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The Most Valuable Asset: Time

     Almost any investor who has been in the game long enough will instinctively tell you to a man that the most valuable asset they have (or had) is time. For those who wish to Invest Like A Farmer, time is the essential element which helps structure and ultimately facilitate your financial farm. Time allows investors to plan, prepare, and save. That is the great benefit of time; it allows you to build diverse holdings over a number of weeks, month, years, decades, lifetimes. A good friend of mine remarked that it takes 100 years for a family to build their personal brand. I agree. From a generational perspective it is essential to not only consider your role in that dynasty, but that of your parents, their parents, your children, and their children. A great harvest is often the result of a great farm built over time.

Amazon's Echo Dot

It's hard to imagine a future now with the release of Amazon's new Echo Dot that isn't in some way voice-controlled. The Echo Dot can turn on your house lights, close the garage, start the oven, cue the music, and yes faithful readers of this blog...trade stocks! Click on the picture above or the hyperlinked text to read the reviews on this device. Simply amazing. Undoubtedly on the Christmas list for many!

Business Adventures by John Brooks

"Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street"

Just cracked open Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's favorite business book: Business Adventures

Great intro and am already absorbed with the first story "The Fluctuation." Quick excerpt for a flavor of the humor and writing style: "Evidence that people are selling stocks at a time when they ought to be eating lunch is always regarded as a serious matter." Hahaha superb reading!

Yogo Sapphires

Pictured above is the Tiffany Iris, constructed primarily of Yogo Sapphires which are mined only in the Yogo Gulch, MT (USA) and boast the purest untreated sapphires in the world. I'd encourage readers of this blog to follow the Wiki link embedded and learn about these awesome stones. It is an interesting lesson for investors to consider: the value of these "worthless tailings" ultimately became worth far, far more than the actual gold that was being sought at the mine.

Jobs Purge

The Wall Street Journal published one of the most meaningful and visually interpretive surveys of the employment picture in the United States today. Coinciding roughly with the passage of NAFTA and the widespread adoption of the Internet in the early 1990s, it portrays the massive disruption of technology, management, and political policy in shifting this country from a manufacturing base to a software-centric service hub.

As anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley for the past several decades will tell you, the Valley has shifted from hardware to software. This megatrend has resulted in massive job losses to cheap overseas manufacturing; spun with rose-hued glasses one could say the United States has spurred global growth and prosperity on an unequaled basis for the past 20 years.

For those wishing to Invest Like A Farmer, the trend of service-based employment and out-sourced manufacturing may have reached its pinnacle, especially as 3D printing and the very machinery has negated the cheap labor rates which caused massive job flows to countries like China, India, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian labor markets.

With lean-inventory and production-on-demand now commonplace, I predict former manufacturing hubs like Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, and other "left-for-dead" traditional manufacturing cities making a strong comeback on the heels of (literally) dirt-cheap land prices, a workforce educated on demand, and the massive shipping moat known as the Pacific Ocean.

As Amazon.com has successfully proven, consumers embrace the concept of sacrificing a little time to get a great product cheaper. An educated, mobile, fluid USA workforce with 3D printing, manufacturing-on-demand, and a diverse skill-set can successfully leverage the Pacific Ocean, dirt-cheap land, and hopefully a political climate that supports them via an "America-first" mentality.

A World Awash in Money

     Even as real wages as measured in constant dollars haven't risen in DECADES, the world seems awash in money. How could this be? This is how: the purchasing power of those dollars has fallen like a rock in terms of real value. The giant vacuum sound you hear my fellow financial farmers is the real dollar value of your fiat currency being sucked away into a global vortex. When a buyer can get a million dollars to purchase a home for little down at 2.75% 30-year interest rate, there is a serious problem that is going to fuel a massive societal shift. A great report detailing this seismic financial shift was recently published by Bain & Company. You can read it here: A World Awash in Money But as a side note, consider buying the only money created by toil: Gold

15 Years Ago Today

A mosaic of the lives lost 15 years ago today in the World Trade Center attacks.