Thoughts on Business, Politics, and Life from a Private Investor
Here is the best thing I heard all day ... Life is not an organization chart. Life is more like a spider's web. Things happen in strange ways. - Ross Perot There is a lot of truth in this. You cannot think lineally about your life or business. You need to think in three-dimensions. This is one of the reasons people are successful. Take my parents and their company, Chenille Appeal. How is it they were able to grow, fund significant expansion and make major technology upgrades … [Read more...]
This is my mom. You've probably read about her but never seen a picture. She's the same one that would slip notes into my lunches in elementary school telling me how wonderful, intelligent and loved I was. Back in the early days when she and my dad started their company in a two hundred square foot garage, she would work during the day (my sister, Kelsey, and I would help run the machinery) and my dad would come home from his day-job and work the night shift. Today, she and my dad are … [Read more...]
I am going to start reading several biographies of Coco Chanel before long, so I made a run to a department store today to pick up some Chanel products (I have a habit of wanting tangible representations of whatever I'm studying around the office, which is why we need "investing cabinets", which contain things like miniature Hershey Chocolate trucks and replicas of Wal-Mart Supercenters from whenever we were buying shares in those companies years ago ... it is a way I make the money … [Read more...]
Phase I of our secret project and my third quarter goals are both going really well, even though I'm spending an inordinate amount of time on the manuscript for my next book, which is a guide to calculating intrinsic value of stocks, bonds, real estate, and other assets. Everything Merging Under the Kennon & Company Brand Remember the $31,000 we spent on the paid search advertising pilot program last September? Yeah, part of that involved testing various keywords to determine if we were … [Read more...]
I took the day off, spending most of it playing video games. About 4:30 p.m., my dad gets in touch with me by calling Aaron, who tracks me down and hands me the phone. It seems that the stock market had been in total chaos, setting an intra-day volatility record, and he had been frantically trying to get me on the phone as I blissfully drank coffee, read, and thought about our sporting goods businesses, completely oblivious to what was going on (we're value investors - I didn't get here just … [Read more...]
Five days or so into my experience with the iPad and it continues to exceed expectations (by far). I've spent somewhere between $120 and $150 in the Apple iTunes App store, which compared to my previous purchases of apps (read: $0), means there is more cash flowing into Steve Jobs' coffers. The overwhelming indication continues to be that the success of the iPad will come down to the applications that software companies develop for it. We bought our iPads for business purposes. As an … [Read more...]
My mom wasn't allowed to go see Elton John as a kid. She came from a very fundamentalist household and seeing a "homosexual" wasn't something God's people did, or so they were told. So, she would wait up at night and watch him on television instead of going to bed. Once she was old enough, she had all of his albums and when he walks out on stage (she's seem him twice - once in 2005 and then again last night), she is able to get some serious volume to her screams of joy. To this day, she … [Read more...]
A few months back, I told you that we were launching a new division of Mount Olympus Awards called MOA Team Supply. I explained that we were going after an entirely new market, specifically athletic directors and schools that want to purchase wholesale chenille letters, chenille patches, and even wholesale varsity jackets. We've finally got the business model in place and over the next month, we will be modifying the prices on the site to reflect the roll-out of our wholesale chenille … [Read more...]
Years ago, I wrote an article called Finding Investment Ideas for Your Portfolio for About.com, a division of The New York Times. I've been thinking for the past few days about how it is that I seem to come across so many opportunities and then I realized that most people like me are always looking whereas the average American isn't. By that, I mean that every time I walk into a business, without exception, the first thought that occurs to me as I look around is, "I wonder if this company … [Read more...]
If you are involved in the sporting goods industry, you probably know that there are only a handful of companies that manufacture letterman jackets in the United States. Among the biggest was a company called DeLong Sportswear, headquartered in Grinnell, Iowa. A few months ago, rumors are that DeLong went into Chapter 7 bankruptcy and was scheduled for a liquidation of assets (although some sources say DeLong merely closed its doors and didn't actually file). The town in which the firm … [Read more...]
Though the home renovations have gotten the most headlines due to their nature (constant onslaught of choices and tasks that need to be completed), one of the most important items on the agenda of the six-month project has been to drastically reduce my digital footprint. By the end of the program, I will have one personal presence [...]
This makes me sick. This high school is ranked in top 5% of high schools in the United States. The worst part of the video for me was the part where the kid says, “I was never taught that knowledge”. It’s not somebody else’s job to teach you, it is your job to seek out [...]
This is a great way to start the day … one of the reasons I love writing this blog. Joshua, [In American Households Continue to Deleverage But That Only Tells Part of the Story, you wrote] “The numbers are just figures on a sheet trying to explain human behavior. Study the behavior, what is driving [...]
We’ve been looking for a corn chowder recipe to add to the “permanent” on-demand recipe collection but most are geared toward summer when fresh corn on the cob is abundant in the Midwest. This allows you to use the rich pulp, corn juices, and kernels to create a delicious, thick chowder that can be eaten [...]
The best message I received all day in the usual flood of reader submissions … Hello Mr. Kennon, I am 24 yr old who has saved/invested incessantly since I was 18, and my portfolio just recently breached 6 digits! I have always had a similar mindset to you when it comes to the future value [...]
I'm a private investor, author, and business philosopher who started with nothing and was essentially retired by my early twenties thanks to my first Internet startup. I went to school on a music scholarship and spend my days doing what I want and growing Kennon Green Enterprises, LLC, the family holding company. Continue reading ...
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