John T. Reed’s news blog

For a year, my wife and I paid a monthly fee to an HVAC company to take care of our central heating and air-conditioning. They were so big on smiling and neat uniforms and returning phone calls and chirpy TV commercials..Then they recommended getting a new downstairs HVAC for our two-story house. I agreed mainly because the AC had a leak, which maybe could not be found or fixed, and even if it could be both, it needed increasingly expensive, no-longer-manufactured freon..Anyway, they bid over $16,000. We got another bid for $9,000 something. We knew that guy and had worked...

Today’s WSJ had a 6-page insert called Investing Monthly. And what is their definition of investing? Apparently, stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs. Bonds, did not even make it into the insert And forget about the most widely-owned best investment in America—your principal residence

Much talk about risk management in crypto. Does anyone know what risk management is? Or are they magic words like “Open sesame” or “WD-40” or “elbow grease?” .There are five ways to manage risk:.• avoid it, e.g., refuse to own any crypto• shift it to someone else, e.g. purchase a crypto insurance policy (there is no such thing)• hedge it, i.e., invest an equal amount in an asset that moves in the opposite direction when crypto moves—a way to lock in the current price—being long and short in the asset simultaneously which is much more complicated to do that it is to...

How hard is it to pit the two top NCAA football teams against each other in a national championship? Apparently impossible for the people running FBS. .65 to 7—and it wasn’t that close. The fourth quarter was mostly Georgia’s Rudys playing against TCU’s came-in-second-for-the- Heisman-Trophy QB.

FreedomFest head Mark Skousen recently wrote about gold as an inflation hedge. I sent him this email: . You should read my web article https://johntreed.com/.../60940227-disadvantages-of-gold..... A couple of points: A. Gold is not a good inflation hedge because it’s gold, but rather because it is a commodity. A diversified portfolio of durable commodities like junk silver, current US nickels or pennies, gold coins, etc. should be better than gold because of the anti-gold discrimination points in my web article. Also, I recommend taking delivery of coins, not buying options or mining company stock. Gold must be kept OUTSIDE of the...