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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (67195)	8/10/2005 11:56:58 AM
From: energyplay	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Hi TJ - great set of pictures. That's Southern California. I'm in Northern California, the cheap part of the North end of Silicon Valley. The car culture is almost as intense here. I will ususually see a Ferrari about every 3 days, even with only 10 minutes trips. Toyota Prius is very popular, I expect Silicon valley has about a quarter of the hybrids in the US. Bentlys are getting popular. Lots and lots of Porsches, every type of Mercedes and BMW. One big difference is we don't have the housing stock - lots of houses built for farmers, farm workers, factory and office workers on small lots. This is most of the housing in San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Milpitas. There are a few really good neighborhoods - Atherton, Palo Alto, Woodside, Los Altos Hill, Saratoga. Atherton and Woodside have real mansions, not McMansions. ***** Norcal - Northern California - generally doesn't have the near obsession with everything being clean and shinny like Southern Cal. ******************** Many of the owners of the McMansions paid cash, and have no mortgage. Some others are on interest only.... Northern california is a little more financially conservative than SoCal. Also, this is about the 5 tech cycle, so almost everyone has some diversity and some conservative investments - REITs, utilities, conglomerates like GE. There has been some investment in overseas conpanies, including public China. ********************* There's not as much of a flashy watch preference in Silicon Valley than Southern California. If you make digital electronics, why have a mechanical watch ? The San Francisco financial district does buy nice watches.