John T. Reed’s news blog

Black Friday’s Wall Street Journal had an article comparing prices for certain toys at Target, Wal-Mart, and Amazon during recent days. They were bouncing around but tracking and matching each other to the penny.   So if you believe that Amazon is aways the cheapest, you have been successfully conned by Amazon.   Secondly, these three companies have gotten themselves into a horrible Hobbsean conundrum. With the internet letting people always find the lowest price, retailers are forced to offer it or lose the sale.   Retailers who sell products that cannot be bought anywhere else make their living off...

Trump has let the military make more decisions closer to the front or at least out of the White House.That’s great. I have written that should have been done in 1950 and Vietnam and all our other wars since.https://johntreed.com/…/68975107-the-current-wars-are-lieut…But a couple of caveats. Who are these military guys who are suddenly going to make decisions? Guys who never made such decisions before in their careers because of White House micromanaging? Guys who never won a war in their entire careers? Guys who have never been in a result-oriented organization in their entire lives?So surely the decisions made by the people...

I need to ban Facebook comments by what I call “religious” asset boosters (gold, bitcoin, Amazon stock) and also “religious” candidate or politician supporters.In this context, “religious” means faith-based, impervious to facts and logic. With assets, this manifests itself as there is no price too high to ever pay for the asset in question. That is absolute nonsense.With politicians, it manifests itself as “my guy can do no wrong and yours can do no right.” Again, the goal at my Facebook Wall is to figure out what is correct by applying logic to pertinent facts. People who have a “religious” faith in the...

A Monday Night Football play-by-play announcer just said Atlanta may take a delay penalty deliberately to get a better angle for a field goal. They did, but Pete Carroll of Seattle declined the yardage penalty. Two idiot coaches and an idiot announcer.Bull!Once upon a time, in 1974 actually, the NFL moved the goal posts from the goal line to the end line. Before they did that, in 1972, they had made the hashes narrower moving them to their present position which are the same as the uprights of the goal posts.Before those two moves, but not since, the number of compass...

I recently was exposing you guys to some general financial analysis principles that I did not identify. I should identify them. I think I got some from the book Financial Shenanigans. And I certainly learned them at graduate business school.• The numbers giveth but the footnotes taketh away. The footnotes are more important to read than the other stuff in a financial report produced by the company.• Line graphs of multiple corporate metrics should have roughly the same slope and direction. For example, Amazon’s sales, stock price, earnings, head count should all be moving roughly the same. When the stock...