Starbox!

Members present: Brian, Yousef

We talked a little about diversifying out of the US a bit. Our last two buys were done to diversify internationally. But where to from there? Europe doesn't seem stable, South America screwed us already, Africa is super-scary, and China isn't going to grow like it has. That doesn't leave a whole lot of places left. Penguin ETF?

Brian had a interesting conversation with a friend of his who dabbles in the markets. His friend posed the question: "Why invest in something stable?" His point is that if an investment doesn't really gain in value, we are paying trading costs just to have something that is the equivalent of cash. If it doesn't have any yield or any increase in value, the investor isn't getting anything out of it, except perhaps the goodwill of the people collecting his trading and management fees.

They also talked about how good dividends are. So we have some ATT, which is stable but we are getting something out of it with the dividend.

We were also looking looking at Coinstar (CSTNR), which includes Red Box. Apparently there were talks to work with Starbucks on a sort of StarBox coffee vending machine. That might work, but there are also talks of CSTNR going private as well. We'll look at it, but we definitely need something a little more tempting.

It might be a good exercise to make our next buy something that we purchase for a short-term investment. Perhaps we could set a threshold and maybe an automatic buy and sell point. This would work to our advantage because the three of us don't really move fast as a group.

Profit!