I Live in Iowa: Week 66

I write a weekly series because I feel it keeps me accountable and attempting to make progress every week. Yet I don't always feel like I am making progress. I am, feeling are not fact.

Work was the pretty standard 45 hour work week. The cool part is that I have three projects now that are working with plastics. Easily 90% of what we do is with plate steel and the other 10% is probably with cast steels. So working on a polymer project is always interesting. To have three of them at the same time! Oh boy! In case you were wondering what happened when a 450lb. piece of steel hit a very thick polycarbonate window at 50 mph, it turns out that the window will survive. Although, if that window is only moderately thick instead of very thick, you don't want to be behind it. Now you know.

Exercising went well. A little over 19 mile on the legs at 6:56 pace average and about 75 miles on the bicycle over two ride at nearly an 18mph average. About 1k of swimming and one day of finger tearing rock climbing. Pretty standard stuff.

On my CS193P iOS programming class, I fell behind. It's hard to do a whole bunch of stuff then spend six hours trying to do a class. Fortunately my schedule is a little open this week so I will hopefully get to work on it quite a bit.

For the stock market investing, well, for those that have been following DHT Holdings, I hope you have not sold. You would have lost money. They had 12-to-1 reverse stock split. Which means formerly owning 12 shares means you now own one share. They did that so that the price of each share of stock would be above $1 to meet the minimum standards for listing on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Then throughout the week the stock continued to lose more money. On the original 1000 shares that I bought I have "lost" more than half of the purchase price not counting the last dividend. Keep in mind that you do not actually make or lose the money until you sell the stock. Two things, I am sweating out the days until Tuesday at 8AM EDT when they have their most recent quarterly earning results and conference call which I will certainly be listening to. If the results are good (earnings per share around $0.40 or more) and the projections are positive I would imagine the stock will go up, if they are negative, prepare for another dive. All of that being said, I just don't understand why this stock is priced so low. They have almost as much cash as their market cap. The prices of their ships are greater than the debt used to finance the ships. Plus, it's a great time to have long term debt due to low interest rates. All of the management have been in the shipping industry for 20+ years. Plus, the dividend is just outstanding. Well, we shall see on Tuesday if the losses are turning around this quarter, or if we still have a long way to go. Regardless, I'm not selling. Unless people are shorting the stock they aren't making money by selling. If they are, this doesn't seem like the stock to short.

Ending on a bad and a good note, two more things. I went to see The Dark Night Rises, and fortunately wasn't involved in a shooting. It is just mind boggling to me that a guy went into a theatre and in two minutes killed 12 and wounded 58. That is the largest number of casualties in any civilian mass shooting in US history. Say a prayer. Talk to a stressed out PhD student.

On Saturday I went rock climbing and then we drove another 45 minutes south of the Palisades to Antique Archeology of American Pickers fame in Le Claire, Iowa. It's a strange place. We drove through corn fields and dying towns with weeds between the cracks and boarded up buildings arriving in this little town that all of the sudden has a micro distillery and half a dozen modern restaurants including a beautiful four block long downtown. We ate at this little modern Mexican place, the Blue Iguana, and it was quite good. The town was sufficiently interesting that I would be encouraged to go back. The shop was pretty small and I didn't find the motorcycle accessories for sale that I was looking for (a leather jacket and goggles or a side car). They still do have those huge bobble head things. If you are ever in the neighborhood of Le Claire, it is totally worth an hour of walking around shopping and a meal.

Where do you put your hands during a picture anyway? I still haven't figured it out.

VOTE!!  --->