I could spend time revising it to make it better, but I am not going to do it. You will just have to deal with it - and get used to it from me. I won’t post daily. When I do, most of the time I will just hammer stuff out.

My friend asked me what I thought of Dave Ramsey. He has a website (daveramsey.com) and nationally syndicated radio program. I had never heard of him before, so I thought I’d see what he was all about. I haven’t spent much time on his website and have only listened to an hour of his radio program, so I still don’t know a lot about him, but my first impression is:Dave Ramsey = Jeff Galloway Bible Thumper

I respect that Jeff Galloway has stirred a lot of people up and got a lot of people, who wouldn’t normally exercise, to take on a physical challenge like a marathon. However, I think his methods are not conducive to maximizing performance. Hell, I would even say that his methodology hinders performance, but I guess participation is better than nothing. He, like Ramsey, should start with some basics rather than jump right into things.

Thanks to George for allowing me to post here. I did enjoy reading Kilgore’s essays. I am not Kilgore, nor am I Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch Phil Fisher or John Neff. I am a hack investor and even worse writer. Nonetheless, by writing these posts, I hope to reinforce some basics points on investing and hopefully stimulate some conversation to develop some new and better strategies on how we can all increase our returns.

When I read a news article or report I fancy, I’ll bring it to the attention to others here and give my opinion. I am not interested in partisan politics. I am more interested in investing, so I can make some more dough.

My basic investment philosophy is not, as the quote goes, “Don’t just stand there, do something”. For the most part it can be summed up with the newer cliche, “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

Where to begin? I’ll start with some short points. Then maybe delve a little deeper into these ideas with posts later. I don’t claim that these are original ideas or my own. They are just points that I have picked up from reading books, articles, or heard over the radio. They come from people who I think are a lot more knowledgeable on the subject matter than I am.

I guess this has been out for a while, but you can use Yahoo Finance to create a display on your own website that shows your visitors which stocks you own and how they are doing.  You can see mine right here, with a few indices substituted for index funds I own that won’t show up on the display.  Coolness!

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There has been a lot of talk about electric cars this summer.  With movies such as An Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car sparking much needed environmental inquiry in the US, it has become apparent that one of best ways the world could reduce energy use and clean up the environment is to change the way our automobiles are powered.

Until just recently, it appeared that hydrogen was going to be the miracle energy that would revolutionize the automobile industry.  Cheap, efficient, and abundant - initially the promise of hydrogen fuel cells - now simply three words that describe qualities hydrogen fuel cells lack.  Still, a plethora of potential solutions exist, yet unfortunately we can’t have them all.  Of these potential solutions, the one I see that rises above all others is electricity.

The electric car is a concept that failed in the past.  I don’t know for sure whether it was killed by a conspiracy or the market, but it is clear that the electric cars made in the mid 1990s had problems such as short driving ranges, long recharge times, and were expensive.  It was simply a technology that wasn’t ready yet.  Because of this, many people have simply given up on the electric car.

Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, was recently interviewed on Moneytalk, a money talk show hosted Bob Brinker.  The interview was about Anderson’s new book, entitled “The Long Tail.”  The main idea from his book, according to the interview, is that the world economy is shifting from selling a lot of one thing, to a smaller amount of many things.  In other words, a wide variety of niche markets are developing in place of one large “mass market.”

An example that Anderson uses in his book is the iTunes music store.  We all take online music stores for granted now, but just five years ago, if you wanted to buy a CD, the easiest way to do it was to walk into a music store and buy it.  The problem with that is that you’re going to only have the most popular CDs on sale, and lesser known bands who don’t have many marketing tools available will be ignored.  Today, however, it’s just as easy to buy a CD from a not so well known artist named Ben Kweller as it is from the band Green Day, which is regularly played on radio stations.