John T. Reed’s news blog

A facebook reader recently said investing in U.S. nickels is impractical, merely a curiosity. That inspired me to reconsider the amount of nickels I own. I bought more. $50,000 worth of nickels Suppose you have a net worth of $5 million and you want to put 1% of your assets into nickels. That would be $50,000. Is it practical? Cars Do you have any assets worth that much? I have a 2018 Lexus that cost twice that. Is it practical? Sure. Where do I keep it? In the garage. Real estate We also own a house and most of a...

A statistical tie First, I must acknowledge that the game was more or less a tie if you understand statistics. If you really wanted to know which was the best team in the NFL this season, you would look at all the games, like the way they used to do the MLB pennants. Team with the best win-loss percentage at the end of the regular season wins the pennant.  The playoffs like they now have MLB and the NFL are a less accurate way of determining which team is best. They are artificial Hollywood drama that panders to ignoramuses and makes...

I am down to my last carton of Youth Baseball Coaching books, so I perused it to see if it needs updating. It does not. So I will just reprint it. . That is a great book. One reader said he read all the books on the subject and mine is better than all the others combined. I know. I read them, too. . You can see that testimonial and a bunch of others at https://www.johntreed.com/collections/john-t-reed-s-baseball-coaching-books . My football books enable coaches who lost every game to win their Superbowl the following season. That’s because football is a highly coachable...

Except for an evening wandering around Juarez, Mexico with my West Point senior class in June 1967, I had never been to mainland Latin America. I also spent a cruise day in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Juarez 1967 was a freak show. The most memorable feature of it was a club where a woman let a donkey have sex with her. I did not go to that show but some classmates did and confirmed it. Oookay. That was not in my previous exposure to Mexico—a Dennis the Menace comic book based on the artist’s taking his family there. The most incongruous...

Today, I ended one of the most important chapters in my life: newsletter writing. Started as a summer job During the summer of 1976 between our two years at Harvard Business School, we had to get a summer job. “Had to” in the sense that we needed the money and in the sense that it was required by the curriculum. A member of the MBA class of 1976 started a newsletter called Real Estate Investing Letter and offered a summer job writing it. Another guy and I were given the job of writing the first year of it. That ending...