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John T. Reed’s news blog

Army defeats Powerful Hawai’i offense by keeping them off the field in spite of weak pass defense

Posted by John T. Reed on

I saw the fourth quarter of the Army-Hawai’i game at West Point yesterday. Army managed to hang on for a 28-21 victory—ending Hawai’i’s three-game win streak.The story to me was that Hawai’i came in to the game having averaged 47 points a game including 59 against Navy. (43 against both CO State and Rice). Army too slow to play man pass defense My son Mike who coached high school football with me was watching with me. I marveled at Army doing well on DEFENSE against a team like HI which was described as having a “high-flying” offense. “How the hell...

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How where you go to college may affect your life after college

Posted by John T. Reed on

A Facebook friend asked the following: I would love to see one of your in-depth, unemotional and well reasoned analysis on the value associated with the three different schools your sons went to relative to each other. Columbia being highest ranked, Arizona in the middle, and ASU near the lower end in terms of academic reputation, where would you want your son to go all things considered? I’m guessing cost followed their reputations (with Columbia the most expensive and ASU the least). John T. Reed No one in my family went to ASU. Two went to U of A. My middle...

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Big picture of collectible and precious metal coins

Posted by John T. Reed on

The heavy bag of coins my wife gave me to figure out what to do included a bunch of foreign coins from the expatriate lives of my wife’s parents and her father’s parents. Initially, I despaired of being able to make heads or tails out of them. Many contain no Latin letters or Arabic dates (Those are the letters and numbers Americans use.) But it was fairly easy to figure out what each and every one was on the Net.For example, one seemed to be Chinese or Korean with a picture of a man on one side and a junk...

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Avoid sales tax on coin acquisitions

Posted by John T. Reed on

I screwed up on part of my effort to convert gold coins and numismatic silver ones to junk silver. In CA, you need to make coin purchases exceed $1,500 per purchase. The reason is CA imposes sales tax on smaller purchases. In Oakland, it is 9.5%. I paid about $30 in tax on my purchase of 66 JFK ’64 half dollars.Further complicating things is that eliminates a lot of coin dealers because they do not have $1,500 worth of the type of junk silver that I want, namely, 1964 JFK half dollars or at least early 1960s Franklin half dollars....

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The current stock market boom is based on fundamentals, not bubble PE ratios: Rational exuberance!

Posted by John T. Reed on

Time and again in recent decades, the stock market was soaring. Why? Because of some stupid bubble like dot-coms or Sub-prime mortgages. Then it would burst costing the investors billions if not a trillion dollars.It’s setting records again. Another bubble? Better performance, not lower expectations Apparently not. Normally, bubbles are manifestations of rising price-earnings ratios. That’s stupid. It means investors are accepting lower earnings per dollar of stock value, not that the companies are doing well.In real estate investing, that is called cap-rate compression. Prices go up because stupid investors start accepting lower rates of return. Why would they be...

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