Friday File: Halfway Through! – Stock GumshoeStock Gumshoe

The first half of the year is in the books, but we won’t roll into our next news-heavy period for a little while — when it comes to the Real Money Portfolio, as currently constituted, earnings season really starts in about two weeks, when we’ll to see our first insurance companies report, along with a few other early companies of interest like Domino’s Pizza and Intuitive Surgical (I own the former but would like to own more, and continue to be interested in re-buying the latter, so at the moment I’m hoping for “temporarily weak” earnings reports from both).

So it turns out, the end of June was a pretty good time to spend ten days driving around Iceland with the family — which was a fantastic experience, I’d recommend it to anyone after being overwhelmed by natural beauty, fantastic hospitality, whales, puffins, reindeer and arctic foxes, volcanoes, glaciers, icebergs, so many things I’ll probably never see anywhere else… and with the sun never setting, we mostly ended up oohing and aahing at the world around us from 7am to past midnight every day. Glorious, if not restful.

And surprisingly enough, we decided that while we’ll never develop a taste for Hákarl, their traditional dish of fermented Greenland Shark, with its tang of decomposition and ammonia (from what I can tell, none of the locals really like it, either), Iceland might have the best bakeries in the world (take that, France!)

But a warning for you: It ain’t a trip for the die-hard value investor. They don’t grow much of anything in Iceland, except sheep, and they don’t have a lot of natural resources, except fish and volcanic sand. Even stuff like asphalt and cement to rebuild their roads and bridges, (after they get washed out by volcanoes and glacial floods), has to be imported to serve Iceland’s tiny population (about 400,000 people, supplemented by 2.5 million tourists a year). I’m sure there are reasonable ways to spend a little less money if you camp, which would be a non-started for Mrs. Gumshoe and is less fun when it’s 45 degrees and raining in the “summer”, and there are some relative grocery store bargains… but the prices of hotels, meals, rental cars and just about all consumer goods will make you think you should have taken a vacation to some more reasonably-priced locale, like Manhattan or Disney World. Here’s my …