Front-row seats for $35

It amazed me the casino charged so little. I guess it's desperate to get bodies in the building. I made a mental note to check other out-of-the-way casino venues for cheap concerts.

Take the board of Horace Mann Educators, the company that sells insurance to teachers. The board found out recently that Horace Mann CEO Louis Lower had been in jail for three days. Lower was charged with a DUI over the Memorial Day weekend back in May. He told fellow executives about the charges in July. But the board didn't find out until September 9, after he'd been in jail for three days.

Can you imagine being on that board and finding out the CEO had kept this kind of information from you for more than three months? And that other members of the corporate suite kept it a secret for almost two months?

My wife should become a public company director. She asks me where I was and what took me so long every time I come home. She'd have sniffed out Lower's Memorial Day DUI charge by June 1.

Is it possible for the stock market to twitch? No, of course not. But it is possible for the line on a real-time price graph of, say, the S&P 500 or maybe your favorite bellwether stock to deliver a twitchy-looking performance on any given day.

That's what most people call investing. Most people think they're going to get rich watching price charts twitch. When they see a twitch they like, they buy it. They spend hours examining twitchy lines and labeling them with names like support, resistance, accumulation, and capitulation.

For the average herd member, the stock market is a giant Rorschach test. The market shows them pictures, and they vomit up a quick response with as little thought as possible. Unfortunately for most herd members, they vomit money... and the market comes along and mops it up.

Big companies like Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco... can borrow as much as they want at the lowest rates available. They don't need to hoard cash. They hold cash because they generate so much of it. They literally can't deploy it fast enough. They should all acknowledge their shortcomings at cash deployment and either pay regular dividends or make a habit of repurchasing shares any time they're cheap enough.

Aside from share repurchases and regular dividends, companies can also deploy cash by paying out large one-time, "special" dividends. That's an option you can probably bet on between now and December 31. Komrade Obama's regime plans to increase the top federal income-tax rate on dividends from 15% to 39.6% by next year...

Reasons to expect special dividends are everywhere (not including the proposed dividend-tax hike). Corporations are bloated with cash they can't or won't deploy. They're either too scared to spend it or can't think of anything to do with it. Also, takeover activity is on the rise.

Keep an eye on World Dominators like Microsoft. It's way too big to be a takeover target, but it could pay out $3 a share in cash (about 12% of the current share price) and still have more than $10 billion left over. – Sean Goldsmith and Dan Ferris, September 9, 2010 Digest

Yesterday, Microsoft said it'll sell debt this year to finance dividends and share repurchases. It will raise as much as it can without risking its triple-A rating – likely around $6 billion. In fact, ratings agency Egan-Jones affirmed Microsoft's triple-A rating this morning.

Microsoft already has nearly $37 billion of cash on its balance sheet. And it generated $22 billion in free cash flow last year. Microsoft has been under pressure to return some of that cash to shareholders. It's issuing debt to repurchase shares instead of paying out cash because debt is super cheap today. Also, much of Microsoft's cash is held overseas. It wants to avoid paying heavy taxes to transfer the money.

With an extra $6 billion, Microsoft could more than double its dividend from last year. Or it could repurchase nearly 3% of the shares outstanding. Shares jumped over 5% on the news.

If Best Buy keeps buying back stock during slow times and times of negative investor sentiment, its stock will take off like a rocket when good times and positive investor sentiment return. Shares were up 6% today.

Best Buy's same-store sales for the quarter were down 0.1%. That's not good, but everyone is looking in the rearview mirror. Last year, second-quarter same-store sales were down 3.9%. Things are bad, but they're a lot less bad than last year.

Berkshire Hathaway bought railroad Burlington Northern Santa Fe for $27 billion in February. Buffett called the deal a bet on the U.S. economy.

Also on that topic, in the week ended September 4, U.S. railroads loaded more cars than in any week this year. And there were more carloads in August than in any month since November 2008. High commodity demand (both agricultural and energy-related) is driving the numbers.

First, we get bullish comments from people like Buffett and Simons. Then, maybe, if this keeps up and stocks sell for 25 times earnings and the headlines scream growth, growth, growth, and declare the death of bad times... that's when things start getting out of hand.

One day, you realize it costs $100 to fill up your gas tank, when it used to cost $50. And you're spending more at the grocery store than the year before. And your utility bills just went up – again. And it's getting harder for the working man to make it to his next paycheck.

Before you know it, gold is $3,000 an ounce and the Fed is raising interest rates to try to cool it down. But by then, it's too late.

What are people buying so much of? Food, gasoline, and groceries... stuff they buy every day, anyway. They're buying less furniture, electronics, and appliances, though.

Apple is giving away iPods to teachers and students who buy computers. Staples is discounting memory sticks and laptop computers. And teen-clothing retailer Charlotte Russe is selling T-shirts for $1.99 and taking 50% off your second pair of jeans. Heck, for $1.99, I might buy a T-shirt from Charlotte Russe. I could probably sell them on eBay for $5 each.

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