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Unfortunately, this perfect work environment is 500 miles away, so I can’t go that often. But, I feel so good there. Ukiah, California is in the middle of nowhere roughtly 200 miles north of San Francisco, CA. I go up there from time to time to work. There is nothing to do there. It is an hour North of Wine Country where you can enjoy amazing food, wine and cool people. It is an hour East of the Ocean where you can enjoy gardens, beaches, parks, great beer, wine, and more restaurants. But, there is nothing much to do in this tiny town. They have a very nice health food store with amazing pastries, and a few passable restaurants. But, I find that I am ecstatic and get a lot of work done in this small town.

I typically will go up to meditate in an ashram in Nevada city for a few days before going to Ukiah. After meditating seven hours a day, day after day, I’ll need to catch up on my work. So, in Ukiah, I bring phone lists and am on the phone all day long. But, in Ukiah, I achieve balance.

I’ll meditate three times a day which is perfect. I meditate in the morning, after lunch, and before I go to bed. I am unable to be so regular about meditating at home for some reason. I work and work and work without tire as well. Finally, I’ll walk around for an hour with vigor since I feel so good. There is nowhere good to walk, so I walk around the hotel for an hour which feels great! There’s a Starbucks next door, Jack in the Box, and Mexican food nearby as well as a few Chinese joints within a few minutes drive. The Brewery has great burgers and there are a few fancy places to eat too. For me, the town is just a place to feel amazing.

Do you have a place where you feel amazing? Maybe you should visit there and bring your work. If you run an office, perhaps you should set up your office there. Too many people are packed into big cities. Sometimes it is nicer to be in the countryside in a place where you can be happy!

In the world of investing, it is easy to fall prey to dangerous investments. If you have a good broker, they will steer you out of harm’s way. If you want to invest in bonds or stocks, the first thing you should do is to check their credit rating. S&P does credit ratings and so does Moody’s. The ratings systems are similar, but start diverging when you get into the BBB or baa range. The two do not translate directly into each other. So, it’s complicated.

AAA investments are by far the safest. They are almost guaranteed to pay you back, but the return on investment might be a lot lower as a price you pay for safety. AA is the next best bet on the S&P scale with roughtly a (.2)% chance of default in any given year. Those are odds I can handle if I am diversitifed. A+, A, and A- are around a (.3) to (.7)% chance of default in any given year. Once you get into BBB territory, then you are in a lot of risk. If you invest in a 45 year old bond that is BBB, there might be a 1.5 chance per year that they default, but after 45 years that turns into more of a 65% chance of default. Do you really want to take that risk unless the monthly payments are high?

Then, there are Illinois and their partner in crime Puerto Rico. These two territories have bonds up the yin-yang who are not looking like they will get paid off. Investors are picking them up at half price hoping for the best.

In my opinion, the biggest issue with this whole investing fiasco is that most financial entities put themselves into too much debt. First they borrow a little, and then a little becomes a lot. It’s easy to get into debt, but not so easy to get out. Once your debt is beyond a particular point — depending on how old your establishment is and what industry you’re in — then, your credit rating goes down and your interest rate goes up putting you in an even worse situation.

When I invest in stocks or bonds, before I even look at the credit rating, I look at how in debt you are, and how much your debt fluctuates from year to year as well as how stable your income is in a recession such as 2009.

In any case, my broker emailed me with rates for utility and trash bonds. I replied:

“I said I wanted junk bonds, not trash bonds!”

What is SDR? This is not a term that shows up on Investopedia or Wikinvest. That’s right. I invented it because I wanted to have a better understanding of risk analysis. As I look at hundreds of stocks, it is impossible for me to determine risk. I don’t know the industries well, or the people running these companies. I have only common sense, articles on the internet, and numbers to crunch. How much a company makes per share matters a lot to me as a metric for “return” on investment as well as dividends and growth averages over the life of the company. However, risk is also another important criteria.

SDR means:
(stability in income) : debt ratio.
If you look at a company’s financial records, you can see what their earnings have been year after year after year. It is generally good to buy a stock that is growing in income. If every year that goes by, the company makes more and more money, your stock will probably go up in value as it will affect the stock’s price per earnings ratio which is one of the most critical metrics in stock analysis.

Earnings growth & stability
What I do is to look at the company’s earnings over the last twenty years and calculate an average percentage growth. Unfortunately, in the real world growth is compounded, so you will be forced to use “the rule of 72” which you can look up on the internet. Putting 72’s aside, I look for income stability, particularly in recessions. I am terribly afraid that my stock investments will go bust if there is a bad depression similar to 1929. So, if I see a stock that survived the great depression, and didn’t do too badly in the recession of 2008 & 2009, then it has some stability to it. I analyze how stable or unstable the consistency in their income per share is, and add that to my stock algorithm.

Is unstable earnings bad?
However, after long and careful thought, I decided that a company with unstable income is not the worst thing. If you hold that company for twenty years, the fact that they had a bad year in 2021 and 2027 won’t phase you assuming they don’t go out of business completely and assuming you don’t need to sell the shares suddenly during a bad year. If a company is deep in debt, that is not necessarily a horrible thing assuming its income is relatively stable at all times including economic downturns. I learned that companies like Coke, Pepsi and Kraft stay steady in bad times while Mastercard, Starbucks, and Sam Adams did not do as well.

The basic idea is that a company that is deep in debt that also has unstable income is a likely candidate for bankruptcy in the next decade or so. It is unclear when a company would go under, but it happens all the time. If income is not stable, but the company’s equity ratio is high — you might be safe. If the income is stable but the debt is high, you also might be safe. Ideally you would have low debt and stable income, but that is only the care with very few companies. The point of this article is that I no longer analyze debt ratio as a separate issue as its relevancy only matters when combined with income stability stats.

In short, in my algorithm gives stocks up to 20 points. 3 of those points are earned from the SDR portion of the algorithm. Perhaps I should give more as two of the stocks I just bought just fell about 10% the day after I purchased them — gulp! If you have low debt and stable income you get all three points. If you have unstable income with high equity or vice versa, you might get two out of three points. But, if you are lacking in both departments, I might assign you a negative rating since the risk would be quite severe! I created a table to go over all possible scenarios including moderate debt and moderate income stability, moderate to low, and various gradations. If you like my idea for this component of a stock buying algorithm, you can create your own table and fool around with it until you get it how you like it. Algorithms are not for everyone, but if you do things like buying stocks or hiring outsourcing companies — you need some type of an algorithm combined with a good sense of people!

It seems that all cultures are off balance to a point. Some cultures have sex too much and develop venareal diseases and AIDS. Other cultures suppress sexuality and those cultures have pent up frustration.

Many of the black African nations have out of control sexual behavior. AIDS has been a serious crisis in many parts of Africa for decades now. Botswana is a text book case of the worst part of the world concerning the AIDS epidemic. A nation littered with small shacks inhabited by orphaned children whose parents died of AIDS. Is this part of God’s divine plan to make the human race more moral — or destroy us? Looks like it is!

Meanwhile in many of the Muslim and Hindu countries, they have the opposite problem. Human beings are designed to need to be touched by the opposite gender. The problem is if you touch them the wrong way, you can get pregnant before you’re married, AIDS, or other diseases. However, if you restrict relations between men and women, people (particularly male people) get very frustrated and can develop a culture of hostility and violence. In India, the Hindus are very rough and insensitive people. Not all of them, but fi you live in India, your toes will get stopped on in all kinds of ways every single day. The Hindu religion requires respect of women, but a woman cannot walk through a park in Bangalore without being followed by sexually deprived men, molesters and gropers. Women are routinely followed, harrassed, yelled at, and badgered by men in India. So, the result of sexual repression is widespread molestation. Meanwhile in Syria and some of the Middle-Eastern countries the same frustration boils over in the form of genocide and mass murder in the form of warfare.

So, it looks like either way you cut the cake you lose. If your culture has sex, you get diseases, and if you don’t, you get molestation, rape and murder in widespread proportions. How can humans deal with this problem? One of the answers lies in spirituality. Many religious texts do not restrict relations between men and women except for intercourse, while religions and religious sects or cultures add another few layers of restrictions that do not exist in the texts which might be their idea of “best practices.”

It is not forbidden for a married woman to have a friend who is a man. But, it is not a best practice as the husband might not be okay with it, etc. But, before people are married, keeping the genders separated is not mentioned in any religious text that I’m aware of — Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. Only intercourse is forbidden.

It seems that following the instructions of the angels instead of the instructions of off-balance human interpretations is the key to solving the problem of moderation. There also needs to be a legal way for Indian men to get their frustrations relieved so there are no more gropers. Gropers even grope men, and society allows this in India. The police rarely do anything while in America you go to jail and are marked by the legal system as a sex offender for life. It looks like America is a little too uptight about these things while India needs to be a little more uptight. And that my friends is what I call balance.