I enjoyed getting all the emails from people claiming their assets back from the state governments this week.  One of my favorites was the fellow who found $200 from a college internship over a decade ago!

And as another emailer pointed out, the state of California owes money to Sergey Brin, John Doerr, Kobe Bryant, Paris Hilton, Chelsea Handler, Conan O’Brien, Mandy Moore, Lindsay Lohan, Elon Musk, David Geffen, Denise Richards and Charlie Sheen.  And there is one on there that is owed > $100k (not that it would matter to this list of course…)

Some other reads:

Booklending and Lendle (ie free lending of Kindle books to other users)

The 10 most tracked hedge funds, stocks, and groups on AlphaClone.

A few other cool new travel sites:

Airbnb

AutoSlash

My book is finally out in paperback, and less than $9!

Update: Largest single claim so far : $10,000, total claimed:  $~$15,000-$20,000

As tax season rolls around, most people are busy trying to figure out how much they owe the government.  Most people don’t know that their (state) goverments likely are holding on to some of their cash as well (running total around $30 billion).  Did you know there is a website where you can go to search for unclaimed assets?  It is usually something simple related to moving (utility company owes you money) or relatives passing away (and forgot about those 1,000 shares of GE ).  I had a friend claim $10k once, but most are smaller amounts.

Goto the NAUPA site here and start your search!

Report back if you find some lost assets and I’ll post the total found on the blog as well as the biggest.

Unfortunately for me I have three claims only worth a combined $2.

One of my favorite things to do all year.  In Los Angeles this weekend….Check out the homepage here for screenings in your city:

Another great chart from the GIRY doc below, would be nice to see this paired with momentum.  The dataset is available through Morningstar as the DMS module…:

Nice free download of the Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2011 (GIRY). (Automatically download PDF here.)

This is a MUST READ.  A few charts below:

I know this is a bit simple but I thought it was useful nonetheless.  From Gary Shilling’s very good book The Age of Deleveraging: Investment Strategies for a Decade of Slow Growth and Deflation.

Here are three charts that demonstrate asset classes and their performance over the past month. It is similar to our old posts we used to do on alternatives, and what “works” during a market sell off.  Let me know if there are any other good funds to include on the alt table.

My intern created this fantastic Excel sheet to automatically download returns for assets classes based on any date.  I considered making this Excel sheet available to people as a download or perhaps as a website, let me know if you are interested.

Click on any table to enlarge.

10 asset classes

Expanded list

Alternatives

I’m not sure why I never saw the book “A Practical Guide to ETF Trading Systems” but it is a fun short book that is well worth the read.  Uses Trading Blox for those that are fans of that software package.

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I didn’t see Mary Meeker’s USA Inc.: A Basic Summary of America’s Financial Statements book  until recently.  Free 400+ PowerPoint PDF here.

Looks awesome.

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Wonderful post by Barry Ritholz: “The time to do drills is before the blitz, not after.”

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A quant approach to Bracketology.

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Remind me again how to short Australian and Canadian housing (HT:Sea).

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When I did a mountain bike trip this summer from Telluride to Moab I crashed probably 100 times.  Watching this bike video makes my palms sweat (HT: CG).

VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.

I’m giving a talk (along with Axel Merk) this Saturday at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles.  It is early (9am) but come on out and ask come questions.

http://www.aaiilosangeles.org/calendar.htm

Coming out in two weeks – the paperback version of The Ivy Portfolio for just $9!