wonderful book called the Gold of Exodus was written by Howard Blum, Simon and Schuster, 1998. In the book, two adventurers Larry Williams and Bob Cornuke went looking for the mountain for both spiritual and financial reasons. There are a variety of reasons why the book is interesting – first any detective story has excitement built in; actually finding substantive information to back the clues is ups the excitement. Taking the journey than Mosses walked or a pilgrimage has many spiritual feelings – a sense of the desert and what life was about and how precious it is. Another aspect of the book is the geo political happenings. In the Middle East, who is aligned with whom is a changing field and depends on the circumstances. Each country is trying to figure out what the others are doing, thinking and trying to stay one step ahead of each other. In the book’s example, Saudi Arabia wanted to defend itself against others and had the money to pay for the best systems, in the geo political world often times money does not necessary buy you what you think it is buying you. Saudi wanted a radar system to detect missiles that could cross its borders and one of the sites for the system was Jabal al Lawz (Mt. Sinai). This meant the adventurers had another roadblock ahead of them – military sites are protected by armed people. If the adventurers had come 5 years previous, the site given Saudi authorization to visit would have been open to anyone, not the site is behind the fence.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the world changes and sometimes even the best planning fails to take account of the geo political changes that happen. Some of it happens over time, some of it happens over a short period of time. When you buy a dividend paying stocks the companies have experience in dealing with geo political changes, technological changes and just change in general. Understanding no company is perfect or even close to it, however if a company has consistently made profits and increased its dividends; you should expect its management has the ability to steer through normal changes and even profit from them.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions