Invest in Your Health Pt. 1 | Prism - Esusu | Prism - Nas, KD and Coinbase

  

Investing In Yourself – Using Pillars to Build Your Core	https://urbanomics.blogspot.com/2015/04/urbanomics-pillars-path-set-for.html
Setting Budgets + Saving for Black Swans	https://urbanomics.blogspot.com/2013/02/personal-finance-budget-101-free-credit.html
	https://urbanomics.blogspot.com/2019/11/hey-henry-high-earner-not-yet-rich.html
How to Open My First Brokerage Account	https://urbanomics.blogspot.com/2015/04/personal-finance-101-starting.html
Diversify your Life (Mind, Body, Soul, + Investments) HOW TO SEARCH MY BLOG:	Get Updates to Your Email When I Create A New Post:

Also Coming Soon - a series on #HowtoInvest. People have been reaching especially after the spikes in Gamestop, AMC, and other stock to learn the basics. I self taught myself how to invest beginning at the age of roughly 18 and have never stopped. To be a good investor and ensure you are not gambling (speculating), I'll cover (hardest parts of investing in RED):

Budgeting 101 - How to Fund Ur Investments?

Why Stocks as an Investment?

What is Ur Investment Profile + Personality?

How to Pick Stocks?

When to Buy Stocks?

How to Enter My Trade?

How Many Stocks Should I Own?

When to Sell Stocks?

Am I Speculating (Gambling)?

Investing in Your Health

I miscalculated and dropped the ball on one of my most important pillars, the "Health" pillar. First is accountability, so I ultimately blame myself. I'll be honest, my calculation was I'm young...I can rip and run the mean streets of Corporate America and gracefully exit the rat race around the age of 35. I tell people in life there are always trade-offs and opportunity costs and I gambled that a former 3 sport H.S. athlete, gym rat, college recreation gym user, and even early adult life YMCA member would be able to stave off my "Corporate 15". That's my take on the Freshman 15 you gain in college. I travelled as a consultant for many years and our typical lifestyle was eating out daily and back to the hotel. Back then not every hotel had a gym and to make matters worse, we worked hard. I often traded relaxing, meditating, exercising for working, drinking, and eating out with coworkers. When I came home, I lived in a fancy apartment complex that had an indoor basketball court/gym, well populated exercise room, and an indoor movie theater. But I was rarely home. As a consultant I once got the designation of being a road warrior --- on the road for over a 100 days within the year. 

Then came life in the office. Being a person a color, I adopted the model of getting into the office early and staying late. I was even chastised by fellow co-workers for delaying my participation in their weekly basketball games...I didn't want the boss to think I was a slacker. So I rarely left early but I participated to manage the image of me not wanting to be a team player. My solution I joined the weekly game but came into work early so I could leave on-time to make the games even though my peers rarely changed their schedules. Back then I lived by the office, which instead of being located in the great city of Chicago was out a good ways in the suburbs. Closer to some of the swankiest and highest priced zip codes in the Chicagoland area. This was another of those secrets we deal with in Corporate America. Many office parks are near where the well heeled live and rarely reside in the our city centers and hardly ever near communities of color. To put it in perspective, we had a good swatch of our workers who commuted from Wisconsin...yep you heard me right. But head down, work hard, I'm a team player and long trips to the city on the weekends to live it up or as my pals in the United Kingdom say to get some culture. My apartment had a room  sparsely populated with a machine or two and I wasn't much of an outside walker or runner. To hit my financial goals, I made a trade-off and didn't join the big gym clubs popular in the suburbs a little over a decade ago. I used the tiny workout room in my budget apartment and drove everywhere I went...classic suburban living.  But stop, who's to blame...ME. I am big on accountability and this is a good example of trade-offs and I needed more balance. Notice one thing that I didn't deploy in my toolkit that should have been...a "MINIMUM BASELINE". In cybersecurity we use this minimum baseline to set a security standard for all of the information systems under our control and by not consistently working out and getting annual physicals --- I didn't know my own baseline. 

More to come on Investing in Your Health in Pt 2. 

How to Buy Stocks

So knowing when to sell stocks OR anything in life is arguably the hardest thing to do. When should you sell your house, stocks, car?? The second hardest question to answer is how should I find stocks to buy. So let me take you back in the day, I used learned the following things when I first got started: 

1) I read everything I could about Warren Buffett and realize to invest you need to know your investing personality. More to come on this but I often find your real life personality mirrors your investing.

High Risk/Reward personalities might like the flash of buying stocks like Ferrari (RACE), Tesla (TSLA), Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH), or trading high flyers, day trading, and high risk high reward penny stocks.

Techy personalities may migrate to FAANG stocks. Facebook (FB), Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX), and Alphabet (GOOG) - parent company of Google...the G in FAANG.

Corporate personalities may like Ford (F), Goldman Sachs (GS), Procter & Gamble (PG), Microsoft (MS), Caterpillar (CAT) --- companies many of my peers wanted to work for when coming out school.

Cost Conscious personalities may migrate to companies meet analytical thresholds. We call that value investing. Sometimes the names are boring but they are steady and pay a dividend (which is the equivalent of getting a stimulus check every quarter): General Electric (GE), Real Estate Companies, Oil Companies, and Utilities like electric, cable, phone, and retail companies.

Loner personalities may gravitate to companies that don't get a lot of hype, quirky, are getting bullied, etc. What comes to mind here are clothing company Skechers (SKX), weed company Tilray, and Collectors Universe (CLCT) a collectibles company that grades things like baseball cards.  Then there a bullied companies (often for good reason) which fall out of favor on Wall Street for messing up: 

Tesla - because Elon Musk was being targeted for his tweeting and 420 comments, 

Lululemon - when their stock got beat up because their CEO appeared to mock curvy women

Gamestop - attacked by short sellers

I believe most people will gravitate to one or two categories. Take me for example, I resonated with Warren Buffett and have read tons of books and articles about the man. He comes across as a cost conscious value oriented guy and that defined me -- simple, no frills, no gimmicks, give me value type of style. But I also am a contrarian and tend to go against the crowd. So when I'm not looking for value stocks, I often look for reasons why the carbon industry was so against Tesla, redemption in Lululemon (after getting rid of their CEO), Gamestop providing a need for many communities that may not always have internet to download games, Disney and other retail companies getting beat down during COVID-19 lockdowns. I like the quintessential story of the getting knocked down and getting back up. That story of opportunity was my family's story. My father and mother, hard working immigrants, came to America worked some of the least flashy jobs but got it done. My father mocked for his West African accent and Ph.D degree and being told you're overqualified. I often look to where cancel culture strikes in the stock market and I bet that if at first you don't succeed, dust yourself off and try again. 

Prism - A look at African + African American Investing

1) Esusu - A company with African co-founders makes me proud: 

Why I'm Watching: 

I like to challenge myself. When I cut the cord, I lost the ability to watch CNBC. So I challenged myself to simply listen to the broadcast on Tune-In Radio. When I heard them announce a company called Esusu, my head turned. I had heard this termed used so many times in my African community. It means to pool money together and usually each week or so the group shares the pool money with one member. So it creates the lottery feeling of getting a big payment once every "x" month once it's finally your turn to receive the payout. Well I listened to Abbey Wemimo, co-founder of Esusu, talk about how he helped to start the firm. I even reached out on LinkedIn looking to connect and as an accredited investor I hope to invest and fund companies like his in the future.

2) The Coinbase Remix - How African-American Rappers and Athletes are Diversifying 

Why I'm Reading: 

For those of us that follow the markets, we were BLOWN away by the opening day value of Coinbase a digital exchange where you can buy, sell, and securely store cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. They became a public company recently and for us regular folk that is similar to baby being born. They were a private company and once they became public the baby popped out and but this baby was valued @ roughly $100 Billion dollars. So I know that many investors were dancing because they cashed in big time. Some of those investors I was proud to say were African-Americans like rapper Nas (Nasir Jones) who you all know I have in my Top 5 rappers of all time and National Basketball player Kevin Durant. Nas reported earned a $100 Million payout from this investment word on the street is KD cleaned up big time as well. I am happy to see these entertainers diversifying their investments...you will not rap and play ball forever. Very proud of these young brothers.

Nas and Kevin Durant Invest in Coinbase

How to Invest in a Clinton / Trump Election Year...

First, I'll address where I've been since my posts have dried up for about a year. My answer is: "Still Right Here".  As we all know for the last few years, people continue to have to do more with less and that extends to companies. With unemployment pretty low for most big companies, they have to squeeze more out of every employee.  Good old fashion hustlin', and I got the memo and have been very busy at work and in my personal life.  The other reason, I haven't written much is because as a country and in the stock market things appear to be in a holding pattern.  I had a feeling a little over a year ago that the stock market was reaching its tops and I took my ball and went home.  For my portfolio, that meant I decided to sell some of the stocks that had been big winners. If you need a reminder flash back to this post: http://urbanomics.blogspot.com/2014/08/marketsno-longer-starting-from-bottom.html

I never like selling but if life you can't get too greedy so I parted ways with names like:

• Allergan - maker of botox (Allergan was acquired Actavis for a nice price) :)
• Lululemon - athletic wear (bought when it was in the low 40s, after some of their pants were showing too much skin and when the CEO ranted he didn't want bigger sized women wearing the clothes, and waited for them to correct their missteps)
• Caterpillar - big equipment maker (bought early and they fell, then I acquired more shares over time through patient dividend investments and they rallied above my purchase prices...just sold in the last few months for a small gain)
• NovaGold - gold miner (bought over 3 years ago and they dropped by over $50 percent; my old mentor reminded me if the fundamentals make sense buy when they are on discount. At roughly $3 I bought more and sold a good portion of it this year at just under $7. 

I felt a little over a year ago we were closing in on the top and I was just a bit early, but by planning then I was starting to set myself up for what's to come. A market near its highs, a Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump election year, and other surprises like the UK leaving the European Union have kept the markets a little uneasy. So I'll tell you what I've been quietly doing as I've sold my winners over the last few months:

Buying Top-Tier Companies (when they reached Low Prices):

• Apple (bought in the low $90s)
• Verizon (bought in the low $40s)
• Manchester United (bought b/w $13-14 range)
• Gilead (bought b/w $73-74) 
• Alibaba (low $80s)

These bigger names anchor my portfolio and should grow in good times and fingers crossed, the bad times. They all pay a dividend so they will pay you to wait :)

I then decided to begin thinking about how I wanted to thin my portfolio out to and hold higher quality names. I've been making hard decisions and here are some of the mistakes I think I have made:

• Gold - NovaGold (I still own a small portion and should have sold it all when it hit its highs)
• Oil - There is too much oil around the world and oil stocks are NOT going anywhere anytime soon. I own (British Petroleum(BP), Oasis Petroleum, Cheniere Energy) and the only good thing is the latter two, I don't hold big positions. BP pays a nice dividend so I use that to buy more shares and love that this is a long-term cornerstone of my portfolio at these levels.
• Non-Dividend Stocks, Not Growing - Lastly, I have a few stocks that don't pay a dividend!! I've held them for quite some time and they are just sitting there taking up space. For me names like:  St. Joe's Company (real estate), Nuance Communication (voice services like Siri), Hertz, and a few others just are not bringing much to the table. So I'll likely be parting ways with these names in the future.

I'm reminding you to go Vote, go Cubs, for me...go focus on higher quality names in this crazy election year.

~ Get Ur Urb On

Federal Reserve Announces Taper / World Improving? / Stocks on My Mind

FED ANNOUNCES a $10 BILLION DOLLAR TAPER
The Federal Reserve has been pumping billions and billions of dollars into the US economy. Today was the first step by the Fed to say that the US economy, their patient, appears to be in steady recovery mode.  The recovery appears to be steady enough that they are starting to reduce the amount of medicine they have been giving to the patient...in the form of the stimulus they have been pumping into the economy.  This was a pivotal moment in the market and the reaction so far is very positive.  Investors believe that the Fed's view that the US is in recovery mode because stocks have catapulted higher. Stay tuned and let's look back in the next 3 to 12 months from now and see if we feel more jobs being created, houses being bought, and you and your friends spending more.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101279385

ARE ECONOMIES IMPROVING AROUND THE WORLD?
I am consistently the naysayer, as I am always looking for risks that impact the markets. But I must admit the news that I have seen recently is VERY positive.  The unemployment rates are coming down in both the US and I saw a story today about the rate in the UK and this is very positive for growth around the world.  More people working means companies are hiring and people have more money to spend in the future.


STOCKS/THEMES ON MY MIND
Lululemon (LULU)- This company continues to stumble and has recently fired it's CEO for some very insensitive comments towards women.  Not the brightest move considering women are their core target group. But I also know that the YOGA and health movement is serious and people want to look the part when they get fit. I believe they are trading around roughly $59 dollars.

Caterpillar (CAT) - A company that had been in the stuck in the mud and the stock price hasn't been doing well. But they are very much impacted by global growth and with things improving this stock may make a nice move up.  Stock price has ranged from $84 to $87. I believe it trades at roughly $87 today.

Stocks Which Support Online Businesses: International Paper (IP), FedEx (FDX), UPS (UPS)
I realize that more than 75% of my purchase habits happen online. I now buy my home goods online and have had dish soap, laundry detergent, door handles, and a host of other products delivered to my house. They always come in a brown corrugated box (International Paper) and are delivered primarily by UPS when I purchase items from Amazon.  I've recently heard that groceries can be bought online very soon...see Amazon "PANTRY".  I think more boxes and deliveries are coming to both your house and mine.

Health Care: I listened to a very interesting story on National Public Radio the other day.  For the first time, health care insurers are taking major steps to advertise their products in response to the Affordable Care Act.  I don't know many things but I do know 1 thing...when companies are spending billions of dollars to advertise it's because they see an opportunity to grow and gain market share.  Insurance is a business that seems to experience very little turnover once they've signed up a customer.  If I am an example, I have had the same auto and health care provider for as long as I can think. There will be a number of winners due to the expansion of the Affordable Care Act. Investors have already realized this a number of these stocks are up significantly this year...but the biggest change to the health care sections in decades will cause some serious gains for years to come.

Easier Said Than Done...

“It’s been a long time, shouldn’t have left you without a dope beat to step too…”  As you know I have a love for music, especially hip-hop, so when I am thinking a song will often pop into my head.  Here, I am thinking of how long it’s been since I’ve written something to the readers out there.  I admit work, life, and stuff happens but I shouldn’t have left you without a nice article to think about.

I would like to start off by simply just being honest!  One of the primary reasons I have not written anything is that in REALITY there is not that much going on in the investment world.  Maybe I should say it different, the markets have been steadily going UP and there hasn’t been much else.  If you remember, there have been a few moments in the last year or so where I wrote that the stock market indicators lead me to believe that stocks and the overall market were headed higher for the foreseeable future.  If I were a TV personality, I can say “We Predicted This Would Happen!” but the reality is it took months and months of reading, researching, and keeping my eyes and ears open to rationalize where things were logically headed.  The goal while investing is to navigate through ALL of the NOISE (family, friends, and TV people telling you how to invest) and for you to logically conclude about where things like are headed.  Once you get a good idea about that then you can determine what and how much to invest in.  I am here to simply share my thoughts on how I navigate through the noise so that I can share those with you and I can learn from the past by coming back and reading my own writings.  This is helpful in life, because you must navigate through the noise (when choosing a house, car, job, etc.) and really get down to making a sound decision.

Here I am always looking to make a sound investment and I’m going to present 1 topic to assist you on your investment journey:

Easier Said Than Done…