The visual opposite of a Code Pink rally

November 9, 2009

If you’re male, then there is no excuse for being financially illiterate. Thanks to Fox Business Network.

Control Your Cash can make financial knowledge fun, accessible, and easy to digest, but Fox Business Network gives it a transcendent visual appeal that even a blog as good as this one can’t touch. In other words, the network is home to the most stunning women on television. All of them. They didn’t even bother hiring a Candy Crowley-type token to keep the other ones honest.

Yes, Control Your Cash makes no bones about how much we loathe news readers and their sensationalizing ilk. But the FBN women are hardly journalists in the “Miss County runner-up who does nothing but read a TelePrompTer and look confused when the weather guy throws it back to her with a joke” sense. Case in point, Shibani Joshi:

She’s a former Morgan Stanley investment banker with a Harvard MBA. Her father is vice president for manufacturing and engineering at Lucent, her mother is IT manager for an auto parts company, her husband is a vice president of a venture capital firm, and her father-in-law is a partner at one of the Big Four accounting firms. (So if you’re searching for the one non-industrious Indian on the planet, you’re going to have to keep looking.) In an ordinary gathering of several thousand people, Ms. Joshi would be easily the best-looking woman in the vicinity. On Fox Business Network, it’s all she can do to crack the top six.

This is Jenna Lee, who appears on the U.K.’s SkyNews in addition to her Fox Business duties:

Her father used to quarterback the Los Angeles Rams. Her mother is therefore the kind of woman whom a pro quarterback in Los Angeles in the 1970s would pursue. Ms. Lee is the beautiful one in the black dress.

The other beautiful one in the black dress is Alexis Glick, who also serves as the network’s vice president of business news. This woman is so confident that despite being blessed with a name seemingly engineered for a media personality (Alexis Donnelly), she adopted her husband’s onomatopoeic Dutch monosyllable/punch line surname. Here’s a more flattering picture:

What the hell, here’s all three of them:

Caption this photo. The best we could come up with was

“’Ladies, you’re hired. It’ll be the absolute worst Three Stooges remake ever, but who really cares?’”

At Control Your Cash, we understand money, not Nielsen ratings. Which is why we’re flabbergasted that CSI or NCIS or CDSIN or TCNIDS somehow manages to pull numbers on the order of dozens of times higher than that of the highest-rated Fox Business show.

We’re not close to done. This is Rebecca Diamond, nee Gomez.

Think of her as a slightly-but-not-overwhelmingly Hispanic version of Rachael Ray, only with a penchant for short skirts. And the body to carry it off. And an infinitely more agreeable voice.

She cohosts a show called Happy Hour, which begins when the market closes. The show is shot in a bar (the Bull & Bear, inside the Waldorf-Astoria.) With the exception of Front Sight Challenge, which was shot on a rifle range, the Bull & Bear is the single greatest set ever devised for a TV show. Nor would Mrs. Diamond’s outfit fly on a rifle range.

This is Sandra Smith, who on first appearance looks like she might be your garden-variety vapid news anchor:

Or not. She was director of sales at Terra Nova Institutional. That doesn’t mean she sat in a corner office reading the Neiman-Marcus catalog while sending slightly less attractive women out to call clients. It meant she handled investment management and hedge fund accounts. She traded equities and options, analyzed portfolios…all the stuff you can’t be bothered to do, which is why you’re reading Control Your Cash in the first place.

This is Nicole Petallides, who broadcasts from the NYSE floor every afternoon.

This woman is the Bob Costas of floor reporting. Impeccably coiffed, looks younger than her years, never makes a technical mistake, shops in the junior men’s section. Alright, 3 out of 4.

That leaves the undisputed queen of Fox Business’ groundbreaking coverage.

This is Liz Claman, who manages to fill out every positive stereotype of the brassy and voluptuous redhead. Ms. Claman, a spirited 45, (that’s her age, not our assessment of her looks on a scale from 0 to 10) serves as a daytime anchor with the irrepressibly professional David Asman, who clearly must be married to the most gorgeous woman in the universe.

Also, Ms. Claman’s Twitter feed is a wonderful mélange of upcoming interview tidbits coupled with stories about leopard-print pumps and her attempts at pole dancing. Hey, we’re just reporting, not editorializing.

Seriously, though, Claman’s responsible for interviewing some of business’ most insightful and renowned titans, everyone from Warren Buffett to Roger McNamee. She’s also made it into the pantheon of Historic World Smiles, joining the Mona Lisa, Ernie Banks, Cheryl Tiegs, the Cheshire Cat, the Ultra Brite Killer, and Michael Strahan.

Thanks to Mitch Kelly (Twitter.com/MitchKellyKDWN), who carries no credit-card debt and boasts a fixed-rate mortgage on the 2-bedroom house he bought at the bottom of the market, for inspiring this week’s post. Now email your cable company or watch DirecTV channel 359.

(See, it’s possible to write 800 words about hot women without being the least bit lecherous.)

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Reading this post will make you sound 477% more financially literate

November 2, 2009

 

The Oklahoma/Texas border, as drawn by Muhammad Ali

“The Dow gained 50 points today.”

“The market broke 10,000.”

Do you know what either of those statements mean? To most people “The Dow” and “the market” are somewhat synonymous, but those above numbers remain abstract. Control Your Cash surveyed some of its smartest friends to see who could define the Dow. Here are a few of the answers:

“The volume of industrial stocks traded.”
No.

“An average rating (or price level) of a bunch of important stocks. I think of ‘Fortune 500’ the same way, but I figure ‘the Dow’ includes more stocks, or just stocks that are somehow related to ‘industry’.”
Yes and no.

 

“The big number that is quoted after the bell every day is an aggregate/average of all the stocks available for public purchase.”
No.

 

“Isn’t that number somehow based upon the average share price the Dow stocks traded at?”
We’re getting closer.

Things the Dow has nothing to do with:

-strength of the U.S. dollar
-price of gold
-unemployment rate
-bonds
-prime rate
-taxes
-interest rates
-how many stocks were traded yesterday, or how many shares of them were traded.

The Dow’s proper name is the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It’s a number that fluctuates throughout the trading day as particular stocks trade on the New York Stock Exchange. The number is the product of a simple calculation involving the prices of the stocks of a certain 30 companies. Though the companies, and the index, are called “industrials,” that doesn’t necessarily mean that they operate big brick factories with smokestacks. The companies are called industrials to distinguish them from transportation companies, which used to be an important distinction. In 1884 when the Dow was first calculated, railroads and steamships comprised a huge chunk of the economy. (The Dow Jones Transportation Average still exists, though few people outside the airline and trucking businesses pay attention to it.)

The Dow is simply the share prices of those 30 big stocks, added together and multiplied by 7.557486. (We’ll explain the multiplication later.) The companies aren’t the 30 biggest revenue generators in America, or even the 30 most profitable, although there’s lots of overlap. The stocks, with their prices at the close of trading on Friday, October 30 are:

3M 73.57
Alcoa 12.42
American Express 34.84
AT&T 25.97
Bank of America 14.58
Boeing 47.80
Caterpillar 55.06
Chevron 76.54
Cisco 22.81
Coca-Cola 53.31
Dupont 31.82
Exxon Mobil 71.67
General Electric 14.26
Hewlett-Packard 47.46
Home Depot 25.09
Intel 19.11
IBM 120.61
Johnson & Johnson 59.05
JPMorgan Chase 41.77
Kraft Foods 27.52
McDonald’s 58.61
Merck 30.93
Microsoft 27.73
Pfizer 17.03
Procter & Gamble 58
Travelers Insurance 49.79
United Technologies 61.45
Verizon 29.59
Wal-Mart 49.68
Walt Disney 27.37

Those sum to 1285.44. Multiply by 7.557486 to get 9714.69, and you’re done.

Most people are surprised to find out how few stocks comprise the Dow. After all, 1400 other companies trade on the NYSE, to say nothing of the additional thousands that trade on NASDAQ and other exchanges. You won’t find America’s 14th, 15th, 19th and 20th most profitable companies (Philip Morris, Occidental Petroleum, Oracle and News Corporation) on the Dow. Corning, Bristol-Myers Squibb and PepsiCo aren’t far behind, either. Still, the companies on the list represent about ¼ of all the publicly traded market value in the country. The Dow consists of the stock prices of only 30 big corporations because a) there weren’t many more than that back in 1884, and b) if it’s the 19th century and you’re using a pencil, the more companies you add, the longer the average takes to compute. Even with the advent of calculators, for some reason the unrepresentative Dow has remained the benchmark for the market.

Nothing’s permanent, mind you. General Electric is to the Dow as Chester Pitts is to the Houston Texans or Dave Mustaine is to Megadeth: the only remaining original member. On average, a company gets replaced about once a year. Two gigantic and gigantically mismanaged corporations, General Motors and Citi, were politely asked to leave the premises this past year. That’ll happen when your stock falls 99%. They were replaced by Travelers and Cisco.

There are far more comprehensive indices out there. The S&P 500 tracks…well, you can probably figure out how many companies. There’s also a Russell 3000 and a Wilshire 5000. That last one measures the worth of almost the entire market for publicly traded stocks.

Besides exclusivity, the Dow has other limitations. Look at the prices above. Some companies’ stocks trade at 9 times the price of other companies’, yet they’re all weighed equally. The chance of Pfizer stock rising $1 tomorrow is greater than that of IBM stock, simply because Pfizer is so much cheaper and its price thus more volatile. But whether IBM goes up $1 (or .8%) or Pfizer does (5.9%), the Dow rises 7.55749 points either way.

Why the 7.55749? Because of stock splits. Throughout history, some companies – Dow components or otherwise – have tried to attract more investors by doubling (or tripling, decapling, whatever) the number of outstanding shares. This is just an accounting construct that doesn’t change anybody’s actual holdings. If you own 500 shares worth $2 each before a 2-for-1 split, you’ll own 1000 shares worth $1 each after the split. Stocks normally trade in units of 100 shares, so if you wanted to invest in the company for as little money as possible, you’d only have to pay half as much as you would have had to before the split.

Another thing to keep in mind regarding the Dow: the price of a stock doesn’t tell you anything about the health of a company. That’s what financial statements are for. Non-Dow member Google closed at $536.12 Friday. That doesn’t mean Google is 31 times stronger than Pfizer is. For one thing, Google might just happen to be divided into fewer shares than Pfizer. Remember that the Dow, in its simplest terms, reflects nothing more than what people are willing to pay for the stocks of 30 large but disparate companies.

The Dow tells you only a sliver of what’s happening with the economy. Unemployment could reach 25%, an ounce of gold could cost $10,000*, the Chinese could finally cash in that gargantuan IOU and put us all to work tilling yams for Jiang Zemin’s dinner table, but the Dow could still conceivably rise if enough people want to buy enough of the underlying stocks.

There. Now you’re educated.

*Or a dollar could be worth 3.11 Aumg. See this post.

Filed Under: Economy Tagged With: , , , ,

Thy will be done

September 5, 2009

His late father didn't use LegalZoom

 

A will doesn’t just disclose who gets what once you die. it also states who’ll take care of your kids.

Your will should designate primary and secondary guardians.

Have your kids’ guardian act as their fiduciary (i.e., to oversee the money.) Which makes sense, since some of your money will support your kids.

If your estate includes more than a house, a retirement account and life insurance, appoint an adviser or relative as “co-trustee for financial matters” (in other words, to oversee your estate.)

If you die intestate (without a will), the court decides who’ll raise your kids. Probate, guardianship and family law vary among states. In general, judges prefer to keep kids in the family. Sometimes, adoptees even get returned to their biological parents. Even if don’t have kids, you still need a will unless you want a judge to decide how to split up your estate. Without a will, typically the order of succession goes like this:

-spouse. Or if you have kids,
-half to spouse, half to kids. Unless you don’t have a spouse, in which case
-kids. If you don’t have kids,
-parents. If they’re dead,
-siblings

And so on, until the state can’t locate any more relatives and just keeps the money for itself.

A will takes a few hours to assemble and a couple of hundred dollars to complete. Totally worth it.

Filed Under: Estate Planning Tagged With: , ,
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