July 2007
You have to love stories like Apple's today. After a stellar week last week, the stock is under pressure the last two days, so a reporter calls a few brokers this morning. He apparently finds one who says he's heard...
I get this request often enough that I finally decided to do something about it. I am in the process of launching a jobs service attached to this site, one that will be focused on financial stuff, plus some technology...
Apparently an iPhone firmware update may be imminent:According to RBC Capitol [sic] Markets, an iPhone firmware update is coming soon. Among the fixes and updates will be new widgets, iChat, MMS, home networking support, Leopard integration, and location based services. Great...
Finally, some good GDP news: As of 11am PST, Facebook is down. The longer it stays down, the better for third-quarter economic growth. Start your econo-timers.[Update] Apparently Owen and I are sympatico. His headline is scary similar to mine....
From the Times:The Bancroft family has accepted News Corporation's $5 billion (£2.46 billion) offer to buy Dow Jones, the owner of The Wall Street Journal, a Dow Jones executive said this afternoon, citing an internal company document. John Prestbo, editor...
People have come up with reasonable answers to my previously posted "Type II" problem with respect to VCs. In essence, I asked whether, given defensible assumptions, you might expect a skilled VC to, purely as a statistical fluke, post four...
My friend Jim Cramer has some strong stuff on the housing market in a recent spot:...
From a new study, here is a simply incredible statistic about the continuing power of Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report:Drudgereport.com alone refers 25 per cent of the US visitors to the British news websites....Talk about the ultimate A-lister. Drudge...
Why oh why is it so darn hard to blog from my BlackBerry Curve? Short of using the web interface to Movable Type on the Curve -- something I wouldn't even force on an enemy -- there is no tool,...
Kudos to my friend Dorrian at Mozes for the flattering BusinessWeek coverage of his company. The mag calls Mozes "The MySpace of Mobile", which is nice company to keep. obDisclosure: I have been an adviser to the firm, so I...
The clock has finally started on the VMware iPO. According to reports today, EMC will partially spinoff its VMware division as a public company on August 14th. It will be 33-million shares priced $23 to $25, which is lower than...
Just as the credit crunch hits and banking business drops off somewhat, the securities industry has surpassed its peak employment from back in the dot-com days. That's gotta be auspicious:U.S. securities firms added 10,000 staff in June, pushing employment levels...
As many people noticed (including the hundred or so that emailed), I had technical problems at my hosting site that kept parts of this site down for way too many hours today. Sorry about that. I'm doing some things to...
Quiz question time: Making some reasonable assumptions about deals per year, success rates, etc., what is the likelihood that a first-time venture capitalist who is actually good at the stuff flops at his/her first four deals? In other words, what...
Okay, language usage pet peeve time. The phrase is "risk averse", not "risk adverse". Sure, the latter construction isn't meaningless, but it's not what you think you mean either....
I wish I could come up with something better than simply saying "Watch this Jeopardy excerpt with Anderson 'CNN' Cooper and Maria 'CNBC' Bartiromo". But I can't. So just watch it. [via DealBreaker]...
I'm a fan of Ron Conway's marker-centric approach to seed investing -- make lots of small bets -- but quoting him is fraught with entertaining peril. You see that in text form via a Jason Pontin piece on Kevin Rose...
Here is a sneak peek at a few links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet: Global growth forecasts revised upward to 5.2% in 2007 (IMF) Junk bond risk premiums have nearly doubled since June (NY Times) Fun...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:Agassi and Graf, non-tennis-playing development tycoons (Bloomberg)There are now more than 200 U.K. companies that buy houses from distressed homeowners (FT)The London real estate market is still otherworldly, with 250,000 pound parking places...
Marc "Gloom, Boom, and Doom" Faber gave some worth-hearing comments to Bloomberg late today. The subject was, of course, this week's adventures in the stock market. View here....
Om has a piece up about something we've mentioned here as well: How Microsoft is gaming search share stats by including unsolicited search queries in a game on its Live Search Club site. Read more here....
Sorry for the nonstop tables today, but these sorts of car-crash days on the markets are great, so long as you stay dispassionate. Here are the top ten decliners among big-cap tech today, amongst which the RIM and SanDisk moves...
The just-filed Entropic S-1 is worth a scan. Silicon for home entertainment, which brings together two trends (consumer and media) that are currently working. It could be a nice exit for CMEA, Redpoint, et al....
It's always interesting to look at stocks that are strong when everything else is weak. With that in mind, here is a list of the Nasdaq 100 members in the green more than 0.5% over the last three days: Apple...
The markets are still grouchy today, with Dow off 118 points here at mid-day. Normally this it the point at which I would be chewing my arms off to keep from buying a host of high-beta stocks. But ... I...
My friend Matt over at the NY Times has a piece about VCs getting cosy with the porn business. Appropriately enough, it's a tease right up there with the industry he's writing about.Sure, there are some large, growing, and highly...
Seeing that Twitter closed a funding round, and spotting the associated incredulity about Evan's company not having a business plan, reminded me of something: Whatever your feelings about Twitter, business plans are overrated, and profits perhaps even more so. Why?...
Amusing WSJ video on how iPhone improves one guy's social life -- or not....
Try to imagine Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster giving this answer to your average VC team during a pitch in Craigslist's early years. Fun, huh?What interests or hobbies do you have outside work?Each year [my companion] Susan and I spend a...
Okay, we have a new high water mark for a single domain sale. Business.com has been bought by R.H. Donnelly for $345-million. Sure, the company has $50-million in revenues, but don't kid yourself, this is about the domain name. Impressive....
My friend Eric Savitz is live-blogging the Microsoft analysts' meeting. Check it here....
I generally love Bloomberg -- smart writing, unvarnished TV, and super-duper data -- but they really need to fix their online video. I just watched on live Bloomberg TV a lengthy interview with Vinod Khosla, and now it's gone. Unlinkable,...
If you can't spot the sucker in the first half an hour at the table, then you are the sucker. -- Poker aphorismI understand why the above aphorism is appealing, but I think it's wrong. People are increasingly too sophisticated...
Wild day on the markets today. Things may perk up by the close, but the Dow is currently off 320 388 412 points, or 2.8%, and the the Nasdaq and S&P 500 are doing worse. Only two Dow stocks are...
Interesting to see that the journal Science is pulling out of the non-profit JSTOR initiative. The publication says it want to take more control of its digital assets, which is understandable, but is also potentially crummy news for profit-seeking providers...
Crazy busy right now, so just a few quick things:GigaOm show launches (Rhevision3 / TMCnet)Accolades for WSJ video (BroadbandVideo360)Consumers wants TVs connected to the Internet (iSuppli/EETimes)Microsoft spending even more money on ads and search (PR Newswire)Rio prostitutes in training (Bloomberg)Good...
Okay, everyone was wrong. Apple sold 270,000 iPhones, which is better than AT&T's 162,000 number, but considerably worse than the highest numbers on the street. Let the iFlop stories begin. (For the irony challenged, I'm kidding.)...
Bessemer famously posts its anti-portfolio -- the list of companies in which it didn't invest -- and I wish more people paid attention. In talking to a major LP doing diligence on re-upping in a venture fund its second fund,...
The meme is rapidly beginning to take hold today that iPhone takeup has been considerably more tepid than many (myself included) expected. The most recent impetus has been the 146,000 new-subs number today from AT&T, which is lower than most...
Well, there goes that idea. Facebook investor Peter Thiel says there will be no Facebook IPO until 2009, at the earliest. That, of course, could mean anything -- like convince us! -- but it's clear there isn't one in the...
I was recently talking to a CEO friend of mine who is having trouble with his board. He thinks there is a very good chance that he will soon be fired.What's the problem?, I asked. "Fucking board full of VCs,"...
In the weekend Barron's, Portfolio manager Larry Haverty has some zen comments on the recession that isn't a recession:This is the market that just won't quit. Or is it? Haverty: It is like a mystery play. In Act I of...
Okay, this bit of ASCII art is officially terrifying....
Good weekend cover piece in Barron's highlighting retail investors' continuing resistance to the bull-market's siren song. The piece has this useful table to put retail sorts' nervousness in context, and to give some things to watch for to mark an...
Sports quote of the day comes today from the husband of a 63-year-old woman struck on-the-fly by an errant Tiger Woods drive at golf's British Open. She was pretty quiet and several people helped to get pieces of paper and...
Maybe this is why Harvard never accepted my application: I didn't use a sufficiently clean envelope.Emergency crews evacuated an Eastern Illinois University building Friday, after a campus postal carrier discovered a disheveled-looking package heading for the college's admissions office. "There...
A Saturday's NY Times article on the reading habits of CEOs features Sequoia venture guy Mike Moritz. He isn't really a CEO, of course, but he is apparently a serious bibliophile -- albeit one who doesn't read business books.“I try...
Ah, it's such fun watching people duking it out in IRC's bookz channel over the new Harry Potter book. Searches for a pirated copy of the new book are coming so fast and furious that the usually bots-only channel is...
To digress from the usual business fare this Friday night, a video for folks to watch. This is a riveting bit of BBC work, a documentary on the 1985 Live Aid concert. Get past the hairstyles, the earnestness, and any...
Many of you will have already read Viacom chair Sumner Redstone's letter to Forbes laying out the reasons (kinda) for his current fight with daughter Shari. I was more intrigued by the format than the content. Because it's a fax....
Anyone who read the Orbitz S-1 won't be particularly surprised at the reception the newly public travel company received today on the public markets. As I have written here before, the Orbitz S-1 is opaque, indirect, and gotcha-filled. This has...
Reuters is now out with a story that Google's miss last night was a function of the company's "irascible" policy of giving no guidance. Yup, which was pretty much my take here earlier today. While giving no guidance might seem...
Best quote from a troubling Bloomberg piece on Florida's messed-up housing industry which has a building boom in the midst of a housing bust: "Have you been to Miami lately?'' Florida Governor Charlie Crist said at a homebuilders' conference last...
The full text of Google CEO Eric Schmidt's letter to FCC Chair Kevin Martin on the wireless spectrum auctions.Dear Chairman Martin:Google shares your bold vision of using the upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction to encourage much-needed competition in the wireless...
I'm likely just dreaming here, but wouldn't it be nice if Google's just-announced investment in Ubiquisys was the precursor to a contract-free iPhone 2.0 that offered voice services via femtocell nets in home and business? After all, Google reminded folks...
Analyst comments on the GOOG earnings miss last night are fairly dismissive of it as not being a thesis-changer. Instead, people are calling it "Google Being Google" (RBC), and just plain "sloppy" (Citi).Overall, while you can whack the company for...
In case there was ever any uncertainty, venture guy David Cowan has way better dinner parties than I do. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens at the same private dinner? I wish.More here, and a Steve Jurvetson musing on same here....
You know, I'm trying to stay on target and concerned with respect to Google's over-spending the current quarter, but I can't. I'm too fascinated by the ongoing tawdry allegations about Henry Nicholas of Broadcom's supposed underground brothel at his house...
Relatively poor conference call so far for Google. They over-hired, messed up bonus accrual, and are being forced to account for weak paid click data.2:37 PM Oh-oh, Mary Meeker's up next. 2:39 PM And it's a prize-winner 212-word question: Dave...
Must-read Bloomberg piece on the collapse of newspaper-based real estate ads. While some of this has to do with the troubles in the real estate market, it has more to do with the reallocation of ad dollars from newspaper to...
Expectations run typically high for Google quarterlies tonight, despite tepid numbers from Yahoo earlier in the week. I remain optimistic, but we'll see at 1:30. Call information here.[Update] A miss. Ouch. This call is very interesting. Going to questions now....
My friend James Altucher is doing some great work over at TheStreet. In this video he is wandering the streets of New York talking about non-Scholastic Harry Potter-related stock picks. Fun stuff.More entertaining Potter numbers here....
Rick Hayes at Oak Hill gave a recent presentation where he put up some data on the quartile spreads in private equity (including venture capital). He compared that asset class to public equity and fixed income in terms of the...
Simpsonize Me. Just bring photos. 'Nuff said....
A perhaps picayune question, but why the heck are BlackBerry fonts so bad? I have a new Curve (yes, I have changed phones four times in last four months -- guilty) and you can choose among six fonts, things with...
For over two weeks now I have had a fragment of a line from a long-ago and 99%-forgotten Muppets movie/show/bit, running through my head. Something about a broken ball. Trying to remember it or trace it nearly made me mad....
Some recent financial research of note, this time from the Journal of Economic Perspectives:Disagreement and the stock market: Disagreement explains some anomalies like glamor stocks and Fascinating stuff on the role of heterogenous views in marketsThe gift card market: An...
Fairly awe-inspiring growth in AUM (assets under management) during 2006 at the U.S.'s 300 largest money managers. Up 16.9% year-over-year, these firms collectively added roughly three-quarters of a million dollars in assets every working second last year. Makes you feel...
While John Mackey's apology about posting anonymously on message boards is plain and abject and all, why didn't a release go out on the wires? Sure, there are Reuters stories about the website post at WFMI, but I can't find...
I often drive-by mention books I'm reading here, but I don't always jump up and down and say visitors should read something. This time I'm saying that. Despite a woeful title, "The Poker Face of Wall Street" is great reading...
While a bootleg version of the new Harry Potter showed up already on the major Bittorrent sites, it has yet to appear on the major IRC channel for pirated books, #bookz. Color me somewhat surprised given old-timers' fondness for the...
Some good stuff on Yahoo (by way of a Google note) from RBC analyst Jordan Rohan. Wish I'd noticed it earlier today:Data Indicates Yahoo's Marketshare Gains Were Temporary: Yahoo's Panama was modestly successful but only temporarily haltedGoogle's gains in marketshare....
This is the highest estimate I have seen from a major bank for end-of-year crude oil prices:The key Middle Eastern members of oil cartel OPEC are under pressurefor an increase in production after a warning from Goldman Sachs thatprices could hit...
Some fairly dizzying data on ETF registrations:# ETFs on market: 561 # ETFs in registration: 363[via IndexUniverse]...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:Business 2.0 may soon be Business 0.0 (NY Times)iPhone owners watch twice as much video as other mobile users (Interpret)Kevin Rose on why it's good that Digg is out of control (TR)Bethel, Alaska,...
Some truly eye-popping stuff in the latest comScore release on online video. According to the company, three out of four Internet users streamed video in May while watching an average of almost 2.5 hours. More good stuff:The average video stream...
Is anyone out there taking this week's lawsuit against Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg seriously? I have had a few media calls, but I tell them all the same thing: This stuff is commonplace in the march to an...
Meant to mention it sooner, but it's nice to see my friend Om has added a new Clean Tech blog to his burgeoning blog kingdom. Biz blogs in this area are still fairly scattershot, so this will be one to...
I spent a bunch of time last night playing with an iPhone at Casa Kedrosky. I really liked it -- bright screen, great video, nice interface, etc. -- and I think it's an overall winner, but two things are nigh...
Much-heralded -- and much-funded -- solar panel company Nanosolar seems to be going through some jarring high-level change. The $100m-funded company -- whose investors include Google's founders, Benchmark Capital, an Apax partnerPartners, and others -- no longer has the services...
Step aside, sex.com. The biggest domain name sale ever may have happened today, and it wasn't for porn.Lexico Publishing Group, the company behind Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com just fetched $100 million, sold to publicly-traded Answers.com.This was about domain names, pure...
Say what you will about VCs, but they do herd together nicely. With that in mind, here is my VC quote du jour:"I don't want to use the word 'lemmings,'" says Scott Bonham, a partner with Granite Global Ventures. "But...
Every hip entrepreneur knows that telecom/network venture investing has been tumbling since 2001, and at the same time Web 2.0 venture investing has been soaring. So ... what percentage of Web 2.0 venture investing was telecom last quarter? Highlight after...
For any retrograde sorts out there somehow not yet convinced, there is more good data in the WSJ today on why 2007 is the year of the tech IPO....
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:Fairly unbelievable list of the major (and minor) iPhone bug (AppleHound)Shades of Carl Sagan, there are mysterious patterns in high-frequency financial data (Risk)BT has launched a new online sports television service (Telegraph)TV is...
Microsoft's search share was up three points last month, or was it? While the company lifted its share of the U.S. search market to 13% in June, that came largely because of the company's Live Search game site. In other...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:Google faces new lawsuits over its search ads (Times)New quake hits off Japan coast (Reuters)Mobile video market will take "quite a few" more years to sort itself out (In-Stat)Porsche lets numerology trump remembrance...
The award for strangest financial research paper of the day is a shoo-in:We use a quinquennial data set covering 87 countries between 1975 and 2005 to investigate the relationship between fertility and the real effective exchange rate. Theoretically a country...
Is Gmail's spam filter broken, or has it been circumvented? I'm getting tons of email spam this morning, after eons with virtually none. The strange thing about the incoming stuff: There is no link, no image, and nothing being hawked....
I find myself talking endlessly to people lately about mobile tv/video. There is oodles of interest, but some nervousness too, only a little of which is warranted. The right thing to be nervous about is subscription rates. As one market...
Good video of Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin talking philanthropy with Google.org's Larry Diamond....
Some big news for a good friend of mine:Bill McCandless, a former senior producer at CNBC, has joined TheStreet.com as executive editor of multimedia.The role is an executive level position that was created as part of TheStreet.com’s initiative to expand...
Pithy comments from Sequoia's Moritz on his trouble with theme-based venture investing:Moritz waxed philosophical by comparing venture capital investing to bird spotting. "I rarely think about big themes. The business is like bird spotting. I don't try to pick out...
Just come back from holidays, and I pop up in an article in the NY Times today about online sock puppetry and general astroblogging. So, how many CEOs engage in online behaviors like Whole Food CEO John Mackey (who posted...
To borrow a phrase from Sam Gamgee, "Well, I'm back." After two weeks of travel and holidays -- about which I'll post later -- I'm back. Good to be here, and I look forward to re-engaging....
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet/RealMoney. China's market problems could prevent it from becoming the next economic superpower (BusinessWeek) Phantom jobs and the trouble with employment growth (Bloomberg/Baum) Private...
It's all VCs all the time this morning, but there was some typically gnomish utterances from Sequoia's Mike Moritz at Fortune's (horribly-named) iMeme conference this past week. He was asked about the outlook for venture capital, and replied:"People would be...
A June paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that doctors talk too much. Fair enough, but with a mere 34% of doctors chattering about themselves in patient visits, and then 21% returning to the pre-nattering topic at hand,...
Why VCs are lying buffoons, Part XXXIV in a series. Collect 'em all:But a lot of times VCs ... say they have all of these strategic relationships and will make all of these introductions and then it doesn't happen. What?!...
The WSJ has a guaranteed link-getter piece today on the "tenth" anniversary of blogging. It's mostly what you'd expect, but I was mildly entertained by this crank-ish Tom Wolfe entry:One by one, Marshall McLuhan's wackiest-seeming predictions come true. Forty years...
Still out fishing, but catching up on a few things in my ever-overflowing link box:Article about heat wave records in Vancouver never actually specifies temperatures (Globe & Mail)Latest magazine ad data has tech publications falling faster than real estate (MPA)Canadian...
I'm guessing this newly advertised position at Facebook has nothing to do with plans for an upcoming IPO. Naaaaah....
Judging by my email, more than a few folks had noticed that I'm mostly absent this week. I was out on holidays last week, and I'm still out this week. Back in the office(s) next week.Keep yourselves out of trouble....
I'll echo Joseph at The Stalwart: Will someone please turn CNET's CEO Wealthmeter into a blog-embeddable widget. It'd be boffo....
Sorry, I just like this headline. Wish I had a better reason for pointing to this bit of techo nuttiness.The Cyborg Astrobiologist: Porting from a wearable computer to the Astrobiology Phone-cam...
Here is a sneak peek at my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet/RealMoney:Canadian tar sands production is growing, but it's a lot tougher going than Venezuela (Reuters) Albert Frere gets Henry Kravitz's nod as investor extraordinaire (Bloomberg) Wider Middle...
Impressive stuff on IT growth in the Middle East & North Africa, all contained in a new IDC report:A report issued by research and consultancy firm IDC showed that the total spending on information technology (IT) in the Middle East...
I am such a sucker for poorly written headlines. This one comes from today's Hartford Courant:...
The World Series of Poker is underway in Las Vegas, and Pokerati has some entertaining and sly coverage. Here are some quotes it collected from wandering the tables late one recent night:(An annoying, brash internet player is debating making a...
Either Spinal Tap's reunion yesterday at Live Earth grabs you from the opening wrong-headed "Hello Wimbledon!", or it doesn't -- and if it doesn't then you're not much fun, are you....
As promised, more recent research papers that some may find of interest. These two happen to be good weekend, dinner-table debate fodder.Extreme weather events, mortality and migration (Deschenes/Moretti)Why are immigration incarceration events so low? (Butcher/Piehl)The first paper has the fascinating...
Interesting that Nike has launched a new ad with Tiger Woods narrating a Roger Federer bio. In addition to being friends (and hence the inside joke in Tiger's crack at the end of the commercial), one of the things that...
From a recent note by Mark Mahaney at Citi:Yahoo!'s stake in Alibaba currently works out to approximately 4% of its enterprise value. And a recently reported potential public offering by Alibaba in H2:07 or 2008 could materially increase that value.Nice...
From a new Yankee Group report on the global, in-game advertising market:Yankee Group today revealed that the global in-game advertising market, which generated $77.7 million globally in 2006, continues to develop at an exponential rate. By 2011, worldwide in-game advertising...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:Market order routing going peer-to-peer in post Reg NMS world (WS&T)Free mobile TV versus Vcast, et al. (E-Gear)Harry Potter bad for bookstore margins (ABC)Private equity and VCs driving fintech investing (WS&T)Newsnow's live feed...
Things that make you go financially hmmm ...Total dollars (books plus movies) generated by J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series: ~$7.2-billionGDP of Aghanistan: $7.2-billion...
Whoa, and here I thought blood doping was limited to endurance athletes. It seems media interviewees are doing it too, or at least so this ill-worded snippet from a recent Cyclingnews article implies:German rider Jörg Jaksche confessed Saturday to using...
Tim Bray has an unburdening post up about his hatred for London's Heathrow Airport. My last experience there was grim and straight-outta-Brazil -- it involved pettifogging bureaucrats, hanging ductwork, and a spiraling misunderstanding -- but that was more than six...
Whoa, Google's new draggable driving directions are very cool. Love how you can re-route just by grabbing the proposed route line and moving it elsewhere. Of course, it immediately led to silliness. I right away found myself trying to find...
Okay, I'm back to griping about the maximum storage in Gmail mail accounts. I currently have a 2.8gb maximum in my main account, and I'm at 92% of capacity. I'd like to buy more space, but I can't. Google won't...
On Monday of this week it was All IPOs, All the Time at the SEC. Eight companies filed to go public, ranging from Netsuite to Och-Ziff Capital. While this pretty much locks in my ongoing prediction that 2007 will be...
A few days ago I wrote a post here saying that Apple had surpassed most first-weekend iPhone sale estimates from analysts. Now, however, the idea is out there that iPhone actually didn't meet initial expectations. So, what's the story? Did...
Havng stopped punching itself in head about Google, online auctioneer Ebay has apparently found a new reason for self-flagellation. This time it's Ebay's lost share to Craigslist, something that has Ebay bringing its Kijiji free classifieds site to the U.S....
3Com founder -- and Ethernet inventor -- Bob Metcalfe is spending less time being a VC guy these days. Instead, he's the interim CEO of Polaris investee GreenFuel, where his first job was to cut staff from 43 employees to...
Here is the best shorter iPhone review I've seen:Looking at the iPhone as an alpha, it’s a heck of a feat. Gorgeous. Groundbreaking. Full of promise and a lot of delivery. Unfortunately, we’re paying for a full-release version.[via mocoNews]...
Impressive market growth numbers in the multi-touch LCD market:The market for multi-touch touch screens is set to grow to $433.1 million in 2012, rising at a CAGR of 30.8 percent from $112.9 million in 2007.[via iSuppli]...
Here is one way to improve the crummy economics of solar power: Steal some solar panels:Thieves made off with approximately $30,000 worth of solar panels from the Sonoma Valley County Sanitation District on Eighth Street East Wednesday night under cover...
Fascinating TED talk by Dan Dennett on societal memes. Watch it....
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:The top 100 venture firms, as measured by deals done in 2006 (Entrepreneur.com)More than 4,000 iPhone-related domain names have been registered by opportunists; and Apple has bought iPhone.com domain for a rumored seven-figure...
As most readers will have gleaned by now, I keep a fairly close watch on the finance research literature. I often highlight interesting pieces, but there are often others worth scanning that I don't link to. Beginning today, I'll start...
One of the tenets of orthodox financial theory is that stock prices in liquid markets move according to a random walk, and therefore the market's future cannot be profitably predicted. The notion of a random walk itself is sometimes better...
Regional social networks in stock purchases are an emerging field of study, with the phenomenon neatly documented among institutional shareholders. Adjusted for intervening factors, fund managers in a particular geography are more likely to buy (or sell) a stock if...
Robert Pelton Young is apparently full of shit, because Belgium is the most dangerous place in the world (at least in terms of the number of people killed per capita by natural disasters). I always had a suspicion that the...
At least as important as knowing which finance papers to read is knowing early which papers to stop reading. Here is a dead giveaway on the first page of an otherwise interesting-looking paper. Using a sample of 160 Internet IPO...
Okay, say what you will about hedge fund thingie Och-Ziff's prospectus, and its merits as an IPO, but the soon-to-be-listed $26.8-billion fund officially wins the award for Most Punnable Ticker of 2007 (so far). The company will be traded as...
The numbers are beginning to come in, and analysts increasingly think that Apple's first-weekend run of iPhone sales whupped their initial pre-release estimates. Analyst/Firm Initial Revised % beat Munster /Jaffray 200,000 500,000 150% Shope/Morgan 180,000 310,000 72% [via Bloomberg]...
After reading Kevin Hassett's piece today about politicians treating PE firms as pornographers, I got to perusing Ed Prescott's 2004 Nobel-acceptance lecture. And that got me thinking about the merits of "rules rather than discretion" in government policies. As Prescott...
Interesting twin trends in the latest Dow Jones VentureOne data on the IPO market. On the one hand the just-completed second quarter of 2007 saw the highest amount raised by VC-backed IPOs since the third quarter of 2007; on the...
Which of the following three widely-touted tech IPOs is likely to happen first: Facebook, Linkedin, or Opentable? My money's still on Facebook, but I'm curious what people think....
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:Cover stories are effective contrarian indicators (FAJ)The age of ignorance: Why we stop learning science (Guardian)Sources and uses of U.S. energy (MSNBC)Market-weighted vs. fundamental indices -- Bogle vs Arnott: who's right? (Marketwatch)Books: Paul...
The financial equivalent of "Pepsi vs Coke" is DFA vs. Vanguard. The two heavily quantitative fund complexes both have their adherents, and it's always entertaining watching them go toe-to-toe. Somewhat more seriously, you can learn something from the debate too.Read...
Interesting heretical findings on order flow implications in a new paper:We study the rivalry between Euronext and the London Stock Exchange (LSE) in the Dutch stock market to test hypotheses about the effect of market fragmentation. As predicted by our...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:The world database of happiness (Rotterdam University)Toshiba drops rear-projection TVs for flat panels (EETimes)Our biotech future (NYRB/Dyson)Competition for order flow and smart order routing systems (JoF)Special feature on financial technology (Financial News)Lovely BBC...
Here is sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet/RealMoney:Funny iPhone segment on The Daily Show (YouTube) Main iPhone components: Marvell, Skyworks, CSR, Intel, Samsung, Wolfson, and Broadcom (iFixit) Ebay-auctioned lunch with Warren Buffett...
