Do we really need Ipad loans?
Thousand dollar bonuses and trillion dollar coins
TD AMERITRADE $1,000 BONUS FOR $250K ACCOUNT: It’s a steep cost of admission, but if you have the assets available, TD Ameritrade would gladly give you $1,000 if you’ll be so kind as to park $250,000 in an account with them. The deadline for this one is March 31. (H/T: FWF)
110 CLUB CARLSON POINTS PER DOLLAR: Frequent Miler shows how to darn near break even on your hotel expenditures. There’s a triple points promo which takes you from 20 to 60 points per dollar, you can get another 10 per dollar with the credit card, 10 more with Club Carlson for Business plus 5% savings, get another 5% back by booking through an online portal, another 10 more for having gold status, plus get 2,000 points by booking online. That is an impressive amount of promo stacking!
FM gives a hypothetical example where you book a Radisson for $105 and get back 11,000 Club Carlson points plus $10 in cash back. Low-end free night redemptions start at 9,000 points, AND Carlson credit cardholders can get a free night with each point redemption, so you can actually get two free nights for each one night stay if you really work this deal.
WHY IS THIS STILL BEING DISCUSSED?: A few weeks ago we brought you the story of the silly idea being floated to mint a trillion dollar coin. The story has bubbled up into the mainstream media for some reason. Fortunately, Stephen Colbert is on the case. (H/T: ZeroHedge)
What’s your college strategy?
HOPEFULLY YOU’RE NOT LISTENING TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: New York Times columnist Frank Bruni turned in a mediocre column on how to pick a college which deserves comment both on its own merits as well as for what it says about Bruni and his NYT readership.
According to Bruni, students should “ask themselves not which school is the surest route to riches but which will give them the richest experiences to draw from, which will broaden their frames of reference.” That sounds nice, but college takes four years or more and costs a lot of money. Is this the best advice for everybody?
It’s almost a throwaway line that doesn’t come until halfway in, but Bruni writes, “If you’re among the lucky who can factor more than cost and proximity into where you decide to go…” Aha! Now we see who Bruni’s writing for. Remember this chart that we ran a few weeks ago?
The title of the piece is “How to Choose a College”, but a better title would be, “How to Choose a College if Your Parents Make a Lot of Money.” Vast swaths of the United States would impoverish themselves by listening to Bruni, but not so much the NYT readership, it would seem.
The Lion of the Blogosphere gives a partial corrective to Bruni’s lousy advice:
This is really bad advice because what college a person goes to is the single most important key to unlocking a good career track. And because teenagers are flighty, don’t know what they really want, and can’t even imagine what kind of person they will be in ten years, they are likely to choose a college for stupid reasons.
Parents should ignore this bad advice. They should guide their children to attend the most prestigious college they can get into, and to select a major that will allow them to enter a good career track. I don’t even recommend parents take their children on visits to colleges, in order to prevent them from falling in love with lower-tier school that has a good marketing message.
We say partial corrective because once you get past the upper echelon–and we’ll leave it to the philosophers to decide what schools, exactly, constitute this particular echelon–choice of college isn’t going to to make that big of a difference in your career on average, at least not if you’re talking about going to a slightly less selective school where you can get better financial aid.
People like to use terms like “priceless” or “invaluable” when describing a college education, but such terms are not helpful when making decisions about something that can eat up $50,000 per year per child. It’s hard to get through a week without reading yet another sob story about some liberal arts major who followed Bruni’s advice and found himself burdened with $100K in debt and minimal job prospects. Cost is one component of a college education that needs to be weighed along with other factors–and, as LOTB points out, career positioning is another. To reject or downplay either merely goes to show that the NYT op-ed board dwells in a privileged and very well-insulated bubble.
Old investment advice is hilarious! Also, it’s the USAir card’s turn to increase its bonus
GHOST OF INVESTMENTS PAST: Barry Ritholtz of the The Big Picture is one of our daily reads, as we’re big fans of his mix of investment advice and whatever thoughts happen to be occupying his mind on any given day. Agree or disagree, the man is never uninteresting. Recently Barry dug up Fortune Magazine’s “10 Stocks to Last the Decade” article from August 2000 and we can only hope that Fortune is suitably embarrassed. Here are the results as given by TBP:
August 14, 2000
1. Nokia (NOK: $54)
2. Nortel Networks (NT: $77)
3. Enron (ENE: $73)
4. Oracle (ORCL: $74)
5. Broadcom (BRCM: $237)
6. Viacom (VIA: $69)
7. Univision (UVN: $113)
8. Charles Schwab (SCH: $36)
9. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (MWD: $89)
10. Genentech (DNA: $150)Closing prices December 19, 2012:
1. Nokia (NOK: $4.22)
2. Nortel Networks ($0)
3. Enron ($0)
4. Oracle (ORCL: $34.22)
5. Broadcom (BRCM: $33.28)
6. Viacom (VIA: $54.17)
7. Univision ($? )
8. Charles Schwab (SCH: $14.61)
9. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (MWD: $14.20)
10. Genentech (Takeover at $95 share)
As Ritholtz writes:
The portfolio managed to lose 74.31%, with 3 bankruptcies, one bailout, and not a single winner in the bunch. Even the Roche Holdings takeover of Genentech was for 37% below the suggested purchase price. The lesson is that valuation matters.
…Had you merely bought the S&P500 index via the Spyders, you would have seen a gain of 23.43%.
Our question: suppose you wanted to pick a basket of stocks that will have performed this badly ten years from now–could you do it? That’s what makes Fortune’s predictions stand out–we think it would be very difficult to do this bad even if you were trying your best.
In a similar vein, TBP also linked to an article in New York magazine which pulls up investment advice from 2008, a more innocent time when people still believed that the housing market wasn’t doomed for a generation or two. Our favorite is this one:
Elaine Garzarelli, president of Garzarelli Capital, in Business Week’s Investment Outlook 2008
What she said then: “Garzarelli is advising investors to buy some of the most beaten-down stocks, including those of giant financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch. What would cause her to turn bearish? Not much. ‘Our indicators are extremely bullish.’”
What we know now: As of January 1, none of these firms will still exist. Lehman went bankrupt. JPMorgan and Chase bought Bear Stearns in a fire sale. We all know Merrill’s fate.
It is of course not too hard to find bad advice in hindsight, as everybody says and believes stupid, wrongheaded things at every moment in their lives. The hard part is knowing which of your current beliefs are the stupid ones.
USAIR 40,000 CREDIT CARD: Coming on the heels of the announcement from Delta, the usual suspects over at boardingarea.com have mentioned there’s a new ‘official’ USAir credit card offer available. There’s been a 40,000 mile link on our Best CC Offers page for a while; this link was apparently intended for employees, although you could still get the card without being an employee. However it seems the new offer does not give you 10,000 miles on your anniversary, so we’re leaving the old link unchanged on our offers page.
NEWTOWN SCAMMERS: It shouldn’t surprise you, but yes, people are using the Newtown massacre to scam money from the generous. If you’re of a charitable bent, be skeptical and give wisely.
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