Restarting this blog (again) with a bet on Blackberry. (BB).

What I'm buying | Blackberry (BB)

Average price per share for this bet | $9.60

My Blackberry circa 2008-ish.

Why I'm risking a bit of my hard earned, runty nest egg into this company | Once upon time, everyone who was anyone had a Research in Motion (RIM) Blackberry. Even nobodies like me had a Blackberry. I started with RIM's first pager-like email-only device at the end of the 90s and became even more of a fan as Blackberries morphed into full on smart phones. Then Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone and... poof, Blackberry was gone. Truly, it happened so fast, just a few years. But today's Blackberry (since renamed from RIM) is not your father's Blackberry, and I think the company's laser focus on securing the rising Internet of Things (or Enterprise of Things as BB cleverly calls it) will pay off.. 

Here's the thing about the Internet of Things (IoT). Most things connect via a cell tower just like a phone and the one reason Blackberry (BB) held on for as long as it did after the iPhone appeared on the scene was that Blackberry phones were ridiculously secure. Many paranoid companies and governments would settle for nothing less. In other words, BB knows how to secure connected devices. And as cars and machines and jet engines and, yes, toasters and other things connect to the internet, they will need to be secure, period, full stop. Remember Stuxnet when the US hacked in into an Iranian nuke plant and caused some machinery self destruct? Or when some sneaky bastards hacked into Target and stole a bunch of credit card data? Or more recently when the Mirai botnet took down Etsy, GitHub, Netflix, Shopify, SoundCloud, Spotify, Twitter, and a number of other major websites? At the heart of every one of these incidents was some sort of security weakness in a connected thing. And going forward, there will be a LOT of connected things needing security, with estimates running about 20 billion by 2020. Seems like BB's in the right business.

Another reason I like BB is the company's focus on connected and autonomous cars. Very little imagination is required to come up with disaster scenarios if a hacker gets control of a car, so many car companies are already working with BB to buckle up. (At the moment, BB seems to have the most traction in automotive, but I don't see why the company's stellar security chops wouldn't make it attractive to healthcare device makers, the military, aerospace, and many other markets.)

Likelihood I will regret this decision | On a scale of one to ten, with 10 being ICOULDAHADAV8, I'd say 3. Right now, BB hardly looks like a great investment. Revenue continues to decline (a result of the dying legacy business), the forward P/E is something like 50, there's debt, the competition will be fierce, etc. But, BB has over $2B in cash, a seasoned turnaround guy at the helm, and, at least for security, a very, very strong brand, which helps not only with margins but also with getting shortlisted for deals.

What would Buffett do? Pass. Buffett likes investements that look like a sure thing and BB doesn't exactly qualify, at least not at today's price.

Welcome to one guy's attempt to pick market-beating stocks so he can die somewhere nicer than a trailer park outside of Tuscon, AZ.

I want to be able to support my family and put my two kids through college without having to go completely broke while still facing years, maybe decades, of life. But I don't make enough money. Yes, I mostly max out my 401k and avoid debt but it's not going to be enough. Not even close.

I need to win the lottery.

And since that's not going to happen, I pick stocks. Now, before you think I'm naive or stupid or both given that stock pickers typically underperform the market over time, let me just say straightaway that my 401k is in low-cost (under .5%) index funds and that the money I buy stocks with represents maybe 30% of my total. If I lost it all I would be very bummed but my future would not change much. Less than not enough is still less than enough.

I've been picking stocks for over 15 years (and will be at it for years to come) and in that time I've learned a lot of valuable and often painful lessons, read gobs of articles and books, checked the market obsessively every sing damn day and not gone broke (believe me, that's worth somethßing!).

But picking stocks is a lonely game. So I'm starting this blog in the hopes of adding a bit of community to my little stock picking operation, as well as to chronicle my thinking and keep my hindsight honest, as I have a bad habit of forgetting my failures and maintaining crystal clear memories of my wins.

I will share what I've learned and what I'm betting on, and I hope to find a few readers who will do the same. I hope you enjoy the writings to come. And I hope I don't die in a trailer park outside of Tuscon.