What is it worth? Money Update May 18, 2016 Please Read!

    

 

 

Jambo!

Last week we told you about our VIP dinner with a Congressmen and a Senator and the many other VIPS and dignitaries, an event I was invited to with my son Kyle.

It seemed like the only one that was not there was a Caesar of Rome and Obama himself! I kid you not, there were that many VIPS. (See last newsletter).

Well, little ole me, I aint no celebrity but a simple kid from San Francisco that people mistake as being from New York cuz’ I have this funny (so I am told but I don’t hear it) accent. I get that all the time; “What accent is that?” or “Are you from New York?”

I can amplify my San Francisco accent (there really is a San Francisco accent) but only those kids that grew up in my neighborhood of SF really know my version of it.

It’s sort of a slurred -together, fast-talking, accelerated, run-together of words where the cadence is fast and not too dynamic (does not have a lot of highs and lows). It’s definitely not good for radio but every so often somebody asked to hear it so here goes:

“YouseeIamfromSanFranciscoandwhenIspeakitsortofsoundssomethinglikethis”

Did you hear it? Well I guess not as this is text on paper but it was there trust me.

Anyway most of my relatives from my father’s side grew up in San Francisco. My grandfather owned a grocery store on Ellis and Divisadero where my dad was raised above the store. His brother and sister (my uncle and aunt) lived in the area called the “Avenues”. My dad’s sister, my Aunt Vera married Mario Brovelli and had two children, a boy and a girl.   The boy, Jim is my first cousin.

The Cuniberti family held Xmas and Thanksgiving get togethers where all us Italians would slurp up anchovies marinated in garlic, olive oil and parsley, eat Gnocchi and leg of lamb and need bigger and bigger tables every year as the families grew.

Jim was a basketball nut and practiced every day after school shooting hoops. At night he would lay in bed and flip the basketball. He tells me he did this every day, rain or shine, practice, practice, practice!

That sort of thing must be in Cuniberti DNA because if I start something I get obsessive about it and do the same thing. When I was 13 I set out to get better at guitar and made a pact with myself to get ahead of all the other guitar players my age and would practice 4 hours a day for one year.

I don’t think I missed more than one or two days in that year.

When I was 10 I found out I was gifted with the ability to throw a baseball faster than any kid I knew. Every day I would go to the schoolyard and hurl baseballs into a painted square on the side of what we called the multi-use room, a stucco building that showed signs of wear as the years of getting hit with baseballs wore down its exterior.

I must have thrown tens of thousands of baseballs into that little brown square and eventually pitched in a variety of leagues, including the PLA (Police Athletic All Star League) and was virtually unhittable. (The shoulder eventually needed cuff replacement because there was no such thing as pitch counts back then and they pitched me until my arm literally fell off).

Since my baseball ended early due to shoulder problems, I then switched to football. I was too small for a lineman so they put me at returning punts (a HORRIBLE painful job) and defensive back (you guard receivers for those who don’t know football). I worked diligently at the skill of guarding receivers and reading quarterbacks intentions and as a result held the high school record for the most interceptions in one game (3). Unfortunately the good comes with the bad. I also held the record for the most ejections in a season for unnecessary roughness. (6), a record I am not proud of but what can I say, I’m competitive.

I discovered martial arts at 13 and worked out a several hours a week until I got to college then increased that to 2 hours/5 days a week. After joining a karate school as an instructor in San Rafael, that increased to 4 hours a day every weekday. I literally practiced martial arts for decades and was moderately successful in hundreds of full contact matches, although one match led to a 7 second defeat by knockout giving me no memory of it and a broken jaw! 

Obsessive DNA I guess. My list of obsessive practice runs the gamut from golf to tennis to racquet ball to reading economic information to radio to writing to whatever else I find myself interested in.

So anyway Jim eventually played for Lick-Wilmerding High School then was picked up by the UCSF Dons and as a player Jim was a three-year letterman for USF, helping lead the Dons to the NCAA Western Regional in 1963 and 1964. He earned All-WCC honorable mention honors in 1964. Later, he was named the 1965 AAU Athlete of the Year.

From there his titles are too numerous to mention in both college and the NBA, but after several positions in the NBA for a handful of NBA teams, he landed assistance coach for the Denver Nuggets then head coach for the Washington Wizards. You can view his complete bio here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Brovelli

“What is it worth?”

How is something valued?

From stock price to investments, to career building to anything else, everything has a value. Value however is merely a perception. Your perception, mine, everyone else’s.

For instance, take a 20 carat diamond and put it in the hands of an aborigine child. He might find it beautiful but other than that, think of it as of little value.

If a threatening lizard approaches him the perceived value of the diamond might increase to our little native as he finds it very effective at bashing the head in of the threatening lizard creature. The lizard might also provide a meal for him solving two problems.

Take that same diamond to a gem dealer in Antwerp and his perception of the value would be vastly higher. His knowledge knows that this jewel will fetch millions. It will fetch millions from others just like him who perceive the value in money terms as he does, very high. Our aborigine on the other hand might not value the gem much and would likely not value the millions in cash much either as the only value he might see is to burn the paper money to cook his lizard.

Indeed perception is everything!

Now suppose our aborigine is adopted by a family in Connecticut (HOW that happens I have no idea) but suppose it happens. They raise him and he turns out to be very smart man and they send him to Harvard and he becomes an investment banker in New York (no accent though). He is rummaging thru his old boxes while moving in with his new girlfriend and she pulls out this gem and says  “Uh Bob (he changed his name from Ulliohgjsoogotso to Bob for ease of pronunciation) what is this huge clear rock you have here in your old deerskin bag from when you were a child?”

Well, he sees this 20 carat stone and now, with his newfound knowledge his perception of its value skyrockets as he realizes what it is and how much other people might perceive its value and says “Holy cow and Jambo! That is worth millions!”

In this whole story, the diamond has remained the same. Its “worth” has only changed because the PERCEPTION of its value has changed in the mind of the beholder.

What we learn from this is “value” or “worth” is entirely subjective, and is entirely up to the individual perceiving whatever it is we have in front of us.

There are low value things (cup of coffee or candy bar for example) higher value things like cars and boats, very high value things like careers and homes, and things we regard as priceless. Priceless examples would be things like health, your kids, your spouse or something or someone you would not trade for any amount of money. This is a no brainer of course. Who would dare put a price on his or her life, or their kids?

They are essentially “priceless” or without a measurable value.

There is one step above priceless but it not actually a perceived value but an obsession type of value placed on a person by another. Limerance is the total absolution of involvement with a person. A person cannot be limerant with an object, only a person. An example of limerance is the Hobbit’s creature Gollum. Although his object of value was a ring (not a person) he viewed the ring as more than an inanimate object. He assigned the ring the name “my precious.”  This elevated the object to an entity, thereby fitting the description of limerence in its purest definition. The value of the “precious” had no bounds, it was his everything.

The main point is the value or worth of something is ONLY in the eyes of the person perceiving whatever it is they are valuing. What is valuable to one might be valueless to another. The truth we garner from this is value is only a perception, not a consistent absolute value.

````````````````````````````````````````

"The most important value to possess in an individual is not centered on an object or even another person but is the perception of self-worth."

 

``````````````````````````

The most important value to possess in an individual is not centered on an object or even another person but is the perception of self-worth. Because people are the basis of all life and interaction as we know it, how one values him or herself is first and foremost the building block of the rest of human interaction. Outside of our value for God and the value we assign to our relationship with Him, our inherent view of our self-worth is the most important perception of value in order to fully live the life we were given and to fully experience and give back our entire person to whatever and whoever we interact with.

Over my many years of having the honor to teach both economics, salesmanship and sports, I have found people run the gamut from having a high self-worth, also known as self-esteem, to having little or none. The common thread among all of them was the higher the view of a person’s self-worth, the higher they performed in whatever they were doing and the more they were able to give back of themselves to the world around them.

Many a martial art student with low self-esteem may have performed well in class but in actual matched combat, failed miserably.

Baseball pitchers have to have very high self-esteem and very high confidence because of the nature of the position and its high stress level. Those I instructed with low self-esteem usually didn’t get very far and that could be said for any sports. I have coached many sports and the thread is a common one. A low self-esteem translated to subpar performance in whatever sport was undertaken.

The same held true with successful sales people. The one with the highest self-esteem made the best sales people. The ones with a lower view of themselves eventually projected their lack of confidence in themselves with the consequential perception by the customer of a lack of confidence in whatever the product or service they were selling.

Low self-esteem is not only damaging to an individual’s mindset, it can be extremely debilitating. It also robs the world around us of ones highest potential.

------------------------------

"Low self-esteem also flies in the face of God’s ultimate wisdom."

--------------------------------

Low self-esteem also flies in the face of God’s wisdom. Step back a moment and ponder this; what parent would sacrifice his own child for another?

None that I know of, yet God not only allowed his Son to die, he allowed Him to die in the most painful and brutal of methods. Crucifixion is one of the most heinous methods of execution conceived by man. It can take days of torment and indescribable anguish to die.

Making matters worse, Gods Son was beaten and tortured PRIOR to the crucifixion. Not only did God allow this, He witnessed it all, and being God, FELT every second of it Himself.

What parent would value something more than his own child, then subject them to such a painful death?

None, yet God did, and He did it because there was one thing even more valuable than his own child, and that thing is YOU.

God has valued YOU more than his own, and that alone should eliminate all doubt one may have as to his or her self-worth.

After all, who knows better than God?

And here is the real caveat about viewing oneself as less than valuable:

Remember, value is a PERCEPTION. This whole article has been about that one truth, and since value is a perception and ONLY a perception, and the perception is solely by the eye of the beholder, YOUR sense of value is arrived at not by truth, nor trial nor comparison with others, but by you alone. If one believes he has a low self-worth, it can be said it is easily changed by changing that perception. This can be helped by knowing:

1-The value that God has already placed on you was confirmed by his sacrifice of His only child.

2- The value you currently place on yourself, whether low or high, is solely developed by you and you alone.

3- Since we all agree that high self-esteem is conducive to living your life to the fullest and also giving the world around you the best of yourself, high self-worth is desired by everyone.

4- Since the value of something is only the perception by the one perceiving it, if you decide to place a higher value on yourself, you only have to change your perception OF yourself.

How is this done?

The methods are by evaluating the causes that gave you the lie “I am not worth it”.

----------------------------------------------

"Low self-worth is an illusion only, a falsehood created by your mind in response to something that happened, or many things that happened to you, likely a long time ago that you now don’t recall."

--------------------------------------------------

Low self-worth is an illusion only, a falsehood created by your mind in response to something that happened, or many things that happened to you, likely a long time ago that you now don’t recall.

The causes are usually rooted in childhood and likely seeded by a form of neglect or abuse while you were a child. These events may be something you recall like major abuse, or simply a lack of complete parenting skills by one or both parents that were so subliminal and slight that you (or they) may not even be aware of them. There are too many causes and semi-causes to cover here but low self-esteem can be helped by:

1-Correcting the bad habits your mind has wired into you by mechanical and cognitive behaviors and thoughts that will essentially “rewire” your brain. An example of one widely used technique is placing a rubber band around ones wrist and every time a targeted (negative thought) comes to mind, the rubber band is snapped to produce pain. This Pavlovian type of negative reinforcement works on the entire animal species from insects to the most evolved mammals. (Think backing away from a hot fire, all species do this). There is information on many simple behavioral tricks available to you on the web.

 

2-Finding the root cause of the influences that made your view of yourself to start to spiral downward. (This is a more involved task and usually involves retro- exploration into ones past).

 

In conclusion, the value of anything is perception only, and since it is perception in the eye of the beholder in every case, and since YOU are the beholder, your perception of your own self-worth can be altered, and altered to the positive, to truly reflect the proper reality, which is you are of the utmost value because God believes this and because it is the truth.

Do the work, make the change and fix your perception of yourself to that truth, which is you have the highest of self-worth and value, because THAT is the truth.

Low self-esteem is an illusion, a lie of circumstances, your circumstances, and once you realize it is nothing BUT an illusion, you can start to change yourself back to realizing Gods vision of who you are AND your vision of who you want to be.

By doing this, you can realize your full potential and be the person you want to be and the person you actually ARE and give that person to your loved ones, the world around you, to God and above all, to yourself.

(And if you do run across a threatening lizard creature, feel free to use the 20 carat stone to bash its head in)

 

Jambo!

:)

                                                                                                                                         

------------------------------------------

 

 

The value of stocks and investments

Because the previous discussion illuminated the fact all value is perception based, stock prices are the antithesis of perceptive reality. Since all public stocks trade in milliseconds, how can the stock of ABC Company have buyers at the same time there are sellers?

Its because each investor perceives the stock differently. Add up the millions and millions of people whose percpetion about what a stock is worth at any particular moment in time and you get a publically traded moving stock market, which is what we have in the markets of the world. Different and changing perceptions are transpiring at once. Somebody thinking a stock is a sell while some perceiving the stock is a buy while others choose to do nothing.

How do we then successfully select (successfully perceive) when a stock is a good buy and when it is a time to sell or not buy at all?

That is the million dollar question!

Every investor in the world asks that question yet few understand truly that perception is just that, YOUR perception of what a stock is worth and will it go UP after you buy it. Most investors think information available to everyone is enough to make up their mind to buy a stock. An example would be to buy a cell phone company stock because they will sell a lot of cell phones. Since that information is a no brainer and everyone knows this, the stock price likely ALREADY reflects that fact. Keep in mind everybody has the same information you do.

To pick a stock that has the potential to go up is difficult to say the least. Most stocks will go UP if the market goes UP but that’s never a given. Bad news or poor sales could make a stock go DOWN even if the market goes UP!  

An investor should accept the best he can do is increase his ODDS of picking a winning stock and that starts with asking for help. 

Would I go into an antique store or yard sale looking for value in an antique if I knew little about antiques? I could but finding a value on one (worth more than I pay) is relying on luck. In fact the odds are against me finding a good value and more likely favor me paying market price or even higher. The same exists with finding good value in stocks which is buying a stock that goes UP after you buy it.

Since most investors “don’t do stocks” as a profession, you likely have to ask for help to assist your selection much like I would ask for help if looking for a good value in an antique. That bad news is you have to pay for that help but the cost does not have to be exorbitant.

I myself pay for help in woodworking, health care, interior design (if I add on to my house) and in many more areas I might find myself lacking in knowledge. What I don’t pay for is someone to select my stocks. That is the area I studied all my life and still study on a daily if not hourly basis.

As Clint Eastwood famously quipped: “A man has got to know his limitations”

Know your limitations.

Stock price is, much like self-worth perception. It is perception only and not a measurable value. It’s a belief, by you, that will always be in contradiction with someone else at some point in time. There will always be an investor willing to take the other side of your bet because he perceives something differently than you do.

Realizing that stock price is only a PERCEPTION is half the battle.

Stocks don’t HAVE to go up, nor do they HAVE to go down. What they do is in fact move when the perception of a majority of investors believe the same thing. The perception may not be in keeping with yours, the company’s fundamentals or anything at all. It’s just what is driving the stock.

Your desire therefore is to pick a stock where investors perceive there will be more value later in the FUTURE after you buy it, which means you pick it BEFORE more investors start to agree with your perception. Then when more investors start to percieve as you do,  they become the buyers of a stock your already own.

If you would like to discuss this idea in more detail or need professional assistance in improving your perception when it comes to investing, feel free to contact me.

Email me at       mcuniberti@cambridgesecure.com

All the best,

Marc

 

 

“Watching the markets so you don’t have to”

 

Money Matters airs again in June, first Thursday of the month! (No show May 19th)