The Russkies are coming! For Seek Fact readers in the Northeast US, you will soon be able to buy over-priced gasoline from Vladimir Putin and his KGB buddies. The previously named Getty and ConocoPhillips stations are to be re-branded as "Lukoil". The Russian oil giant of the same name now owns these outlets. There is an article about it behind the subscriber wall at fortune.com (page 194, dead-tree offline, 25 July). It is only 500 words long, so I will summarize. Lukoil has the second largest reserves of $60 oil on the planet, after that other super-sized capitalist entity known as Exxon. Experts say that Lukoil, which trades in London, is the safest bet in the Russian oil patch. The same experts feel the company is immune to a Yukos style pogrom, because it actually pays taxes to Putin and company, and covers its political back. Yukos, another oil giant, somehow messed with Putin, and was run by so-called "Mafia capitalists". For those of you who think all capitalists are Mafia, please book your one-way visa for North Korea or Cuba now. The price earnings ratio of Lukoil is only seven (half that of Exxon), since the Russian market is politically risky. If you can stand this risk, you will still be rewarded with a tiny one percent dividend. Imagine what you could do with all those rubles. Lukoil can be bought over the counter, with ticker symbol LUKOY.PK. The current price is about $43, and the daily average volume is 500,000 shares. As always, consult your financial adviser. For you young whippersnappers out there, let me explain the "PK" on the Lukoil ticker. Years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there were basically three types of securities. First were the exalted NYSE issues. Next came the OTC, or over the counter market, and lastly were the pink sheets. The OTC securities didn't quite qualify for the NYSE higher standards. The pink sheets were even worse, they couldn't even be handed over the counter. Like some back alley pharmacist, they had to be pushed under the counter. Brokers passed around the bid-ask prices for these stocks on mimeographed sheets of pink paper. You can google "mimeograph", to see what the hell that means. Fast forward to the present, where the NYSE is still the premier market. The OTC market matured into NASDAQ with some respectable names like Dell and Microsoft. Even the pink sheets have evolved. Now with the ticker suffix PK for "pink", they are still mostly the dogs (pink poodles?) of the stock business. But there are indeed some potential decent companies there, and Lukoil may be one of them. Check out www.pinksheets.com for more information, especially this page for the leading volume and value foreign stocks.

Read the New York Times? Like many of you, I read the Times online every day. Recently, I found a very efficient way to access its articles, namely at nytimes.blogspace.com. This service has two compelling attributes. First, it acts much like a news reader, with no ads and with short useful descriptions of each article. Also, it is much more efficient to peruse articles because every article is now on the "front page", so to speak. Secondly, the actual Times front page has the annoying habit of refreshing every 15 seconds, and the link above doesn't. No one has ever explained why this quick re-fresh is necessary. The Times content is ever changing, but 15 seconds? Fifteen minutes would make more sense.

Wanna buy or sell your home? The housing market is not the same as the stock market. The signs to gauge market tops and bottoms are different. This New York Times article has important tips for todays hot markets, such as San Diego for one example. One important question -- is the present market near a turning point?

Though it appears the shift is now at hand, the end of the bubble will not look anything like the crash in the stock market after the technology bubble. The stock market turns frenetic when investors scramble to get out and prices fall sharply. In housing, however, a collapse is signaled by a sharp drop in activity as people hold off buying. Houses stay on the market longer. Inventories grow. Only then will prices fall, slowly. Economists say prices will lag a slowdown in the market by four to six months. Prices in overheated markets must, by definition, come back down to the mean. Knowing which way the market is headed before buying or selling is extremely important to anyone who wants to protect the wealth tied up in a house. And it certainly matters to anyone who is thinking of buying because it never makes much sense to buy at the top of the market. "The turning point is pretty important," Mr. Brown said, "because the trend will play out for years."

This article is full of tips for the real estate investor. It can be read in five minutes, and is so good, IMHO, that it substitutes for an entire book.

Investing is hard work. This is rather depressing. David F. Swensen has written a book called "Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment ". Don't be fooled by the title, his thesis is that ordinary people cannot compete with professionals like him. He runs the endowment fund at Yale University, the most successful fund of its type in America. In an article in the New York Times, Mr Swenson is described as first thinking that his ideas would be useful for the small investor. However he soon realized that what he did as an investor was biased to big institutions only. His biggest advantage is the ability to be diversified beyond the means of the average person.

...the Yale portfolio is extraordinarily diversified, which both lifts returns and protects against disaster. At the end of the 2004 fiscal year, Yale had a mere 15 percent of its assets in domestic equities, and another 15 percent in foreign stocks. It had 15 percent in private equity, and 18 percent in "real assets," which includes investments in timber and energy. But its biggest percentage, 26 percent, was in something called "absolute return." That is a category invented by Mr. Swensen in 1990. It means hedge funds. Before Mr. Swensen arrived on the scene, hedge fund investors were almost exclusively rich people. But he quickly realized that the best hedge fund managers were extremely skilled, and he began putting Yale's money in a variety of hedge funds. Eventually, other institutions realized that Yale was making money in good markets and bad ones, and they raced to copy Mr. Swensen's model. If you want to understand why hedge funds are exploding these days, a big reason is that every big institutional investor in the country is trying to do what Yale does. His new book has given Mr. Swensen a greater appreciation of the enormous advantages he has as an institutional money manager, starting with the obvious fact that he has a staff that spends full-time researching investment possibilities. Thus, he takes it as a given that individuals shouldn't pick stocks themselves. "I see every day how competitive the markets are, and how tough. So the idea that you can do this yourself, that's out the window."

However, readers of Seek Facts should keep the faith. Maybe this guy is one of those Swiss gnomes, and his book is just a way to keep all the loot for him and his buddies. Stay tuned for more investment postings.

Left vs Right. Do I just believe the last thing I read? Both of these articles made sense at the time, but I am swayed by the second linked article. Comments by a Washington state Judge concerning the trial of the Millenium Bomber were hailed by civil libertarians. The riposte to those remarks appeared in the Washington Post today. Read them and make up your own mind. Money quote from the Judge:

I would like to convey the message that our system works. We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, or detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant, or deny him the right to counsel, or invoke any proceedings beyond those guaranteed by or contrary to the United States Constitution.

Here is the first link. Next is the money quote from the Washington Post, and its link.

In fact, the balance between security and liberty is constantly readjusted as circumstances change. A well-functioning government will contract civil liberties as threats increase. A government that refuses to adjust its policies has simply frozen in the face of the threat. It is pathologically rigid, not enlightened.

Culture Watch. I just read an interesting article about a new cultural phenomenon. The name given to it is Machinima, pronounced mah-sheen-ima, to rhyme with cinema. The combination of machine and cinema gives a clue as to its intent. The machine is whatever plays a video game, such as a PC or a game console like a Playstation or Xbox. The cinema is the creation built upon an existing video game that is altered or mixed with the artist’s own words, sounds and music. I predict that this will be a very large cultural movement if copyright holders of the original works are willing to cooperate. The amazing thing is that Microsoft is being very receptive with the use of its game Halo by these artists. The only spanner in the works is if pornography rears its ugly head. Read the article here.