I admit it. As a runner, I’m obsessive about my mileage. It’s not that I’m obsessive about running and getting my mileage in. That would be a good thing. Once I do go for a run, I’m obsessive about knowing exactly how far I’ve run.
In high school, I’d finish my run and then promptly jump on my 10-speed bike which had an odometer, so I could measure how far I’d gone. In college, I got lazy and started using my car for the same purpose. Then someone invented the internet and surfing MapQuest became my routine post-run activity. I’d spend more time trying to find out how long my run was than I actually did running.
During my training for the 2003 Marine Corps Marathon, I bought a Timex GPS watch to calculate my mileage. I thought this would be the holy grail of running measurement, but unfortunately it was quite inaccurate in Manhattan. Everytime I ran through Battery Park and past Ground Zero, the miles would click off like I was a Kenyan marathoner. It once told me that I had run 3 miles in under 12 minutes.
Over time, I’ve become a little less obsessive, to the point that I now estimate my mileage by dividing my run time by my perceived pace. So just as I’m shedding the last vestiges of obsessive-compulsive disorder, what do I find? Google Pedometer. Someone took Google Maps and hacked it to allow people to measure distances between multiple points. Just double click on your starting point, click ‘Start Recording’ and then double click your way along your route as the miles accumulate at the top left. Very cool.
found on Joel’s Blog
Footnoted.org is a blog that delves into SEC filings looking for those juicy details that companies are trying to hide from investors. Mainly, these details include things like excessive executive compensation or shady related-party transactions. You don’t want companies that you’re invested in to show up on her blog (except on Fridays when she tries to find companies that are doing responsible things).
Footnoted.org recently highlighted Flagstar Bank (FBC) because they’ve announced that their auditor resigned, their CFO resigned without citing a reason, and finally that he was still being paid as a consultant at a higher salary than he was as an employee ($60,000 per month vs $30,000 per month). Shady stuff. All of the above is true, but CFO Michael Carrie actually announced that he was retiring way back in April and at that time the press release documented that it was to “pursue personal interests”. CEO Thomas Hammond gave him some glowing praise in that press release,
“He has served the Bank well, and we are pleased that he has agreed to remain on the Board so that the Company can continue to benefit from his knowledge and experience in his capacity as a director and financial advisor.”
His retirement as CFO was planned to be on June 20th, 2005, but he was supposed to stay on the board. On June 22nd, 2005, we got the press release stating that he was also retiring from the board, but would remain as a highly paid consultant.
I bought FBC in November 2004 at around $20.80 per share with a 5% dividend at the time. It’s now sitting near $19. Their earnings had been growing significantly over the past few years because of the booming housing market, but they’ve plateaued now, as expected. I listened to one of the initial conference calls and the CEO and team seemed to be reasonable. They were honest about the fact that mortgage business would be declining and that they were focused on a conservative strategy. But, I wish I knew what was going on with the auditor and the CFO issue. I can understand resigning as CFO for personal reasons, but then why stand for election to the board in May just to resign in June.
I’m holding for now, but I may sell if anything else spooks me.
Congrats to Milla and Ben on getting engaged. And to getting written up in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for their amazing world travels!
Clocky, an alarm clock that runs and hides, so you can’t hit snooze.
I’ve been planning to write about my trip to India, but since I’m the biggest procastinator in the world, I have a feeling that might not happen. Suffice it to say that Mala and I had a blast visiting our families and taking in some amazing sights. Thanks to everyone there for taking such great care of us. Without further delay, go look at some photos:
Adobe Acrobat takes forever to load (with “forever” being defined as 4-5 seconds), so I wanted all my PDFs to open in Preview, by default. The thread above explains how to do it.
- Select a PDF file in the Finder
- Select “Get Info” from the File menu (or hit Cmd-I)
- Set “Open With” to Preview
- Click the “Change All” button to make this the default for all PDFs
Wow Google Maps is really cool. You can drag the maps around. How cool is that? Put in a location, then drag the map so that the location that you put in is just off the map. Then click the little red signpost on the right hand column and google rescrolls so that your location is back on the map. Very nice!
Read more at the Google Maps Tour.
I subscribe to the National Guideline Clearinghouse’s (NGC) email alert service. Sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the NGC is a database of clinical guidelines from numerous sources. Sign up for their alert service to receive email whenever a guideline is added or changed.
It’s the first place I look when I want to find an evidence-based approach to a problem. Clinical practice guidelines are helpful, but they have problems, too.
- It takes time for evidence based studies to be incorporated into guideline statements, so newer data may not be in the guidelines yet. I go to MEDLINE when I want to find the most up-to-date stuff.
- Guidelines may be written by very diverse groups, so may not necessarily apply to me as a primary care physician.
- Guidelines are usually just summaries, so they don’t provide the fine-grained data that I usually like to see. What is the specificity and sensitivity of this test? What is the Absolute Risk Reduction of this treatment? Guidelines gloss over this data to give you the big picture, but I like to know the stats (Sorry, I’m a math geek).
Still, they are very useful as a starting point and the alert service helps me in the near-impossible task of keeping up to date.
OK, it’s well past the end of 2004 and I’ve finally calculated how my investments have done for the year. I’ve also analyzed my overall investment results since I started investing in 1996.
These are calculated using the XIRR function in OpenOffice. The XIRR function takes a series of cash flows in or out of an account and returns the internal rate of return for that account. It’s the best way to compare portfolio returns when investments or withdrawals are made on an irregular basis.
The VFINX column shows how I would have done if I had simply invested all my money into VFINX, a low-cost mutual fund which tracks the S&P 500. This number will not match numbers you see posted for VFINX for a given year because it depends on the timing of my* investments. Note that I include the cost of commissions in my performance, but not in VFINX’s.
| Date | Me | VFINX |
| 1996-2004 | 3.6% | 6.2% |
| 1996 | 22.7% | 35.7% |
| 1997 | 15.3% | 28.6% |
| 1998 | 15.1% | 24.9% |
| 1999 | 66.0% | 26.1% |
| 2000 | -25.8% | -7.4% |
| 2001 | -33.1% | -12.3% |
| 2002 | -21.1% | -22.1% |
| 2003 | 31.7% | 30.1% |
| 2004 | 13.5% | 11.7% |
A little background. The years 1996-1998 reflect my 403-b investments during residency - half in Fidelity Growth Company and half in Fidelity Contrafund. In 1998, I started to buy individual stocks, but without any underlying strategy. Until 2002, I used a strategy called Mechanical Investing, whereby you screen stocks for certain criteria and buy them without further research. Unfortunately, I followed largely momentum based strategies and in 2002, the momentum arrow was pointing decidedly downwards. From 2002-2004, I invested in well-diversified index funds based on the advice in Burton Malkiel’s, A Random Walk Down Wall Street. I still think this a safe, reasonable strategy for just about everyone.
So why did I change again? In 2004 I read Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor and realized that most of my previous individual stock investing had been decidedly un-Intelligent. I find stock research and investing fun, and I think there are inefficiences in the market, even if it may be mostly efficient, or efficient in the long run. I believe that an individual investor can find these inefficiencies, and over time can significantly outperform the market. So, while I have most of my money parked in index funds, I also have a significant minority invested in individual stocks that fit a value-investing discipline. Let’s see how I do over the next 5-10 years. If I’m still enjoying it and beating the market by 2-3% (which so far, I haven’t!), then I’ll keep doing it. If not, I’ll plead surrender to Malkiel et al and dump my money into index funds. Next report 2006…
Comments from old site
Just a suggestion
Why don't you try putting your alarm clock on the other side of the room so you have to get out of bed to turn it off. Instead of something that looks like a cat coughed it up.
Andy Drout 2005-04-04 21:25:49