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With so much going on this week for me, I'm not posting my usual Five for the Weekend this time around. Not that there's not a lot happening -- we're in earnings season, after all. This week saw my holdings Newmont Mining (NEM) and EGI Financial (EFH in Toronto) report fine results, with King Pharmaceuticals (KG) slightly missing analyst expectations.

I was able to catch the EGI analyst call, and need to catch replays of the others this weekend, and read the reports. Plus catch one or two call replays of companies on my watch list. So I've got plenty on my dance card the next couple of days.

What about you? If you've got some time be sure to check out Geoff Gannon's new podcast site for investors.

Geoff, as many of you know, used to be blogging (he hosted Gannon on Investing, one of the best value blogs around) and now writes some for GuruFocus. He's one of the really nice folks I've come into contact with since starting Controlled Greed in 2005. And investors everywhere -- those in and out of the value school -- can benefit from his podcasts. In fact, my impression was that his podcasts were perhaps THE most popular aspect of his old blog.

Geoff is an analyst's analyst. A number-cruncher par excellence. (Whereas I try to win by not being dumber than I really am!) Visit his podcast as soon as possible.

Five for the Weekend #80

With the weeks already flying by in 2010, here we go with yet another five items you might check out over the next couple of days.

• Fortune has a good interview with David Rosenberg (HT: RealClearMarkets.com). If you're familiar with him, you'll see the same themes discussed in previous reports and interviews with him. Rosenberg is bullish long term on commodities (including gold), thinks bonds will do better than stocks as a group, and worries about what happens when government stimulus ends (as it must eventually).

• Speaking of gold, gold miner Agnico-Eagle Mines (AEM) reported excellent results this week. I'm hopeful this may be the first in a long line of events in which we see gold mining stocks eventually catch up to bullion. As you know, the miners have lagged badly. AEM in particular had hiccups in bringing several new mines online last year, and it looks like things have smoothed out considerably.

• DirecTV Group (DTV) also reported excellent results this week, including an announcement the company will buy back $3.5 billion worth of stock. I recently sold the DTV shares I inherited from Liberty Media. And before that I sold half of my original stake when the stock price doubled. So DTV is a free ride, and I'm watching to see what John Malone has in store for my remaining shares.

• Last week portfolio holding Geeknet (LNUX) reported better-than-expected results. This is a small outfit, with some nice assets, and has seen heavy insider buying. The company's e-commerce business is probably worth more than the entire market cap, so good things could be in store. But there are no guarantees.

• I've often said that the people of this country would be a heck of a lot better off if new presidents would focus on emulating Grover Cleveland or Calvin Coolidge, instead of trying to be the next FDR. I was watching C-SPAN the other night and delighted to see that Amity Shlaes is working on a biography of Coolidge and has a site called Silent Cal. Sometime back I recommended her book on the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. If you've read it, you far ahead of anyone in the White House, most of Congress, and -- of course -- most of the nation's press corps in understanding the current financial mess.

Have a great weekend.

Former Templeton Manager Jeff Everett Interviewed

The Nightly Business Report PBS program interviewed former Templeton fund manager Jeff Everett. He left a couple of years ago, give or take, to start his own firm, EverKey Global Partners.

Everett thinks the Greece problem will be contained, and he also likes the US dollar (though he says he's not a currency expert).

He names three stocks he likes and has in his fund: China Mobile, Canon and Rayonier. About that last one:

EVERETT: They have a division called performance fibers. It's a real estate and paper, timber company. It has a division called Performance Fibers that has had record earnings. It's a wonderful business which makes the fluff pulp product that goes into cigarette filters and the like and some hygiene products, a wonderful story. It's sort of a growth option on a really good paper company.

HUDSON: So you're getting the whole thing there, the hard assets as well.

EVERETT: You're getting the whole thing with a 5 percent dividend yield and I would argue in our work the stock is as much as 50 percent undervalued if you were to take it out and look at it on a private market value base.

Read the linked transcript for Everett's reasoning on his two other picks.

Beware Speculating on the Euro's Future

John Dizard's new Financial Times column warns us about taking advantage of the Greek crisis to speculate on the Euro:

I believe that sooner rather than later, European officialdom will impose higher taxes, credit restrictions and transaction barriers aimed at global macro traders. There could be shock measures that force the unwinding of politically undesirable trades. Right at the spec’s moment of triumph, his opposition would take back the profits from euro spread widening, or trap the money behind regulatory barriers. After that, there are likely to be increasing levels of “monitoring” of international capital flows, leading to exchange controls in everything but name.

More:

At this point some earnest young person with a dog-eared copy of Ayn Rand’s dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged, will say that such controls would only injure the country, or currency area, that imposes them. Oh, and free capital movements are required under the Maastricht Treaty amendments to the Treaty of Rome. The response of the officials administering these controls would be, so what? And by the way, we have exemptions to the free-capital-movement requirement; just look at Articles 73 (d) and 73(f) of the Maastricht Treaty. We’ll call you when you can have your money back.

And finally:

The “Washington consensus” on free international capital flows as the path to world prosperity is now so . . . Nineties. If European authorities move on “speculators”, they will not get much of an argument from the current US administration. So your euro convergence/divergence trade could turn bad fast.

Doesn't sound like anything I want to be involved in.

Fred Hickey on the Financial Sense Newshour

Very rare treat. Fred Hickey, editor of The High Tech Strategist newsletter, is interviewed by Jim Puplava on the Financial Sense Newshour. Go here and scroll down to Hour 4 of the 2/13/10 broadcast.

I say rare treat because Hickey doesn't do interviews often at all. In fact, he doesn't even promote his newsletter (doesn't even have a website) -- which is truly rare in a field where over-the-top hype and endless promotion are all too common. Most newsletters are mediocre and many are garbage. But some are excellent, and The High Tech Strategist is certainly one of them.

About the only publicity Hickey engages in, if I may use the term "publicity," is his participation in the Barron's Roundtables.

If you share my enthusiasm for Microsoft (MSFT) in particular and gold and gold mining stocks generally, you'll want to listen to this interview. I recently added back shares in MSFT. Its product upgrades -- notably Windows 7 though there are others -- are coming out at the right time in the cycle.

And Hickey's sentiments on gold are worth listening to as well. I'm not too much of a big picture guy. Yet the massive, and misguided (in my view), money printing by the US Fed means bad things for the US dollar at some point. How bad? I don't know. But I believe bad nonetheless. And I can't sit things out in US Treasuries since they earn nothing.

That's what lead me -- and Hickey before me, because let's face it, he's way smarter than me -- to gold and gold mining stocks. The mining stocks could be big winners in the months to come. That assumes the price of gold stays at current levels, and I expect it to move higher still in the not-to-distant future.

The only place where I'm not onboard with Hickey is this: he's moved into the junior mining stocks via an ETF, while keeping his bullion and major gold miners. I'm sticking with my SPDR Gold ETF (GLD), which Hickey owns as well, plus the major producers I've mentioned in the past.

Great interview. Check it out if the spirit moves you.

Five for the Weekend #79

Let's get right to it -- five suggestions for your weekend reading.

• Southeastern Asset Management has just released the 2009 annual report for their three mutual funds: Longleaf Partners, Longleaf Small-Cap and Longleaf International. Go here to access and download in PDF format. I've just had time to glance at it, but Mason Hawkins, Staley Cates and the Longleaf folks had an outstanding 2009, after a brutal 2008. And, as you doubtless have seen me post before, I believe investors can learn more these days from the likes of Hawkins and Cates than Warren Buffett (because of the sheer size of assets Buffett must deploy).

• Speaking of Buffett, this Bloomberg story about him having dinner with  a 29-year-old hedge fund manager and her business partner (after she sent him a note) makes a good read. It also has some good stuff about Walter and Edwin Schloss.

• When it comes to my gold mining stock plays -- Newmont Mining (NEM), Goldcorp (GG), Agnico-Eagle Mines (AEM) and the Market Vectors Gold Mining ETF (GDX) -- I'm either early or wrong. That's because this group is down since I established these positions in January. Gold mining stocks typically outperform gold bullion by 2-to-1 in gold bull markets, and the miners have lagged the metal badly. So I'm staying patient and holding as well as maintaining my SPDR Gold ETF (GLD) (which is in the black, thankfully). GLD is my single largest portfolio position. For more on gold, Peter Brimelow penned a MarketWatch column on the gold bugs this week.

• Niall Ferguson's piece in the Financial Times claiming that "a Greek crisis is coming to America" has been getting wide play. Ferguson also appeared on Glenn Beck's Fox News program this week, and Larry Kudlow's CNBC show last week, making many of the same points. A bit from the linked column: What we in the western world are about to learn is that there is no such thing as a Keynesian free lunch. Deficits did not “save” us half so much as monetary policy – zero interest rates plus quantitative easing – did. First, the impact of government spending (the hallowed “multiplier”) has been much less than the proponents of stimulus hoped. Second, there is a good deal of “leakage” from open economies in a globalised world. Last, crucially, explosions of public debt incur bills that fall due much sooner than we expect.

• Africa-Asia Confidential runs a feature story on staggering corruption in Congo concerning Chinese investment. Corruption is nothing new in Africa, and the same goes for China. Aside from the linked story, Africa could once again find itself home to proxy wars if relations between the US and China deteriorate (sort of like it was during the Cold War). Let's hope not. Like Dambisa Moyo says, Africa needs development not aid. And I'll add not proxy wars.

Have a great weekend.

Selling Some DirecTV Group

I sold some more of my DirecTV Group shares (DTV) today, at $31 and change. These were the DTV shares I received when the company merged with one of the Liberty Media tracking stocks I held.

I still hold enough DTV to make it a normal full-sized position in the portfolio, but not the over-sized holding it had been. And, not to be too confusing, my original DTV stake had doubled in price and I sold half of it fairly recently.

My view is that DTV remains a potential takeover candidate, and that's entirely apart from the fact I like John Malone being in control of the company. Yet I think it's prudent to take some chips off the table, book some gains, and have enough cash to establish a new position, if the opportunity pops up.

John Dizard on the Greek Problem

I never thought the Euro made sense over the very long term, though surely people have made money trading it over the recent years. I have no idea if the Greece debt crisis, or the problems in Portugal, Italy and Spain, spell the absolute end or not. Probably not. As Niall Ferguson said on Kudlow's CNBC show Friday night, I wouldn't want to be a German taxpayer right now.

John Dizard's weekly Financial Times column is about Greece. A couple of good parts:

The history of foreigners providing advice and supervision to the Greeks, or even appearing to do so, is not a happy one. The German military government of Greece during the war repeatedly attempted to stabilise the Greek drachma, in large part because its soldiers were paid in the local currency. Even though large amounts of criminally obtained gold were used for the purpose, by the end of the occupation hyperinflation had destroyed the drachma. Five years of civil war followed.

On the current mess:

I had a word with a friend who led IMF missions to Argentina in the 1980s, and then did sovereign debt analysis on Wall Street. He says: “If I were at the European Commission or the IMF I wouldn’t want to touch the Greek problem. You will be associated with deflation and depression.”

There is no good solution here. The best Brussels can do is limit the economic and political damage by adopting the lowest possible profile.

Read it in its entirety if you can.

Five for the Weekend #78

Snowy times here in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US. But as long as the power stays on I'm content to bunker down and wait for the white stuff to melt. Eventually. Anyway, it has been a wild couple of days in the markets. Now let's see what your humble editor is dishing up for weekend reading.

• The First Eagle funds have made available their semi-annual market update and commentary. Go here and scroll down to the January 19 item. You can choose to listen to it or download a PDF transcript to read. Jean-Marie Eveillard is among the participants and, as you might expect, there are questions on gold and gold mining stocks.

• Portfolio holding BCE Inc. (BCE) has announced a profit forecast beating analyst estimates. BCE has top-notch management, has been trimming fat, and pays a nice fat dividend in Canadian dollars. Not a bad thing in the current environment.

• I've noticed that people who deeply admire George W. Bush tend to deeply dislike Barack Obama. And folks who admire Obama deeply dislike Bush. But when it comes to fiscal irresponsibility, Obama is simply Dubya on steroids. A fact that must leave admirers of both men deeply unhappy (if they can bring themselves to acknowledge the truth). Jonathan Weil of Bloomberg has a nice column on the budget fiasco (and dishonesty) in Washington.

• Today's editorial in The Wall Street Journal on the US debt and the chance, remote or not, of the US losing its Aaa credit rating is worth reading. Not a fun read, but an important one.

• Africa Confidential has a feature on the African Union summit held in Addis Ababa on February 1. Excellent recap on something receiving almost zero coverage in America, and an example why AC is a great publication. That they continue making their feature stories available free online is a treat for those of us enjoying hard news.

Have a great weekend.

Adding More Microsoft

You'll recall last month I trimmed my Microsoft (MSFT) position, selling those shares at $30.37. I thought the tech sector was getting frothy and wanted to book some gains. I had bought MSFT for $18 and change when establishing the holding.

Today I added back those shares, and a few more, by purchasing MSFT at $27.998. (That's right -- $27.998.)

Microsoft is in the midst of a powerful product-upgrade cycle, and the very popular Windows 7 hasn't impacted the balance sheet yet. They have some other good things going on and, if you haven't done so already, be sure to check out Fred Hickey's measure of the company in the latest Barron's Roundtable.

MSFT's yield isn't as good as when the stock sold in the teens. But they have $36 billion in cash, and perhaps they'll declare special dividend this year since the tax on dividends may rise after 2010.