Mark Cuban's Blog on the Rangers

http://blogmaverick.com/2010/08/05/chasing-the-rangers/

I really enjoyed Mark Cuban's blog post on his quest to buy the Texas Rangers. I did investment banking at Hambrecht & Quist for my first three years after college and his post brought back many fond H&Q memories.

Banking is kind of like joining a fraternity & the hazing, you'd recommend the entire experience to someone but you wouldn't want to do it again.

Anyways, this post is excellent and it captures the adrenaline that comes with the chase, the analysis that keeps you from over paying, and the disappointment that comes when your bid loses, which happens almost every time. You can even read between the lines and see that Cuban is blowing off a lot of steam in this post.

Tim Goodman & Mark Lisanti on Mad Men

Two of my favorite bloggers happen to write epic blog posts on each episode of Mad Men. If you're like me, you savor the show and then can't wait to read the recaps and analysis the next morning.

Lisanti writes a tongue and cheek recap full of humor and sexual innuendos (or overt sexual humor). His Mad Men logo is an inside joke for those that enjoy Draper's "Finger Bang Threat Level" update each week. Note, Lisanti's column is for adult reading only.

Goodman's recap are always enlightening and point out a bunch of little things that I missed, but make the show so much more enjoyable.

Check them both out on Monday after they've had time to write the recaps.

Friday Chill Music (August 6, 2010)

The best way to describe this weeks mix is: Quiet.

Hope you enjoy.

What to Do With 401k Allocation Choices

A good friend from Kellogg asked me to help her with her 401k Allocation choices. I'm not a pro, but tried to give her some general guidance. After I wrote the email, I figured I might as well post it here so others could either point out the flaws or use it themselves if they think it's a good framework. Remember, I'm not a pro.

General rules - 

1) Diversification is very important. Will protect you over the long haul. some things go down, some go up. the nice thing about a 401k and automatic contribution is that when things are going down, you are still buying them, so you are dollar cost averaging down. You may want to set up something where you re-balance every year. That way you take profits on things that have gone up, and dollar cost average down even more. I don't really worry about that, but that is me. I'm lazy and I figure my time frame is so long that it's not a huge deal.

2) My friend is 30 so so she is still very young, so you want to take some risk. If you were 50, I'd say have a lot of your money in more conservative things like a lot of bonds and large cap. You should have some exposure to International stocks and bonds, which are riskier but theoretically have a higher return profile, as well as Alternatives like Real Estate and Natural Resources.

There are two ways to do this with her choices, pick funds that are a complete diversification plays (different securities and different asset classes) within themselves. A general Capital Appreciation Fund is like that. You can put a lot of money into that and know you have some diversifcation. Find a general bond fund like that, and you are good. Probably 80% to 20%.

Personally, I like diversification on the funds too, that way, no one bad fund performance can screw me up too bad. Therefore, I allocate based on Asset Classes and just try to pick the best ones based on expense ratio and I look at performance too, but past performance is no guarantee of future success.

Using my strategy, I break up allocations into Asset Classes. My 401k allocation is about the percentages below. This would be my rec, but you can't really go wrong as long as you are diversified. Also, I'm not a pro so take mine with a grain of salt.

US Big Cap - 20%

US Small Cap (or Mid Cap) - 15%

Value Fund - 10%

US Bond (or High Quality US & Euro Bond) - 10%

Global Equity - 15%

Global Bond - 15%

Real Estate - 7.5%

Natural Resources - 7.5%

Hope this helps everyone. Please point out the flaws in my thinking in the comments!

Cool Video

The Clogs & Matt Berninger via Fuel Friends


CLOGS "Last Song" from Brassland on Vimeo.

Inception

Inception is the best movie I've seen in a long time. It's such a brain twister that I'm still trying to figure out what actually happened. I've been searching the Internets for days and thought I would share a few, cool articles that friends Matt Koidin and Cousin Cliffy sent me.

Very thorough explanation of the movie and what's really going on. Loved this!

Nice piece of Inception music trivia. What are they trying to tell us?

A late addition is this beautiful chart posted on Flowing Data (fast becoming one of my favorite blogs).

Healy Jones on an MBA & Startups

My buddy Healy Jones writes a great blog post on why MBA's can be so useful in startups. Here is a snippet:

"As OfficeDrop has grown I’ve found my MBA more and more useful. Basic stuff like statistics, pricing strategies, etc are particularly useful. I sure that I could have learned this in a book, but there is something about the classroom learning environment that is good for the way I acquire knowledge.

The connections I made during the MBA are very useful. For example, I wanted to test out an idea for a new verticalized product offering at OfficeDrop. I glanced through LinkedIn, saw several classmates who were in the targeted field and had some quick conversations. I could have done this without the MBA, but it was nice to know that there were people who would pick up the phone. And of course the connections were helpful during our fund raise."

Also, he has a great point about how student loan availability make tuition increases easy for schools, but they end up crowding out risk appetite of recent grads because of the huge debt burden.

"*On a somewhat unrelated note, does anyone else think that student loan situation in the US is the major cause of the educational cost inflation that we have here? In other words, because the federal government makes loans so easily available it is driving up the cost of higher education? I’m starting to think that government policies may be part of the reason that education is becoming so expensive - flood a market with cheap financing and the asset prices will go up??"

Car in Russian Fire

via kedrosky

this is nuts!

Metatastic Breast Cancer - Leah Siegel

Incredibly touching Dallas Morning News story about Leah Siegel, formerly of ESPN, death due to Metastatic Breast Cancer. Stories like these are why we continue to start new networks on the BensFriends.org network, and why we added http://metastaticbreastcancersupport.org/ last month.

My grocery shopping list

My favorite part of my shopping list is the condiment to actual food ratio.