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#21
October 31st 06, 06:32 PM
posted to rec.aviation.soaring
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How to buy a glider affordably - redux
Andy Blackburn wrote: At 08:18 29 October 2006, Tony wrote: yea no kidding, the original post had nothing to do with gliders. he was trying to work some stock or money market system or something. most of those schreders are going for 3-4 times what i payed for my cherokee with an enclosed trailer. just remember, if youve got enough glider to make it back to the airport, you probably could have gone at least a third longer distance if you wouldve just kept going downwind! i bought my glider to avoid having to share gliders with people (a'la club) call me selfish but i like having my own ship to go cross country when and where i want. Ill keep a partner in bed and that is all. You guys need to read more than the subject line... My post referred back to a post a year ago where someone asked if he had a new glider on order with a delivery a year out what was the best thing to do with his money. It ended up in a bet between a few of us and Tom Seim who made a prediction about the performance of the Fidelity ContraFund versus the broad market and Euro/$ exchange rates. His suggestion was to keep you money in dollars and invest in the ContraFund. Turned out to be bad advice. My post was to close the loop on that bet. Andy, You better go back and reread your post yourself. There was never any mention of a "bet". Quite the contrary, I commented on your complete lack of any recommendations whatsoever. The only thing you recommended was to (maybe) order the glider and take a currency hedge position, which will be useless to your average investor. Mainly, you criticized mutual fund newsletters, but offered up no alternative. Go back to Nov 15, 2004 and reread my ORIGINAL post: Yes, invest your money and wait. For instance, if you put your money in a high quality mutual fund you will begin accumulating principal. Take your $70,000 and put in a Morningstar 5-star fund (i.e. Fidelity Contrafund). If you average 15% return the numbers a Year Amount 0 $70000 1 80500 2 92575 3 106461 4 122430 5 140795 6 161914 etc. At some point the price of the glider, converted from euros, is going to be less than your investment. BUY THE GLIDER! This is, simply, the power of compounded interest. Don't agree with my numbers? Then put your damn money into a mattress and see what happens! -------------- Since then (Nov 2004) the ContraFund has gained 35% vs 22% for the S&P 500. This is a compound rate of return over 16%. Personally, I am VERY pleased with that performance. If you left it in 3 month Tresury bills (the present day version of the matress) you might have gottern 8%. The Euro has dropped from 1.2933 to 1.273 in the same period (despite one prediction on RAS that it would go to 1.35!). So the advice was excellent by any reasonable measure. Picking apart performance differences over a short time period (6 months) demonstrates an appalling lack of understanding on how markets work. This is, indeed, very bad advice. Tom 
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#22
October 31st 06, 08:16 PM
posted to rec.aviation.soaring
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How to buy a glider affordably - redux
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#24
November 3rd 06, 12:36 AM
posted to rec.aviation.soaring
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How to buy a glider affordably - redux
Why would anyone bet on the dollar versus the Euro?! With our deficit
spending the dollar will continue to decline! Craig On Oct 27, 1:07 pm, Andy Blackburn wrote: FROM 11 MONTHS AGO: Only point was that one would need to know your predictions for what to do for, say, the past 10-20 years to know if your 2005 prediction was good or just lucky. Stock newsletter writers have used 'survivor bias' in market forecasting for years - trumpet your successful calls and hide from the rest. But rather than trying to go back a decade, we can just start now. For those considering buying gliders later in 2006, what's your forecast for the $/Euro rate 12 months from now?Well, I started about 35 years ago, but who's counting? For the next 12 months I predict that the Euro will continue its decline, probably leveling off at a $1.05 to a $1.10. I would definitely not hedge the Euro, however. I would - and will - keep a substantial portion of my holdings in the ContraFund (but I also own a couple of dozen other funds, ContraFund is my largest holding). And, at this point, I would put the glider on order (if I were in the market for a new glider). My recommendation is, if you have a glider on order, hedge the FX rate, but if you think you can out-guess the market, you're probably only half right. 9BI don't out-guess the market; I find fund managers who have a proven track record of doing that. And I monitor there performance to ensure that they remain in the top 20-30% of their peers. Tom _________________________________________ Soooo, with a month to go on Tom's prediction how are we doing? Tom's advice: Don't buy Euros in 11/05, instead buy ContraFund (versus alternative funds, such as an S&P ETF or Euro-based index) and wait. Specific Euro prediction: weakening Euro from $1.20 in 11/05 to $1.10 or $1.05. Actual performance: Euro has strengthened from $1.20 to $1.25. ContraFund: up 10.9% or 9.97% after management expenses S&P 500 index: up 15.1% DAX (German market) index: up 28.2% So if you had taken $100,000 for a new glider (pick your own number, but this one is nice and round) and invested it in the ContraFund and taken it out yesterday to buy Euros you would have 87,644 Euros or a 5% return after adjusting for exchange rates. If on the other had you had bought Euros a year ago and put your money in a no-load DAX index you would today have 107,017 Euros, or 23% more than under Tom's strategy. In fact buying Euros and investing in a short-term money market fund would have done better too. Of course there is still a month to go so maybe the ContraFund will make a big move, but over the past 12 months (and particularly the past 3 months the ContraFund has significantly underperformend all the major market indicies. This was the point about chasing past returns - anyone looking at the ContraFund performance up to last November and deciding to invest with an expectation of above market returns would have been disappointed. Credit to Tom for putting his money where his mouth was and making a prediction - many people don't have the strength of their convictions. He just didn't turn out to be right on either count up until now. For reference: http://finance.yahoo.com/charts#char...;range=1y;comp are=^gspc+^dji;indicator=volume;charttype=line;cro sshair=on;logsca le=on;source= 9B
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#25
November 3rd 06, 08:29 AM
posted to rec.aviation.soaring
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Now for something really off topic
Roger wrote:
Why would anyone bet on the dollar versus the Euro?! With our deficit spending the dollar will continue to decline! Craig Our deficits are now declining and are paid for by the Chinese. Our unemployment rate is so low that we need to import millions of "uneducated, illiterate foreigners to do the jobs that Americans don't want to do", and build a fence to keep them out; and our gasoline prices are back below $2.00 per gallon. In France gas prices are low enough that their cars can once again be easily burned by THEIR uneducated, illiterate foreigners; which is what, $5.00 a gallon? If they don't get their gas prices back up to six they'll run out of cars. Why would anyone bet on the Euro versus the dollar? October 30, 2006 The Dark Ages Live from the Middle East by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned postmodern world back into the Dark Ages. Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago, gruesome practice of beheading. How brutal were those societies that chopped off the heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Marie Antoinette. And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from such elemental barbarity. Twenty-four hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for unpopular speech. The 18th-century European Enlightenment gave people freedom to express views formerly censored by clerics and the state. Just imagine what life was like once upon a time when no one could write music, compose fiction or paint without court or church approval? Over 400 years before the birth of Christ, ancient Greek literary characters, from Lysistrata to Antigone, reflected the struggle for sexual equality. The subsequent notion that women could vote, divorce, dress or marry as they pleased was a millennia-long struggle. It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental hatred of Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms or the Holocaust. Yet here we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage past. Beheading? As we saw with Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, our Neanderthal enemies in the Middle East have resurrected that ancient barbarity - and married it with 21st-century technology to beam the resulting gore instantaneously onto our computer screens. Xerxes and Attila, who stuck their victims' heads on poles for public display, would've been thrilled by such a gruesome show. Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated Europeans - in fear of radical Islamists - would be afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology? The astonishing fact is not just that millions of women worldwide in 2006 are still veiled from head-to-toe, trapped in arranged marriages, subject to polygamy, honor killings and forced circumcision, or are without the right to vote or appear alone in public. What is more baffling is that in the West, liberal Europeans are often wary of protecting female citizens from the excesses of Sharia law - sometimes even fearful of asking women to unveil their faces for purposes of simple identification and official conversation. Who these days is shocked that Israel is hated by Arab nations and threatened with annihilation by radical Iran? Instead, the surprise is that even in places like Paris or Seattle, Jews are singled out and killed for the apparent crime of being Jewish. Since Sept. 11, the West has fought enemies who are determined to bring back the nightmarish world that we thought was long past. And there are lessons Westerners can learn from radical Islamists' ghastly efforts. First, the Western liberal tradition is fragile and can still disappear. Just because we have sophisticated cell phones, CAT scanners and jets does not ensure that we are permanently civilized or safe. Technology used by the civilized for positive purposes can easily be manipulated by barbarians for destruction. Second, the Enlightenment is not always lost on the battlefield. It can be surrendered through either fear or indifference as well. Westerners fearful of terrorist reprisals themselves shut down a production of a Mozart opera in Berlin deemed offensive to Muslims. Few came to the aid of a Salman Rushdie or Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh when their unpopular expression earned death threats from Islamists. Van Gogh, of course, was ultimately killed. The Goths and Vandals did not sack Rome solely through the power of their hordes; they also relied on the paralysis of Roman elites who no longer knew what it was to be Roman - much less whether it was any better than the alternative. Third, civilization is forfeited with a whimper, not a bang. Insidiously, we have allowed radical Islamists to redefine the primordial into the not-so-bad. Perhaps women in head-to-toe burkas in Europe prefer them? Maybe that crass German opera was just too over the top after all? Aren't both parties equally to blame in the Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan wars? To grasp the flavor of our own Civil War, impersonators now don period dress and reconstruct the battles of Shiloh or Gettysburg. But we need not show such historical reenactment of the Dark Ages. You see, they are back with us - live almost daily from the Middle East. ©2006 Tribune Media Services
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#26
November 3rd 06, 09:38 AM
posted to rec.aviation.soaring
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Now for something really off topic
Personally, I believe it's the meek who are behind
all this... ;o) At 08:31 03 November 2006, Bruce T. wrote: Our deficits are now declining and are paid for by the Chinese. Our unemployment rate is so low that we need to import millions of 'uneducated, illiterate foreigners to do the jobs that Americans don't want to do', and build a fence to keep them out; and our gasoline prices are back below $2.00 per gallon. In France gas prices are low enough that their cars can once again be easily burned by THEIR uneducated, illiterate foreigners; which is what, $5.00 a gallon? If they don't get their gas prices back up to six they'll run out of cars. Why would anyone bet on the Euro versus the dollar? October 30, 2006 The Dark Ages Live from the Middle East by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned postmodern world back into the Dark Ages. Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago, gruesome practice of beheading. How brutal were those societies that chopped off the heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Marie Antoinette. And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from such elemental barbarity. Twenty-four hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for unpopular speech. The 18th-century European Enlightenment gave people freedom to express views formerly censored by clerics and the state. Just imagine what life was like once upon a time when no one could write music, compose fiction or paint without court or church approval? Over 400 years before the birth of Christ, ancient Greek literary characters, from Lysistrata to Antigone, reflected the struggle for sexual equality. The subsequent notion that women could vote, divorce, dress or marry as they pleased was a millennia-long struggle. It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental hatred of Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms or the Holocaust. Yet here we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage past. Beheading? As we saw with Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, our Neanderthal enemies in the Middle East have resurrected that ancient barbarity - and married it with 21st-century technology to beam the resulting gore instantaneously onto our computer screens. Xerxes and Attila, who stuck their victims' heads on poles for public display, would've been thrilled by such a gruesome show. Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated Europeans - in fear of radical Islamists - would be afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology? The astonishing fact is not just that millions of women worldwide in 2006 are still veiled from head-to-toe, trapped in arranged marriages, subject to polygamy, honor killings and forced circumcision, or are without the right to vote or appear alone in public. What is more baffling is that in the West, liberal Europeans are often wary of protecting female citizens from the excesses of Sharia law - sometimes even fearful of asking women to unveil their faces for purposes of simple identification and official conversation. Who these days is shocked that Israel is hated by Arab nations and threatened with annihilation by radical Iran? Instead, the surprise is that even in places like Paris or Seattle, Jews are singled out and killed for the apparent crime of being Jewish. Since Sept. 11, the West has fought enemies who are determined to bring back the nightmarish world that we thought was long past. And there are lessons Westerners can learn from radical Islamists' ghastly efforts. First, the Western liberal tradition is fragile and can still disappear. Just because we have sophisticated cell phones, CAT scanners and jets does not ensure that we are permanently civilized or safe. Technology used by the civilized for positive purposes can easily be manipulated by barbarians for destruction. Second, the Enlightenment is not always lost on the battlefield. It can be surrendered through either fear or indifference as well. Westerners fearful of terrorist reprisals themselves shut down a production of a Mozart opera in Berlin deemed offensive to Muslims. Few came to the aid of a Salman Rushdie or Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh when their unpopular expression earned death threats from Islamists. Van Gogh, of course, was ultimately killed. The Goths and Vandals did not sack Rome solely through the power of their hordes; they also relied on the paralysis of Roman elites who no longer knew what it was to be Roman - much less whether it was any better than the alternative. Third, civilization is forfeited with a whimper, not a bang. Insidiously, we have allowed radical Islamists to redefine the primordial into the not-so-bad. Perhaps women in head-to-toe burkas in Europe prefer them? Maybe that crass German opera was just too over the top after all? Aren't both parties equally to blame in the Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan wars? To grasp the flavor of our own Civil War, impersonators now don period dress and reconstruct the battles of Shiloh or Gettysburg. But we need not show such historical reenactment of the Dark Ages. You see, they are back with us - live almost daily from the Middle East. =A92006 Tribune Media Services
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#27
November 3rd 06, 04:39 PM
posted to rec.aviation.soaring
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Now for something really off topic
"Al Eddie" wrote in message ... Personally, I believe it's the meek who are behind all this... ;o) And I say, "OFF with their heads!!!" sorry, bumper
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#28
November 3rd 06, 04:47 PM
posted to rec.aviation.soaring
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Now for something really off topic
There are (civilised) nations that still hang and electrocute
people. Not mentioning any in particular of course. Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago, gruesome practice of beheading. How brutal were those societies that chopped off the heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Marie Antoinette. And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from such elemental barbarity.
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#29
November 3rd 06, 04:54 PM
posted to rec.aviation.soaring
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Now for something really off topic
It's Bush who has taken us back into the Dark Ages, specifically to a time
before Runnymede and the Magna Carta. 900 years was a pretty good run for the right of Habeus Corpus, the foundation of liberty, but now it's quaint--like the Geneva Conventions. I'm working toward a day I can show my daughter the America I once knew--y'know the one with a Constitution, a Bill of Rights. Those "just a god damned piece of paper" things as George put it. Bush. The small man who thinks he's fighting a war and is too damnably stupid to realize he lost the war when he started taking the rights of citizens. He lost to his own fears. He has taken from us what no foreign invader ever could. Damn him. Sorry for this OT post. October 30, 2006 The Dark Ages Live from the Middle East by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned postmodern world back into the Dark Ages.
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#30
November 3rd 06, 06:35 PM
posted to rec.aviation.soaring
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Now for something really off topic
SAM 303a wrote: It's Bush who has taken us back into the Dark Ages, specifically to a time before Runnymede and the Magna Carta. 900 years was a pretty good run for the right of Habeus Corpus, the foundation of liberty, but now it's quaint--like the Geneva Conventions. I'm working toward a day I can show my daughter the America I once knew--y'know the one with a Constitution, a Bill of Rights. Those "just a god damned piece of paper" things as George put it. Bush. The small man who thinks he's fighting a war and is too damnably stupid to realize he lost the war when he started taking the rights of citizens. He lost to his own fears. He has taken from us what no foreign invader ever could. Damn him. Sorry for this OT post. No problem. And isn't wonderful that you can say this and even give your real name (if you so chose) without the fear someone will come to your door, take you away and cut your head off. This is the situation in much of the Mid-East right now. Our rights are only as good as our will and ability to protect them. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, are you going to damn him, too? Tom
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