August 2007
Economist Robert Shiller presented a paper today on human behavior in real estate bubbles at the KC Fed conference in Jackson Hole. Economist James Hamilton was there, and he filed this skeptical report:One thing I have never understood is the...
The Times has an incisive and nicely conversational summary of what has happened this summer on global financial markets while many participants were away in Nepal and the like.I’ve been away for six weeks. Much been happening? You could say...
Ben Bernanke is apparently a Blackberry junkie. Bloomberg just showed shaky zoom footage of the Fed chair Blackberry-ing away among a group of three bankers in Jackson Hole today. The AP captured it from a different angle. (And the trouble...
From a chat today with a hedge fund guy:Market impact ate my alpha.Like me, most of my readers will have heard variants of this one before, but for everyone else it's such an evocative and lovely phrase -- like out...
One of the unspoken questions in all the discussion about subprime making home ownership available to all comers is, "Why do we want people to own homes?" After all, here was President Bush today in his subprime speech: "Owning a...
Here are the two "money" sentences from Fed chair Ben Bernanke's Jackson Hole speech today on housing:The Federal Reserve stands ready to take additional actions as needed to provide liquidity and promote the orderly functioning of markets.It is not the...
Lots more stuff being added to the soon-to-be-announced agenda of my Money:Tech conference. Oodles of interesting technology and speakers in weather data, real estate, travel, and many other domains, plus some notables from quant investing land -- and some eye-opening...
Milton Friedman, John Lennon, and J.G. Ballard: Now there's a dinner party guest list. More pragmatically, and via my usual favorite sources (smashingtelly and fora.tv), here are some highly worthwhile videos concerning the aforementioned troika.A BBC profile of dystopian SciFi...
From a WSJ article on the bath many real estate "investors" are taking on California, Nevada, and Florida condos and homes:Sazzad Khandakar, 43 years old, an information-technology manager and father of three in Monroe Township, N.J., is among the nation's...
I have this admittedly unusual fixation whereby sometimes when I see/hear words my first reaction is, "Whoa, great Scrabble letters". It can be highly distracting in social circumstances when you should be thinking of what to say after "Hello", as...
Every time I flip on CNBC lately my friend Herb Greenberg's voice or name has popped up. Heck, twice this week while I was on hold for a producer at CNBC I could either hear Herb's disembodied voice as Muzak,...
This came out of yours truly in a fit of pique this week:Most financial media commentary on day-to-day stock and market movements is about as meaningful as live ESPN coverage of Brownian motion in a coffee cup -- and marginally...
My favorite quote from any of the current spate of articles talking up the idea of a Microsoft purchase of Blackberry-maker Research in Motion:The Waterloo, Ontario-based company's shares regularly move as much as 5 percent in a single session, even...
Good Bloomberg interview with ISI economist Ed Hyman. He says slowing, but no recession, and rates fall to 4 percent....
I don't often post news here about my colleagues at Ventures West, but I thought I'd post something about a sizable financing announced today. Presidio Pharmaceuticals, Inc, a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing novel, small molecule compounds...
Am up in Bay Area for a few meetings today, so posting will be slow. I just finished up a meeting and am currently outside the venerable Buck's Restaurant, where I'm baking in the exfoliating heat....
There are many interesting aspects of the ABN Amro acquisition, including the current attractive arb spread -- 11% -- and the debate over whether the Home Depot deal price reduction will cause a price cut in the ABN deal --...
Having worked to get rid of about six hundred emails that I could safely read and file without responding, I was down this morning to 407 emails in my inbox. All of them were non-list messages that had arrived since...
Here are some quick links from my ever-overflowing link box:Gordon "Wall Street" Gekko is back (Telegraph)Bad weather and biofuel have conspired to drive wheat prices to record highs (BBC)Forget subprime, what about student loan syndication? (Reuters)...
Here is a blackly comedic bit of economics in looking at U.S. spending on the war in Afghanistan: It's been great for the opium poppy business, with Afghanistan's production up 17% y-o-y in 2007, and the country's global market share...
While I'm on the subject of the Renaissance hedge fund and its bizarro Wikipedia edits, one of the Renaissance Wikipedia edits is particularly unsettling. Someone at Renaissance edited Wikipedia a few years ago to say that Microsoft founder Bill Gates...
According to a story in tomorrow's FT, the super-secretive quants at Renaissance Technologies are considering a partial share float via a 144 listing, following by trading on the Opus5 platform. The upside for Renaissance of going that route is that...
Apparently the major TV networks have conceded this InterWeb thing may not be a fad after all:To launch their fall lineups, the major networks are turning to the Web like never before, offering viewers the chance to see premiere episodes...
There are stories making the rounds about people becoming nauseated while watching the popular new movie The Bourne Ultimatum. Not because they movie is so bad, but because the shot lengths are so short, averaging (apparently) something like two seconds....
Another example of why Sun flipping tickers from SUNW to JAVA is wrongheaded: It messed with one of my streaming spreadsheets....
When the U.S. economy sneezes, does the world catch a cold? It has been interesting watching increasing (non-China) market correlations in the last month or so, but the underlying economies themselves are something else. When & how do they move...
The minutes for the Federal Reserve meeting on August 7th will be released tomorrow, but the minutes for the two unscheduled Fed meetings since then -- August 10th and 16th, the second being the one leading to a surprise rate...
My favorite business headline in some time comes today courtesy of the Times of London:Death not ‘adverse effect’I guess it depends on your point of view....
The skittishness about hedge funds among some pension fund investors cited in today's Wall Street Journal is one of the more optimism-inducing things I've seen in ages. Less money raging into the asset class will help returns, weed out some...
Both Dell and Gateway do it on their respective websites, and it drives me nuts. "It" is segment buyers upon visiting their websites based on whether you're a home, small business, or large business PC buyer. Pardon my frankness, but...
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.com: The Fed discount window is open, and no-one's coming (Reuters) Chinese banks have just begun disclosing their subprime credit exposure (Washington Post) Great...
The best recent comment on credit markets I have seen comes from banker "bid 'em up" Bruce Wasserstein:[Some investors] thought they had outsmarted the market and added leverage to make it interesting. But as my chief financial officer says, risk...
I don't have time to do much with it, but there is interesting stuff in (here we go again) Wikiscanner if you use it as your guide to wander through the short interest on Nasdaq and the NYSE. Check the...
For some non-apparent (at least to me) reason, I get a lot of emails of the what-should-I-do-with-my-life sort. People seemingly think that, given a few professional and personal facts from a stranger, I can tell them how to proceed in...
Here, via Wikiscanner, is some subprime-related fun at Lehman Brothers' expense. In early July of this year, just before the subprime shit the fan, someone at Lehman felt it would be timely to edit the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) Wikipedia...
I'm also fond of this bit of Wikiscanner-ishness, with someone at venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson using Wikipedia to conduct a running internal turf battle about who at DFJ invented (versus coined) the phrase "viral marketing"....
I've been messing around intermittently with Wikiscanner this week, mostly looking at the kinds of edits done by brokers, hedge funds, and the like. (For example, there are some fun Morgan Stanley edits, and as well as some not-so-secret Cerberus...
This iPhone unlocking story is waaaaay overdone. First off, this was inevitable. Second, it's an absurdly difficult multi-step process, one that requires 6-8 hours and a soldering iron, which isn't exactly up there with toasters as a common household item....
It's late summer, so time to bask in the econo-geek fun of the annual Federal Reserve Bank of Kanas City Economic Symposium in Jackson Hole. (Martin Feldstein's stuff was great last year.) Trouble is, while the FRB website says Ben...
Fun factoid from the (until recently) real estate mad California market. The following figure compares the percentage of the California non-farm workforce made up by real estate brokers/salespeople this past June, and ten years earlier in June of 1997. California's...
Okay, let's say everyone follows Sun's model and changes their ticker based on four-letter abbreviations of key products/technologies. What would happen? Epistemological anarchy! SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Sun Microsystems Inc. said it plans to change its Nasdaq stock ticker symbol to...
Apparently independent equity researchers, which have struggled in recent years (despite Federal regulatory support), is now following the time-dishonored strategy of losing money on ever sale, but trying to make it up on volume. Among the more than 1,000 buy-side...
After having largely laid low for years, Netscape co-founder Jim Clark appeared today in a somewhat incongruous context: A WSJ article on the most expensive homes in America. Here's Jim:"One hundred million is an insane amount to pay for a...
Fairly remarkable figure showing the rapid increase in acceptability among portfolio managers for taking on credit risk into late June (ignore the 2009 number) of this year. Me-thinks that will have now changed....
While I've been working on the just-announced Money:Tech conference program for some time, things have really accelerated since formally announcing it earlier this week. I'm seeing great speaker ideas, lots more cool companies, and generally giant levels of enthusiasm for...
Fun conference call this morning with Fitch Ratings on asset-backed credit market. Among other things, the ratings company is rerating its ratings for RMBS CDOs, acknowledging that more borrowers will, you know, default on their mortgages. Specifically, it is upping...
Missed this paper until now, but it's an interesting look at how you can begin to parse out informed short-sellers in public stocks via insider-selling data: We examine the return predictability of short selling activities for NYSE/AMEX stocks. We use...
Savvy comment from Emanuel Derman on the current quant fervor:It always seemed to me, and recent occurences seem to confirm it, that most algorithmic trading strategies are long volatility but short volatility of volatility.Nicely put....
I recently had central air installed at Casa Kedrosky. It's a fat R2D2-ish looking Trane thing, with a new blower, etc. The trouble is, the system blows prodigious, wind tunnel-esque amounts of cold air to two downstairs vents. It cools...
I buy the general thesis that the gaming market has set in motion a new cycle in consumer IT, there is more to it than that. In particular, consider the following factoids about game development costs. Each line give the...
Okay, Robert Reich finally tipped me over. Hearing him talking nonsense about subprime on NPR's irritating Marketplace program this afternoon convinced me that I have to write a column in the subject to make myself feel better. Damn that bastard...
PIMCO fund manager Bill Gross has joined the bulls. Whoa! Dogs and cats living together, etc.I think the global economy is sufficiently strong and the U.S. economy probably will avoid a recession, certainly on the corporate side, such that it's...
Here is testimony to the joys of high beta stocks. Consider the post-trough bounces (from the close last Thursday to today) for the following Nasdaq 100 stocks: Company Ticker % Research in Motion RIMM 24.2% Garmin GRMN 13.8% NVIDIA NVDA...
Firsthand's Kevin Landis (I know, I know) is on Bloomberg TV right now, and he's telling the same up-with-tech story I told on CNBC's Squawk Box earlier this week, and repeatedly over the last few weeks on On the Money....
Pardon this bit of unabashed fan-boy geeky-ness, but I wish I was at Cornell this Fall. I would love to take Jon Kleinberg's new course "The Structure of Information Networks". (Why can't Cornell do an MIT and put this video...
I can't add much to this article that makes it any stranger or more stupidly surreal than it already is. A gloriously-named Paris-based hedge fund manager -- Bertrand Des Pallieres -- nearly had his rare Maserati Cambiocorsa auctioned out from...
She pulls the eyes out with a face like a magnetI don't know how much more of this I can takeShe's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake -- from "Watching the Detectives, by Elvis Costello (1977)I'm less interested...
Somehow I had it in my head this wasn't supposed to be launched until later this year, but Google is apparently launching video ads in its YouTube subsidiary tomorrow. The approach will be a transparent ads in the bottom fifth...
Fun, fear-mongering piece about "killer quants" in today's WashPost. The gist: Quants are bad, or not, maybe, except when their models don't work, which they do, sometimes, except when the moon is full and subprime is in the sign of...
So much for the supposed improvement in other search services' user satisfaction ratings. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Google gained search traffic share in July against all of its competitors other than Microsoft (which gained a tiny amount), despite The Google allegedly...
A provocatively bearish piece in today's Times argues based on some Japanese researchers' work that lithium ion batteries are fundamentally unsafe at any speed. While it's not news to say that lithium ion batteries are volatile things, it is worth...
I'm delighted to announce that I am chairing Money:Tech, a new conference next February in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. I'm partnering with the estimable Tim O'Reilly and the fine folks at O'Reilly Media, which is really about bringing...
Steve Ballmer apparently wants people to think his Microsoft is buying Yahoo. Here he is from an interview today in New York with Charlie Rose:Rose: Are you in talks to acquire Yahoo? Ballmer: If I were, i wouldn’t say anything,...
Interesting twenty-year U.K.-based view of changing rationales in why people buy their first houses. Notice, in particular, how much "houses as investment" has increased as the rationale:...
U.S. Rep Barney Frank, who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is in the FT today calling for increased subprime regulation. Three main things:All mortgage originators must be subject to reasonable regulation substantively similar to those that apply...
The following traffic figure from Gawker shows why top blog networks are currently so attractive to advertisers: raging traffic growth. Granted, it would be nice to see the logarithmic version, but still impressive....
Apple is cutting iPhone prices via the release through its Apple Store of refurbished "good as new" phones. In general, they are about $100 below the price at which they sold a scant two months ago....
Having recently launched a jobs section here, I show up in an FT piece talking about the newfound penchant among some blogs for adding such things to their sites. Worth a read, and some savvy musings about where all of...
Here is a sneak peek some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over TheStreet.com. Gulf oil and natural gas companies are shutting production in preparation for Hurricane Dean (Reuters) Swiss central bank chief calls U.S. credit crunch "unbelievable" (interactive...
Intermittently interesting interview with Yale's Robert Shiller on the outlook for the housing market. Among other things, he says that he's become "less bearish" about housing. Admittedly, that's not saying much -- if Shiller had been any more bearish then...
Does anyone else have trouble buying the proffered explanation for why Bill Poole missed the FOMC vote yesterday? While I like the idea that Bill Poole, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, is really just an economic...
Here's one way to sidestep having to raise money from LPs: Sell your house for $76-million. The most expensive house for sale in San Diego County -- and maybe in the country -- is a venture guy's abode. Bill Stensrud,...
I'm supposed to be giving a talk in Cuernavaca, Mexico, next Friday. Note where Hurricane Dean, a likely Cat 4 storm, is forecast to be by next Wednesday, and keep in mind that Cuernavaca is a little south of the...
While I appreciate the symbolism of the Fed early today cutting its discount rate to the best borrowers -- even if it caused my spot on CNBC's Squawk Box to get bumped .... damn you Ben Bernanke for making we...
With the Dow having been down as much as 340 points partway through the day today, only to end the day up 8down 16, it got me thinking. What are some of the largest one-day snapback rallies -- in percentage...
Once again my traveling habits have apparently induced a minor market meltdown. Sorry about that. Anyway, I'm sitting here in a TV studio green room on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. watching the carnage via an EVDO connection and instant messages...
I'm in transit for the first half of today, so posting here may (or may not) be infrequent. Judging by Asian and European markets overnight -- South Korea ended off 6.9%, and the FTSE is currently off 2.7% -- it...
Otto: [practicing his apology] Oh, I'm so very, very, very sssssssss .... Fuck You! -- A Fish Called Wanda (1988)The WSJ has done a nice job of collecting all the supposed apology letters to investors from various quant hedge fund...
The good folks at ForeclosureRadar have new data out today on California mortgage defaults. Here are the top ten counties measured by mortgage defaults per capita. I lose track of which is which, but I think only two of these...
This should come as no surprise, and I've written about it here a little before. Nevertheless, a new paper purports to show (it uses surveys, ick) that finance academics aren't all that consistent about investing according to their own research.This...
Nice factoid from Michelle at Footnoted. Number of financial filings in which the word "subprime" appeared during the June-August period last year and this:2006: 7642007: 1,349Given that companies citing subprime in filings now include Leap Wireless and the restaurant chain...
I had been looking for a decent figure showing the dollar value of mortgage resets this year and next, and I came across this useful one. If anyone has anything better, please post a link below.[First American via Marketwatch]Okay, here,...
My friend Andy Kessler gets the Wallstrip treatment.Lindsay? Howard? I'm here and still waiting for my call....
(Editor's note: I'm not sure if most readers of this site know it, but long ago I was an equity research analyst at a few brokerage firms, including TD Waterhouse, HSBC Securities, etc. That will help explain why I still...
Pardon the Hurricane Flossie aside, and it's nice to hear that the storm bearing down on Hawaii is weakening, but am I the only one having trouble getting worked up about a hurricane named "Flossie"? It could just be too many...
Apparently the FTC filed redacted court documents yesterday in the Whole Foods/Wild Oats case. Except the documents weren't really redacted. Instead, the documents were word processor docs where the redacted sections contained Whole Foods trade secrets were merely changed to have...
Here is the quant fund understatement of the day, this time from a WSJ piece on how UBS's just-released results lend insights into the quant/sub-prime storm:By some estimates, trading by these giant investment pools, such as AQR Capital Management or...
Interesting seeing what it took for Goldman to rope investors into rescuing investing in its struggling Global Equity Opportunities Fund. Three billion went into the fund, including two-billion from Goldman itself. But the terms on the other billion are these:...
I spotted some data today comparing the stuff being flogged via text-based email spam versus image-based spam. Only in the bizarro world of email spam would sex sell better via text, and stocks sell better via pictures.[Bitdefender via Businesswire]...
I have written here before about the myth of better search. Short of psychically guessing my search intent, and/or connecting electrodes directly to brain so that search results can scrolls, heads-up style, across my retina, it's not clear to me...
Yeesh, if I see another damn article knowingly explaining that first-day initial public offering pops are bad I'll lose it. The impetus, of course, for all these return-of-the-dot-com-daze articles was today's VMware rocket-ride, with the stock being priced last night...
From a new survey by GE/Future Foundation:Owning satellite TV was found to be 50 per cent more important than starting a family.Kids care about TV? Who would have thought. Mind you, they merely care about TVs more than they care...
With VMware's IPO pricing at the high of its range last night, and then opening up 79% on the NYSE (on a day when the S&P 500 is off 1%), it's hard not to feel positive about tech stocks. Back...
Barry just pointed me to this remarkable document over at TheStreet. Apparently Sentinel, a kind of goosed/hedged money market fund, is halting redemptions. There must be more to this, because the letter sure sounds like there was a trader screw-up...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box:New GAO report awfully bearish about U.S.'s fiscal condition (GAO)Quant funds start selling the recent earthquake as an "opportunity" (Marketwatch)VMware priced at high end of the range, and fair value is generally viewed...
In continuing to ponder the inherent problems in making non-modal distributional assumptions about stocks, I got to wandering through one of my old statistics texts. That, in turn, got me thinking for the first time in ages about non-parametric tests,...
Remarkable the performance of GS's GEO quant long-short fund losing 30% last week. That's tough to do in a market neutral fund, so kudos to 'em....
There were too many highlights to cite them all in the Goldman Sachs conference call today on the firm's hedge fund misadventures, but here are a few:#1) Clients losing money is one thing, but you?Mike Mayo - Deutsche Bank -...
Lots of interesting jobs up on the jobs.kedrosky.com site, so wander over and have a look. And if you have something you'd like to advertise, following the instructions at jobs.kedrosky.com in the top right of the page....
I may be slow coming to this, but ForeclosureRadar is a nifty service. It shows the latest California foreclosure data on a Google Map.More here from Barry, who was the one who sent me the service. He has this figure...
Apparently his new consulting gig isn't enough work for Alan Greenspan. He's back to predicting stock market crashes, as this quote from a speech today shows:Dr Greenspan said that the recent boom in Chinese stocks could not last. “It is...
I haven't read it yet -- 5,985 words! -- but Daniel Roth Tom Wolfe has a lengthy piece on Cerberus Capital in the new issue of Portfolio Magazine. Without any notes, [Cerberus CEO Feinberg] launches into a meandering speech. Between...
Wish I had thought of this first, but here are the live mortgage and hedge fund implode-o-meters. Clever stuff.[via FT]...
Here's the some inverted reassurance: One Chinese academic told the South China Morning Post today's' that China's mortgage market is in even worse shape than the U.S. sub-prime market. Yi Xianrong, a banking and finance expert at the Chinese Academy...
According to the WSJ tonight, two major quant funds -- BGI's 32 Capital and Goldman's Global Alpha -- will release more explicit performance information in the next 24 hours. The latter is apparently holding a conference call early tomorrow as...
I just finished reading Richard Bookstaber's well-done Demon of Our Own Design, the subtitle of which is "Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation". The gist: Bookstaber argues that financial innovations have markets more volatile and interlinked, not...
Highly useful mini-essay from Paul Graham on the "equity equation": how much stock should early-stage companies give people, when, and why. Paul bring some useful numerical analysis to a subject that is usually mostly arm-waving and "I heard that..." rhetoric....
A quote in today's WSJ on the troubles quant funds had this week is worth pondering:"Wednesday is the type of day people will remember in quant-land for a very long time," said Mr. Rothman, a University of Chicago Ph.D. who...
Today the Nevada Gaming Control Board released FY 2007 winnings (i.e., the amount lost by gamblers). It was a record year of winning/losing, with an aggregate $12.7-billion take, up almost 5% from last year. A little more than half of...
An idle question: Can markets crash and stay crashed these days if China's don't do the same? I see that the Shanghai Composite is up 6% since the beginning of August, and it hasn't had a down day in the...
Jeremy Siegel is waving his buy flag in the air. Mind you, he is also promoting Wisdom Tree ETFs, which benefits him nicely.[via TheStreet]...
There was a great segment earlier this week on the Discovery Channel's catnip "Mythbusters" program about baseball. I'm no baseball junkie, but I was still fascinated to learn that there is no rising fastball, that cork bats don't work, and...
I've been getting more than a few notes from quant investors out there, all saying a variant of the same thing: "We're being killed!"People blame all sorts of things, ranging from blind selling, non-quant fast-money seeing quant blood in the...
Some speculation about a post-Murdoch free online WSJ in Reuters today. For sure it would put a lot of pressure on Pearson to do the same thing with the FT, to the detriment of its prints subs....
Catching up on a few things of potential interest in my overflowing inbox:VMware's IPO pricing has been boosted to $27-29 from $23-$25, making it the largest offering since Google (Bloomberg)U.S. corn production in acreage this year is the largest in...
You know, who really cares about Countrywide's filings, quant fund collapses, and the sub-prime spiral. Why? Because Google is finally selling incremental additional storage for we profligate Gmail users. Happy days.More here (official) and here (unofficial)....
New risk factor added to mortgage kingpin's Countrywide Financial in a filing late today:Debt and secondary mortgage market conditions could have a material adverse impact on our earnings and financial conditionWe have significant financing needs that we meet through the...
I don't cite many of my media appearances lately, but two quick mentions might be of interest:Today at 4pm pst I'm on CNBC with friend James Altucher talking quant hedge funds and crashing correlationsI just taped a few video spots...
I haven't had time to look into this more closely, but interesting comment over on Eric's site about Cisco's stock repurchases during CY 2007.His press release waxes superlatives about how much stock CSCO has bought during the 2007FY but did...
Catching up and emptying a few things from my exploding inbox:Big liquidations are triggering hedge fund troubles among market neutral and quant funds (Marketwatch)Blind to trend, quant funds are paying a heavy price (WSJ)Micro-formats for XBRL (CoreFiling)Gambling vs. investing (InvestorGuide)Annual...
Checking my spam folder this morning, I have now received the bot-net stock spam message I mentioned earlier today -- the largest such pump-and-dump in history -- 60 times in the last hour. Remarkable....
Here is my venture capital phrase of the day, complete with definition:venture tourist. A venture capitalist who has no money in his/her current fund, and so has zero likelihood of investing, but meets startup companies and visits conferences all the...
I have complained here many times that Google won't let me buy a storage upgrade to Gmail without going to Gmail apps. This morning, however, I have had two people email to say that they woke today to discover that...
In case you've somehow missed it, what is almost certainly the largest pump-and-dump stock scam in history is underway. A giant online bot network (a good chunk of which was just created by the recent greetings card spam) has upped...
Limelight Networks, the relatively newly public content delivery network hasn't gone dark, per se, but weak quarterly results -- and tepid revenue guidance -- have the stock getting shellacked today, with it off more than 30%. Combine that with the...
Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb was on Charlie Rose's show earlier this week:...
Nice find: "What was the GDP then?", a great service for finding the real and nominal GDP figures through U.S. history, both total and per capita. Just did it to remind myself about the 11% GDP decline through the credit...
Great comment from Bloomberg's Caroline Baum about the next steps for the Bernanke Fed:The Bernanke Fed, with its model-driven forecast, may turn out to be wrong in its laissez-faire attitude toward tightening credit conditions. It will come to that decision...
Earlier in the year on CNBC I picked Cisco and Akamai as two stocks to benefit from the overall trend toward greater backbone bandwidth utilization for video. Well, I'm one for two. While Cisco is now up 14.5% on the...
By quarter over the last year, the number of times Cisco CEO John Chambers has used the phrase "web 2.0" in each quarterly call:Q1 2007: 0Q2 2007: 0Q3 2007: 9Q4 2007: 11In case you're curious, Cisco's stock is up 4.6%...
There is some fascinating reading on an alleged, wide-ranging mortgage fraud scheme via an indictment brought down recently by the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles. Here is an example of the sort of thing they are accused of:The indictment...
Some made-for-bears stuff from the Telegraph via Drudge:China threatens 'nuclear option' of dollar salesBy Ambrose Evans-PritchardLast Updated: 1:48am BST 08/08/2007The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its...
A post by Kevin Kelleher got me to comment on something here that I've been meaning to mention for a few days: What's the impact of sub-prime losses, and the credit crunch in general, on tech stocks? Kevin argues that...
While I'm admittedly just getting suckered in, I can help but like this press release from MySpace and The Onion announcing a content partnership:THE ONION BRINGS JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY, CORRECT PUNTCUATION TO MYSPACERespected Pillar of Journalism Partners With Fledgling Unknown “Websiteâ€The...
Some portfolio news, so feel free to look away if that sort of thing upsets you: The folks at Dabble DB (in which I am an investor via Ventures West) in Vancouver have launched a fun-to-use Facebook-based todo-list manager called,...
Renault: Realizing the importance of the case, my men are rounding up twice the usual number of suspects. -- Casablanca (1942)A lengthy story about the rise of the Casablanca Stock Exchange ends with a lovely anecdote demonstrating the inherent troubles...
Straight from the press release, here are some interesting highlights from today's new VSS 2007 report on media and communications:Communications is the third-fastest growing sector of the U.S. economy (after agriculture and goverment!!)For the first time since 1997 consumers spent...
Growth of HDTV in China is slow, with only 2-million users forecast by 2011. Why? Check this:"The most important element in the service market is content production," says Simon Sun, In-Stat analyst. "At present, the majority of HDTV content is...
Catching up on some interesting stuff in my linkbox:Germany's caught the subprime fever (IHT)New VSS report shows online ads to overtake newspapers by 2011 (VSS)Skype introduces mood videos (Businesswire)Summary data from VSS's communications industry forecast for 2007 (PRweb)Nine of ten...
I'm spending part of this week at the SIGGRAPH conference, so posting may be more erratic than usual. If any readers are at the conference, feel free to send me a note....
A new measure of residential real estate prices in major metros is being launched by Radar Logic in New York. You can check the current data (in icky PDF form) here, or just look at the front page of the...
Some great (if unsettling) flight delay data out from the Department of Transportation. Among other things, it says that flight delays in the first half of this year at the highest percentage of flights since the DoT began collecting such...
While I enjoyed the piece in the current New Yorker about tactics (on both sides) in the losing war on junk e-mail, it misses an important point. The spam problem is still here, but it's unevenly spread.There are many of us...
Apparently we heavy users of wireless data don't feel loved:Wireless operators are failing to make high average revenue per user (ARPU) users in North America feel special, reports In-Stat (http://www.in-stat.com). More than 60% of these users do not feel that...
In case folks are interested, two persistent searches that I use to track developments leading up to the VMware IPO. First, a Google News search (via this link), and then an Atom feed of the previous search (via this link).Both...
Overseas markets almost all fell on the open, but some have now stabilized somewhat. The Nikkei is currently off "only" 0.9%, while the Hang Seng is off 2.4%. The Shanghai Composite is actually up 1.5%. A number of people I...
I'm not all that interested, one way or the other, in the revelation today that the author of the Fake Steve Jobs blog is actually Dan Lyons, a Forbes editor. I didn't read FSJ very often, and I thought the...
It is unprecedented how completely professional golfer Tiger Woods has dominated the World Series of Golf at Firestone. While he has done well at other tournaments, nothing compares to his crushing performances on the "monster" 7,139-yard South Course at Firestone...
Here is the Bear Stearns press release this afternoon announcing that Warren Spector is resigning as president and head of the fixed income group. It's cheerfully cryptic to the point of happy opacity.Bear Stearns Announces Management ChangesNEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Bear...
Missed this Jim Grant appearance on Bloomberg TV back in mid-July. Well worth watching for its musings on credit markets and mortgage-backed securities: Here is Grant waxing particularly bearish in today Floyd Norris column in the NY Times:"Financial panics don’t...
The mortgage problem in two sentences from a piece in today's WashPoston the rise and fall of zero-down mortgages:Many years ago, a 20 percent down payment for a home was the norm. But as prices escalated, fewer people could afford...
Some fascinating (if intermittently oddball) stuff about luxury travel in a Times of London piece this weekend on Abercrombie & Kent:There is no Abercrombie in Abercrombie & Kent, and there never was. Founder Geoffrey Kent just thought it sounded better...
The thoughtful (if self-confessedly sometimes over-bearish) Jeremy Grantham of GMO has some worth-reading stuff on what he calls the current "anti-risk" bet. I'll quote him in full:The Anti-risk Bet in Perspective:A Once or Twice in a Career OpportunityIn 40 years...
Here is a sneak peek at some links for my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet:Junk bond issues outnumbered non-junk issues for the first time ever in Q1 2007 (CFO) Trading strategy results have begun to correlate in current...
I just got my first bit of sub-prime collapse email spam:From: A spammerTo: Paul KedroskySubj: Some Bad News, But ...Sorry to inform you that the company that was interested in providing you with a good deal for your property has...
Okay, okay, please stop emailing me either a) asking for a link to Jim Cramer's "mortgage Armageddon"comments Friday afternoon on CNBC, or b) sending me a link to same. Because I saw it Friday, commented Friday night on CNBC, and,...
Catching up and emptying my ever-overflowing link box. I promise not to turn into All Mortages, All the Time, but I do have a fair bunch of the stuff today:The U.S. has sneezed. Will the U.K. now catch a housing...
A slow day on the markets turned nasty today, and it ended worse. The market fell off a cliff into the close, losing almost 300 points, with Bear Stearns doing the need on a conference call where executives said the...
My friends Matt and Toni at Wordpress get the Wallstrip treatment today. Funny ending....
While the current media frenzy over subprime may mark a near-term bottom -- the smart folks at Citadel are seemingly betting that way with their Sowood buy at 40 cents on the dollar -- but Jim Rogers doesn't buy it....
For those of you keeping score at home, the current count of mortgage company bankruptcies and forced sales since the start of 2006 is 70. To my knowledge, American Home Mortgage is the first non-sub-prime to go under.[via Bloomberg]...
While it's not unexpected -- the company warned on Tuesday it was spiraling into bankruptcy -- there is something deeply disturbing about the news out of American Home Mortgage tonight. The country's former number three mortage lending company, no longe...
I'm not at AlwaysOn at Stanford, but just watched a good VC roundtable from there available on video. With panelists Roger "Mullet" McNamee (Elevation), Erik Straser (MDV), Paul Deninger (Jefferies), and Bill Gurley (Benchmark). It is an entertaining wander through...
Ryan McIntyre has a great "one month later" iPhone review. Rather than me summarize it -- okay, it's a solid B+ -- read the whole thing....
A certain defunct pundit (to whom I won't link) has a typically silly screed up today about the existence of a bubble in technology. He's wrong, of course, but I'd rather touch on something else. He opens by saying this:Every...
Wish I could see the actual transcript for the five-hour interview with Henry "Brothel-boy" Nicholas summarized in yesterday's L.A. Times:But in a marathon interview that began Tuesday evening and stretched to 3 a.m. Wednesday, Nicholas talked enthusiastically about his eclectic...
After the Club Penguin news today, a colleague of mine sent me the following entertaining note concerning the top five kid-centric virtual worlds (based on Hitwise data):Top 5, Runescape (UK), Webkinz (Can), ClubPenguin (Can), Stardoll (Sweden), Habbo (Finland) are all...
Here are three questions I/we were asked on-air at CNBC tonight as a preview of tonight's MBA Challenge: Something to do with a slogan about cutting 15% from your auto insurance. What current stock is the only remaining member of...
Impressive. The rumored $500m Sony deal for kiddie social network Club Penguin falls through, and Disney comes along with an even better offer: $700m in total, assuming performance targets through 2009 are met. Congrats to Lane and the entire team...
While I'm sure I'll do much worse on-air tonight, I just scored 100% on the short-form MBA Challenge on CNBC's website. Take that Dylan!...
There is another (and more overlooked) Canada/U.S. exchange rate beyond the dollar. People -- and it's seemingly heading for parity too.The number of U.S. citizens who moved to Canada last year hit a 30-year high, with a 20 percent increase...
Making money from the weather is one of my favorite subjects, whether it's destination sites, weather futures, data sets, etc. With the preceding in mind, there is a great overview at Bloomberg today of the myriad speciation going on in...
Worth-watching Bloomberg interview with (outrageously Boy Scout-ish) FCC chair Kevin Martin on new spectrum rules. He calls them a compromise, and not anti-Google....
New proposed New York rules for filming fly in the face of the current democratization of media:New regulations drafted by the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting would require a permit for any type of filming or photography that...
