Hard About! Hoist the main sail!

Every once in a while I get a tingly feeling when I read about a company. The tingly feeling is usually accompanied by a desire to purchase stock in said company because some type of change of monumental scale is afoot. I'm getting that feeling about Yahoo. I feel that they finally have someone in charge after nearly a DECADE of foundering and flailing about in vain. It seems that they have a direction. Their horrible management of the last 10 years has left them no choice in their direction. They could have been a force to be reckoned with, but they were like a sledge hammer with a finite number of swings available to them. The swings were all spent in fear and desperation instead of focused on a single goal. They gave away much of their talent when they let Microsoft take over their search operations. I've said it before and I'll say it again. "Agreeing to work with Microsoft is like agreeing to a dinner date with Hanibal Lechter. You might as well role in spices and jump in the oven." Yahoo isn't dead yet though. They have extensive global operations...operations where they're actually doing their own search. It will take them a while and it will involve re-inventing the company yet again, but they might pull out of nosedive and become a respectable company yet again.

A 'HelpDesk' is a resource to turn to for help. It is not a 'Do-It-For-Me' resource. I think that if I could get that point across to more people my desire to kill myself daily would diminish dramatically.

I was discussing finances with some people last night and we talked about how different people reacted to the recession. Some people sold everything and hoarded their cash in low-interest investments. My personal feeling was that the stock market was on sale. All of it. I increased my retirement savings by about 50% in 2008. I figured so long as I have a job and I don't have an immediate need for this money I'd better make use of this once in a lifetime opportunity. I looked at my standard IRA returns a few days ago and I saw just how dramatic the swings in the market were in 2008:

Personal rate of return 01/31/2012
1 year : 3.3%
3 years : 19.8%
5 years : 2.5%

That doesn't mean that I made a fortune in 2009, but rather that I lost a fortune in 2008 and things recovered in 2009-2011...and then some. But in addition to that, I maxed out my IRA contributions, started a ROTH IRA, and made some large (for me) investments in individual stocks while things were down. I bought GE, C, BAC, USB, and F all at incredible discounts. GE is now almost 100% above where I bought it at. C continued to tank and is still in negative territory, but I'm confident that it will recover eventually and earn a profit for me. F is doing well. BAC was doing well, then tanked. I don't know when or if that will recover, but if it does I should do pretty well there too.