Chinese Cafe Cash

Armin Van Buuren in Jo'burg this week
(real marketing, real audience, real sales)

It is really very hard to talk about well-known investment situations right now because the ones that appear in the media are highly questionable to me, but have all the boilerplate elements that make them seem utterly not to be questioned. (e.g. never question Kanye West...)

You can’t fight the marketing push from some of these people.

But if you are an individual, with power to make decisions over you own money, however small or large, then you will want to read this blog. And not be swayed by the media fairy tales that are everywhere these days.

When I was starting out on my own (I did have uncles and aunts in fairly large scale international business) the simple rule I observed was that very old one about going to where the money is. But when I go back even farther in my personal experience, to when I watched my uncles do business, it was all very much more basic still. Money revolved around mid-mornings at the Chinese cafe where Vestey talked to Asian merchants about his cold storage units, and late late nights when the shipping containers were all accounted for and the cash was counted in the same cafe, on the same round, worn-down, marble Chinese cafe table.

The money was on the table.

Where the deals are done

Sure today 'the App is in the cloud…' But the money is still on that table.

Someone I am doing some reasonable sized business with right now just ended his email to me with: ‘enough of business, I want to do some relaxing stuff too.’ Back to the Chinese table you see.

Today we have ‘binaries,’ ‘CFD’s,’ ‘Apps,’ ‘Forex,’ and every other kind of investing situation or derivative imaginable. You can, apparently, invest in anything so long as it doesn’t involve a real profit whereby you get to earn a calculable dividend that relates to the equity price paid.

In the old days there was this old hawker, outside that Chinese cafe, but you could buy what he sold and have it delivered to you inside the cafe by the cafe itself - which was pleased to do it, too. His dish? ‘Tak Yee’s fried soup.’ It came wrapped in newspaper. There is no way to describe what ‘fried soup is,’ suffice though, to say that no accountant or modern media editor or stockbroker would credit such a thing as existing.

Which just shows you what little these clowns really know about anything. Because there really is such a thing as ‘fried soup,’ but only those who have experienced it can know what it is.

I’m about to realize a profit on some cases of Taltarni Shiraz that are around ten years old (in the bottle) now. The wine though is undervalued at the price. And that is because things like Sassicaia - admittedly a great wine - take all the publicity and they take it away from many other small wine-makers of equal skill and quality of product. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, because you can move in an out of positions that whilst all of them go up, some of them are cheaper to enter in the first place, but the others are better as far as liquidity is concerned.

Will last a hundred years - and go up
in value every year.

Buy some cases of Taltarni or Cape Mentelle or Langhorne Creek for small money, turn them into cash after a few years, buy a case of Sassicaia, and after another ten years you will be a millionaire by opening a restaurant and vending the Sass in glasses, or rolling the proceeds into the discount on bonds then. Oh yes, there will be a crash in the stock markets between now and then but not yet. And that is why you need to be taking positions in the hard stuff now that will keep its value through the ‘unforeseen’ disturbance to come. This is the unforeseen disturbance that is, of course, utterly inevitable because Wall Street is such arrant nonsense right now. And so are the governments that pander to it. And the criminal ‘banks’ that have no money, take no risk, and want taxpayers to bail them out when their inside deals go sour. Which they, strangely enough, always do.