interactive Brokers’ offered TFSA and RRSP, I would move all accounts with them, but now I am stuck somehow with TD and it seems all big institutions are the same.

Netflix again

Until today, Netflix had been around the price I kept regretting I didn't purchase shares. It's price had almost quintupled in fewer than 18 months.


Search through "The Cynical Investor" blog, though, and you'll see that I've been saying Netflix's days are doomed. I wasn't alone, as there were some notable short-sellers such as: :
Whitney Tilson: Why We're Short Netflix


However they their nerve:
Whitney Tilson: Why We Covered Our Netflix Short

I don't know why Netflix shares had this huge jump today but I wouldn't buy Netflix despite any past regrets.

“The commission on this order will be greater than the trade value”

The tax selling season is here and I knew this would happen:

The company: Oracle Energy.

When I bought them some 5 years ago they were exploring for oil in Yemen. I thought the Yemen had been poor long enough and there must be some oil somewhere.
They didn't find anything. I thought the name of the company might help but it didn't.

From BRIC to BRICIT to BRICITMENP ?

Long time ago I came across the term BRICIT ( the BRIC countries, everyone knows of, plus Indonesia and Turkey) so I decided to coin the term BRICITMENP ( + Mexico, Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan).

http://www.intelligentspeculator.net/free_stock_picks/bric-etf-stock-picks/

Chances are I am the first person in the world to have come up with this term so I stake my claim for glory. Let the world acknowledge it.

But I will have to become a chief economist or someone important somewhere so that Wikipedia has an entry for BRICITMENP where they will mention my name as they do now for BRIC.

The acronym was coined by Jim O'Neill in a 2001 paper entitled "Building Better Global Economic BRICs".The acronym has come into widespread use as a symbol of the shift in global economic power away from the developed G7 economies towards the developing world.

Jim O'Neill is presently the Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. He was previously head of global economic research and commodities and strategy research at Goldman Sachs.He is best known for his prominent economic thesis regarding the economically related nations referred to as BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China). He coined the phrase in a 2001 paper entitled "The World Needs Better Economic BRICs."

Groupon -15.50%

And this is only the beginning; in less than 12 months Groupon will become a penny stock. They don't have any moat, everyone can copy them and they will. The novelty has started to wear off.

+ ∞%

What my iPhone ('Stocks' app) showed this morning.

I would be happy with only 100% increase :).

McDonald's Free Coffee

Another week of free coffee of which, as a shareholder, I don't approve.

I reckon I am a very small shareholder, but nevertheless, management should still listen to me. Or at least pretend to. There should an e-mail address available for only shareholders to contact the company or, more realistically, for those who have at least 0.0001% of the shares or the groups who represent shareholders who cumulatively own at least 0.0001% of the shares (I would become a member of one of these groups).

The free coffee should be only for customers who have a Starbucks card or any other way of proving they are a regular customer of another coffee chain. I know it would be more complicated, but these are the people to be targeted and encouraged to switch. It should not be for the freeloaders who drink free coffee for that 1 week, who don't buy anything else and then go back to their herbal teas and green teas and other fancy drinks, like Kombucha, and tell to everyone who cares (and doesn't care) to listen that eating at fast food restaurants is bad for their health.

Also, to avoid alienating the regular customers, free coffee will be offered to those who have purchased more than $5 worth that day.

And no free decaf; one cannot become addicted to decaf so therefore, once the promotion is over, decaf drinkers would no longer need to satisfy their coffee fix on a regular basis. I know what I am talking about: during the week of free coffee, I have had decaf with a little bit of regular added just to give me a hint of the taste of proper coffee. Very difficult to explain to the employees.

Here is another idea: blended coffees, regular + decaf in different ratios:
5% regular + 95% decaf, 10% + 90% …. 90% + 10%.

People who don’t usually drink coffee will start at the beginning of the range (after all, what harm can be done by a few millilitres of regular coffee). However, after some time, they will go after higher and higher ratios of regular coffee and in no time they will be hooked and, hopefully, a customer for life. Someone told me that once you get used to the taste of a certain type of coffee, you won’t like anything else.

And apparently coffee can be beneficial for one’s health. I have read about all kind of studies that showed that 5 -6 cups of coffee per day prevent cancer, Alzheimer, and several other diseases.
 

Disclosure: I own Starbucks as well, bought the shares long after McDonald’s (if you can’t beat them join them).

Big Bang Theory sitcom
Sheldon: I'm sorry, coffee's out of the question. When I moved to California I promised my mother that I wouldn't start doing drugs.