iFlop

I have a split personality with regard to Apple.

Personality One: I've made a tremendous amount of money speculating on Apple stock over the last ten years. You'll never go broke betting on the stupidity of the American consumer.

Personality Two: Apple is and always has been one of the most overrated and hypocritical corporations in the world. There isn't time or space here to cover all the facts supporting this assessment. Walmart has more integrity.

Since it's announcement last Fall, I've been amazed at the ridiculous hype surrounding Apple's latest attempt to fleece the sheep....the iWatch.

What you have is an overpriced fashion statement that has a lousy battery life, is relatively bulky, and doesn't have its own internal intelligence to do much (it relies on your iPhone). The one thing it does well is serve as an expensive workout timer and, provided you don't mind small storage, a means of music playback to bluetooth headphones. That is a nice capability, but is it really worth $350?

That, of course, is for the plastic piece-o-crap version. The metal version is around $700 and it gets worse from there. Apple is literally trying to see what the limits of their customer exploitation may be. 

Apple may finally be starting to run out of lemmings. Some preliminary channel data is suggesting that sales have been absolutely abysmal since the first rush of iDiots, who just had to buy one sight unseen. Volumes have collapsed over the last couple of months.

Full disclosure: I sold all of our final Apple holdings with the late April
iWatch launch hype spike. The next move will be to short with conviction when the markets finally do begin to roll over (which may be sooner than anyone thinks).

Beating the Heat Without AC

It's been warmer than usual up here in Northern Idaho. On a couple of days it even hit 95 degrees inside our rig. The hottest time is from about 4pm to 7pm before the nighttime cooling sets in. Fortunately, we have 30-35 degree swings in temperature at night, so we get 14-16 hours a day of cool temperatures even on the hottest days.

We pride ourselves on being able to boondock in conditions most people couldn't handle, but dealing with temperatures in the teens is a lot easier than dealing with temperatures pushing 100 degrees. Now we could fire up the generator and turn on the AC, but that would be admitting defeat! Instead we've chosen to deal with it the old fashioned way.

Our first strategy has been to save the hardest physical activities for the 4-5 hour period in the mornings before the temperature hits 80 degrees. This has been our time for gardening, working on the forest, and hiking. After 80 degrees, it's time to find a shady spot for the day and just relax, or head up to our favorite mountain swimming holes. Fortunately, low humidity and the scarcity of bugs works to our advantage.

One of our favorites is a 20 minute drive away. It's worth the extra drive time. The water is perfect, the setting is private, there's a nice mix of shade and sunny areas, and the creek has a nice diversity of deep pools, sandy shallows, and water chutes among the rocks.

Sometimes you need to be in the sun after swimming in a cold mountain stream.

Jake doesn't really know how to relax. His motto is "I'll sleep when I'm dead".

However, warmer weather does have its benefits. The sweet corn is waist high by July, the squash and raspberries have been coming in regularly, and the heirloom tomatoes are ripening early. There's been very little rain and loads of sun, so we've been able to crank up our refrigerator/freezer on electric during the day to keep the cold beverages and ice flowing. The solar panels easily power it and the batteries fully recharge every day (we never draw down our batteries below 70%).

We're going back to our normal weather in the 80s starting this weekend. Time to get back to work. No more lounging in the shade in a hammock with a cold beverage all afternoon.

Back in the Saddle

Back in my working days, I would use a unique system to taste and evaluate wine samples. I first learned the technique working for a Sonoma-based winemaking consulting firm called Enologix. I went on to use this technique at several different wineries where I made wine and for our own wine brand Rocinante.

The beauty of the system is that you can quickly evaluate hundreds of samples a day and have a numerical result can easily be manipulated in a database to give you predictive information about a wine style and the type of consumer who will prefer that wine style. This is valuable winemaking information, not least because you can adjust your winemaking techniques to match the markets and price points you are trying to hit.

However, the best part may be that the technique lends itself particularly well to blind, informal group tastings at home. Someone who has never tasted wine can participate next to a seasoned wine professional and both will have fun and learn something about wine styles and, most importantly, wine styles they actually prefer (not wine styles they have been told to prefer or want to think they prefer). We did hundreds of these tastings over the years when we still had a "normal" house. We'd have anywhere from four to 12 people at a tasting and the food and drink would carry long into the night. 

Since we've been on the road, we haven't had the venue to do one of these tastings. Now that we spend the summers up in North Idaho, we've mentioned these tastings to friends up here and have had a lot of offers from them to provide venues.

Since it's been warm, I decided to blind taste a group of Brut style sparkling wines from the U.S. made in the traditional Champagne style. We had Roederer Estate, Domaine Chandon, Mumm Napa Valley, Gruet, Gloria Ferrer, and Scharffenberger.

In the beginning, it was all very dignified.

By the end, things were a little more loose.

This flight of wines was interesting because of the subtle differences. We had some great results that even surprised me. One of our friends has a brother visiting from Australia later this month. I think we'll need to do Australian Shiraz vs. U.S. Syrah in their honor. I'd like to see the Aussies pick a Rocinante Syrah as their favorite!

What would Jesus do?

Not that I am any kind of authority, but I think he would decide that we're not worth saving and go back to his carpentry gig.

We Are Certifiable

It took a year, but we finally received our certification for sustainable forest management from the American Forest Foundation. In the process, we also worked with the Idaho Department of Lands and the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service on developing our forest management plan. 

The Certified Family Forest designation is proof that we are managing our property according to a detailed plan that balances forest health, wildlife management, water quality, and responsible recreation. So at least we received this nifty sign in exchange for all the time we're spending controlling erosion, thinning and pruning, replanting, eliminating noxious weeds, and improving wildlife habitat.

To "celebrate" we volunteered to help out with the 2015 Idaho State Forestry Contest.  This is a statewide program designed to teach kids about the wide diversity of trees in Idaho and the best practices for managing this valuable resource.

Not that we love children and look for volunteer opportunities to hang out them. It is well documented that children are all monsters. In addition, human children under 4' 9" all look alike and are almost impossible to tell apart. That aside, we thought it might be fun to check it out.


The gang. With teams from Montana and Washington as well.

Compass and pacing skills

Log scaling

Forest surveying

Tree identification and silviculture

It has been unusually mild since we made it back up to Far North Idaho, with constant sunshine, temperatures in the mid to high 70's and no rain for almost seven weeks now. The asparagus has come and gone, and we've been picking ripe, juicy strawberries for over a week already. But the dry weather has definitely hurt the mushroom season this year. Thankfully, the weather forecast is calling for some clouds and a little rain over the next few days. 

The Markets Can Remain Irrational Longer Than You Can Remain Solvent

For the first 40 years or so of my life, everything I learned about finance revolved around mathematical certainty and fundamental analysis. For more than 100 years of the modern financial system in the U.S., details related to corporate financial reports, GAAP accounting, and valuation actually mattered when making investment decisions.

That all changed in 2008.

In a world of unprecedented government economic intervention, unlimited central banker QE, and the steady erosion of GAAP accounting standards and any pretense of enforcing our existing financial market regulatory laws, every financial asset class has been manipulated to the point where successful investing has required completely different approaches.

Fundamental analysis has become a relic of the past. For a while, cyclical analysis was effective. At times, traditional trend analysis has also been useful. In all cases, you would have had to suspend mathematical logic to make money in the markets over the past seven years.

While the only markets still currently trending higher are the major market indices, the foundation they rest on is more shaky than at any time in my lifetime. The problems that created the last financial crisis (systemic debt and leverage combined with currency debasement) are larger now than they were in 2008. If it even matters anymore, the fundamental underpinnings are also worse than 2008.


The last time there was a divergence this large of stock price vs U.S macroeconomic date was in 2008. How much larger will it get?



Why is the market still rising while forward earnings projections are increasingly negative?



Nothing to see here. Stocks should rise as the U.S. GDP collapses, right? I guess it's the darn weather again.



The Big Boys have been steadily unloading positions into stock market strength. What side of that trade do you want to be on?



And finally the ultimate indicator. When your banana guy starts trading stocks, you know the end of the trend is near.

Who knows, maybe the principals of finance and math have been permanently altered by governments and central banks. Maybe this time things really are different (just like they were in 2000 and 2007). Not that advanced finance degrees and certifications were ever worth anything, but maybe all those hours spent studying and taking exams was wasted. Maybe the irrational levitation of some markets and repression of other markets can continue indefinitely.

If you haven't started lightening up your exposure to stocks, you may want to consider doing so.

Three Years on the Road

It's been a busy March. We've been camping and hiking our way through the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona and the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. We'll probably spend more time in SE Arizona and New Mexico next year.

April 1st marks three years since we've been living and travelling fulltime in our 5th wheel. Why is three years an interesting waypoint? When we started this retirement lifestyle by going to the New Horizons factory for two weeks of training and to take delivery of our rig, we met an old-timer of the road who told us if we made it three years, then most likely we would be doing this a long time. In his experience, it seems that most people give up on living this way within the first three years. They just miss all of their "stuff" too much, grow weary of the occasional challenges that surface, or worse, grow weary of being together so much.

It feels like we left the factory less than a year ago, but a lot has happened over the past three years. We've camped through exotic bug infestations, weld failures on our hydraulic leveling system, a fire on the rig, floods, weather from 12 degrees to 95 degrees, sink holes, and very deep mud. We've had our rig in all of the lower 48 states and Canada, unexpectedly bought a 100 acre Garden of Eden in Far North Idaho for summer boondocking, have enjoyed countless sunsets along with grilled local produce and rare bottles of wine, have sampled food and drink that will remain memorable forever, and have discovered more solitude and wild, wide open spaces than all but a few people will ever know. We've met some interesting people along the way and have made some new friends that will be among our closest for the rest of our lives.

As we start out on our fourth year of fulltime RV travel, we can't see living any other way. Our list of places to go just seems to grow larger. The thrill of finding the next unknown boondocking spot is always there. I guess that old-timer of the road we first met three years ago would say we have a good shot of making this lifestyle work out for us.

This message has been endorsed by Jake and Karly.