School's Out

Burning Bridges.



It's Friday night in San Francisco, warm and peaceful.



Apple's stock just keeps rising. It's now over $124/share. The company's new iPhone, which launches near the end of June, is widely expected to be a success, much like the iPod is. I really wish I hadn't sold 100 shares last year when the stock was in the high $60s. Had I waited, those shares would have appreciated by ~$6,000.

At least I kept most of my Apple Stock, which I bought when it was in the $20s.



I'm not much of an investor. I went headfirst into the market at the height of Web 1.0 mania, and I pretty much lost my shirt. This was brought home to me today when I filled out my form for yet another class-action lawsuit against one of the companies in my portfolio that went bankrupt.

Other than Enron (which I probably would have bought if I'd known about it), I chose almost every big loser of the era. Thus, I've received pennies on the dollar from lots of class-action settlements as the legal system tries to recover a measure of justice for all the small people (I qualify as one) who were essentially cheated by corporate managements that bent the law and cooked their company's books for their own benefit.



Today's form was more emotional than others, because the company involved was Excite@Home, my former employer. Naively, in early 2000, I bought 500 shares of this doomed company when its stock was in the mid-$30s. (Note to my kids: Never, NEVER invest in the company you work for. Trust me. You do not need that kind of redundancy of risk in your portfolio!)

I sold all 500 shares in December 2000 when the stock had fallen to just above $4/share; plus I learned (at the company's Christmas party) that I was to be laid off early in the following year.

Yep, I lost over $15,000 on that foolish investment, along with hundreds of thousands of unvested stock options that would never find a market. Today, to my surprise, I found that I am apparently due to get some $1,200 back from this particular lawsuit, which is a huge amount in matters like these. Even though it hardly makes up for the losses I suffered, it will be welcome in a summer when I have a daughter getting married, and lots of kids' camps to help pay for...



I'm sorry if this has been a rant about my personal economics. Maybe, I'm a bit angry that having reached an age that I could well have retired had not these investments gone sour, I'm instead reduced to filling out boring forms to reclaim a fraction of what I have lost. Others, I know, suffered far worse losses. Unlike me, they didn't have any assets to lose, other than their pensions that their owners cheated them out of in what is truly among the most despicable of white-collar crimes. (Reference: Enron again.)



Today, the school year came to an end. The kids are ecstatic, naturally.



These photos capture more or less what we have been doing around here. Money is really not that much on my mind. The hopes and fears of my kids; the beauty of birds and flowers; the promise of new love always in the air -- these are my focus now.




And, as always, our "family art." We continue to play with colors, shapes, representation, impression, and (courtesy of PhotoShop) distortion.

From us to you, happy first night of summer!