October 2007
This BBC video had me giggling, so maybe it will have the same effect on you: [via Marc]...
I may get a moment to post later, but I'm largely incommunicado today and traveling. That's why you haven't seen me post anything on the 25-point Fed rate cut, which, given the 8-1 vote in favor, tilted more toward what...
Decent-sized earthquake in Bay Area late yesterday: 5.6 magnitude. More here and here. As an aside, a friend in Milpitas reports that all ATT cell calls began failing, making the iPhone crummy in emergencies, while SprintPCS was fine....
In case any readers are planning to be there, I'm moderating a panel next Tuesday afternoon at Eric Norlin's sure-to-be-excellent Defrag conference in Denver. The subject? Relevance and information overload, topics near and dear to my heart....
Here is the mortgage market quote of the day: The CDO mess has punctured the structured finance market's former central conceit: that the ratings on which it is based are a good measure of underlying risk. Structured finance product ratings...
Yes, it's the day before Fed rate announcement day, which can mean only one thing. Yes, that's right: Time to visit the Ben-in-a-Box Fed Statement Generator (tm). Here it is -- and, as ever, it's strange stuff: Release Date:...
Little did I know, but I'm apparently currently at Davos. No, not that Davos, the other Davos: the North American Venture Capital Summit here in Quebec City, Canada, now fancies itself the Davos of the venture capital set. Here's...
Is the whole idea of "Best Colleges for Entrepreneurs" an oxymoron? I got to thinking about the preceding in scanning Fortune Small Business's new list of the best said colleges. While the number of such programs is up 10-fold over...
Yesterday on CNBC I expressed my strong surprise that the debate about Fed rates cuts today made it seem like it was entirely a matter of 25 vs. 50 basis points, with the latter more or less a certainty. My...
Some savvy commentary from CERA's Dan Yergin today. He argues that oil supply and demand have becoming increasingly "decoupled" from oil prices, and the result is that we are only mad mullah (or equivalent) from $100 oil. Peak oil, at...
The good news: Oracle is likely to make another offer for BEA The bad news: The offer is likely to be less than Oracle's current offer There are few things more embarrassing for companies than getting caught in negative...
Great moments in corporate speak: "I've never seen someone as skilled as Shai at selling abstract concepts." -- Nimish Mehta, a former senior vice president at SAP, in today's WSJ , on another former SAP veep, Shai Agassi, who...
These two factoids won't settle the debate as to whether China's stock markets are currently in a bubble, but I thought it was worth putting them out there -- one bullish, one bearish: While the Shanghai Composite is up a...
A reminder that I'm guesting on CNBC's The Call for the hour this morning from 11am to noon. Check your local listings, plant your corn early, etc....
Will he or won't we? Cut, that is. With a Fed meeting is on the agenda this week -- as if you didn't know -- the nattering is non-stop about Ben Bernanke's next action on behalf of the Fed. (As...
With the news today that Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal is, at his board's strong urging, negotiating his exit from the brokerage firm, speculation has inevitably turned to who will be the next CEO. Larry Fink of Blackrock? John Thain?...
This sure seems unlikely, but a user of web-based instant messaging service Meebo is alleging that AT&T is doing packet sniffing and billing him/her on a per message basis. Given that Meebo is a web-based service, and he has unlimited...
While I'm thinking about books, another book that recently arrived at Casa Kedrosky is worth a mention. The people at Bloomberg sent over a copy of Hedge Hunters by Katherine Burton, a series of profiles of some of the best-known...
I've 'fessed up a number of times to being a Stephen Pyne junkie, with his magnificent Fire in America now nearly thumbed to collapse. With that in mind, I'm understandably looking forward to his new book, due out next week...
I'm not sure I've mentioned it here before, but one of my favorite investment themes is water. There are many tailwinds behind the theme, ranging from declining precipitation in the U.S. southwest, to upgrading of water supplies worldwide in both...
My current favorite favorite picture from the southern California wildfires is this one from the NY Times: It is this ironic shot of new hilltop construction in the urban/wilderness interface viewed through the fork of a tree singed in the...
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.com: Barron's reverses course and picks tech (including Google) (Barron's) The next hot China IPO? (Stalwart) Simon "American Idol" Cowell new infrastructure fund launches...
This post-fire picture from a San Diego neighborhood northeast of here sticks in my brain. Adjacent streets, one where every house but one burned down, and the other where every house stayed unburned except one. (c) Photo San Diego...
Boys and girls, I'm guest hosting CNBC's "The Call" on Monday from 11am-noon. No, the actual hosts aren't gone, but I'm alongside for the hour. Should be fun....
This is not safe for work, but it's still amusing on a Friday. See if you can separate the Fox Business News anchors from the adult entertainment stars in the quiz. If you must know, I got nine right out...
Not to say Countrywide CEO Angel Mozilo might not be right today in his upbeat fourth-quarter forecast for the mortgage market -- if nothing else, the 20+% gain in his stock is something to behold -- but I'm trying to...
You don't have to be a Vista booster or be entirely happy with Microsoft's Facebook adventures to want to own Microsoft. The company is benefiting from a product cycle, as well as from tailwinds in the business market, and neither...
Great quarter from Microsoft today. It was a beat-and-raise quarter, with everywhere you look across the software company's product lines it posted impressive growth. The results were better than I figured Microsoft would put up -- and better than Microsoft...
So, Microsoft has bid over Google for Facebook shares. I should be pleased, right? After all, I've ragged on Microsoft repeatedly for letting Google outbid it in the past, and here, finally, Microsoft went deep and won the deal.If that's...
Here are the slides from my presentation yesterday in San Francisco: | View | Upload your own...
The San Diego fires aren't over, but I'm very briefly on the road. I'm on a one-day up-and-back trip to San Francisco to do a previously-scheduled (private) presentation on venture capital, .400 hitting and the redemption of Immanuel Velikovsky....
I keep wondering if the current fires in southern California are the first Web 2.0 disaster. No, not for the whole idea of Web 2.0, or even for a specific company, just the first disaster to use wholesale the various...
While things have quieted down around my area of town, the fires continue unabated in other parties of the city of San Diego, as well as across San Diego county. The most shocking statistic? This one: An estimated 513,000 San...
Great numbers from Apple today. Unless I'm missing something in my fire-fatigued state, the company turned in a $0.20 EPS beat, while shipping 1.1-million iPhones in the quarter. More later....
Things spotted this morning during the San Diego wildfires while I bought groceries and gassed up the car:Police cars everywhere, and fire trucks screaming by on a regular basisKids walking to school with bandannas over their mouths (what school isn't...
A quick update: My friend (and columnist) Herb Greenberg has been evacuated not far north of me here in San Diego. More on his blog....
If this is October, this must be Santa Ana season here in Southern California. The wind is blowing strongly out of the east, the air is desiccatingly dry, and smoke is reaching us here on the coast from inland...
I'm a junkie for this sort of site traffic data: [comScore via MarketingCharts]...
JOSEPH My dear, young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Cut a few and it will be perfect. MOZART Which few did you...
I had a brief look at the newly launched Twine site last night, the much-ballyhooed new search-semantic-web3 thingie launched by the folks at Radar Networks. I was earnestly trying to figure out what the heck it was good for --...
There is a long, must-read piece on the August quant fund meltdown in the current issue of MIT Technology Review. While it doesn't advance things in terms of naming names for whose unwound leverage sparked things, it does an able...
Google price targets continue to be ratcheted up after last night's beat and raise financial results. Among others, I see this morning that RBC's Jordan Rohan has raised his GOOG target to $725, and he rightly points out that the...
I'm briefly at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, so say hello if you're there and see me wandering by. My high-speed talk with Tim O'Reilly on financial technologies is mid-afternoon....
From Pensions & Investments, more validation for my Money:Tech conference thesis:Institutional investors will spend a projected $1.1 billion on research technology globally by 2010, up from $586 million in 2007, according to a report written by Dushyant Shahrawat, research director...
Reading the just-released revised proxy from Dow Jones for its buyout deal with News Corp. is endlessly entertaining. With its backroom machinations and endless secret names for parties/companies orbiting around this deal (Company A! Mr. E! Company F!), it's like...
Self-serving, of course, but KP's Bill Joy opined recently that it's better to be investing in clean tech than internet companies. I think it's something of a false dichotomy, with there being interesting opportunities in both, but I don't begrudge...
The Seth Tobias story seems to be taking a new twist. While initial reports were that the Florida hedge fund managed died a month ago of a heart attack in his pool, media outlets are reporting today that some are...
I get a lot of invites to trial new beta program/services/products, etc., and I only have time to try a subset of them. It amazes me, however, how many people invite me to try something, without actually having a succinct,...
Just to give another perspective on Fox Business News, the kids at BusinessWeek have a rave about it here. All fair comments, and I hope he's right, but for now I'll just settle for them learning how to spell. In...
Whoops, I was wrong. I had been opining repeatedly on various media that tech was safe from subprime. Apparently not, at least if you have a runaway treasurer, like at Logitech:Logitech International, the U.S.-Swiss computer-peripherals maker, said late on Wednesday...
Not to give Google bears ammunition, but I thought I would do some left-handed writing this morning and give the critics some talking points. You can't truly be a bull on a stock unless you can make a stronger bear...
Well, this is going to a downbeat finding for many Internet idealists. While many had heralded online video as a new medium, with opportunities galore of fringe program, the long tail, and so on, that's not the way it's playing...
If the following quote doesn't have you hiding under your trading desk, nothing will. Be sure to make it to the last sentence: Banks and securities firms hired a record 450 people for commodities [traders] this year, up 33 percent...
Missed this until now, but my cheerfully misguided friend Herb has an entertaining diversionary post up wherein he redefines what it means to be a technology stock. Tired, seemingly, of decrying tech stocks during the current bull run in the...
Lots of noodling about Google's quarterly results, due later today. Here are some debate points to keep in mind: GOOG is priced at 49x this year's earnings, people continually point out, more than Microsoft, Intel and HPGOOG is now the...
Sorry, I just don't buy that Apple never planned to open up the iPhone for other apps. Steve Jobs has been around the industry for too long not to have had that in his plans all along. My guess is...
The latest stock spam campaign involves emails with attached MP3s where instead of the promised Elvis, or Carrie Underwood, you hear a monotone voice saying the following:Hello, this is an investor alertExit Only Incorporated has announced it is ready to...
Granted, it's almost a year-and-a-half after Google first did it, but it's great to see that Yahoo Finance has finally added a ticker auto-complete feature. Type in any random company name, and you will get some suggested possible tickers below....
Tech question: Can anyone out there point to anything that allows you to create a river of news from an arbitrary list of URLs? For example, Dave Winer has done that with the NY Times -- see nytimesriver.com, which I...
Fairly stark stuff in the latest U.S. Treasury International Capital data on foreign holdings of U.S. securities. Adjusted net foreign acquisitions of said securities was around -$85-billion in August....
Here, according to a just-released survey from the Consumer Electronics Association, is what we should perhaps call Maslow's hierarchy of post-industrial needs. It is, in other words, adults and teens Christmas 2007 wish lists: Rank Adults Teens 1 Computers Clothes...
From Eric: Seagate CEO Bill Watkins says the company is sold out on drive capacity for the fourth quarter. Watkins noted in an interview with Tech Trader Daily this afternoon that the company sold 29 million drives in the September...
I'm on the Yahoo quarterly call. Results were okay, almost certainly better than expected. More when news warrants. So far it feels like the calm before the storm. [Update] Okay, that wasn't a bad call, but it also felt sort...
Ah, welcome to the wonderful world of venture capital, where every GP is first quartile by some measure, even it's based on their mailing address. I was reminded of that when reading this pithy quote from Jim Leech of Teachers'...
Google bears will love this: Google's search share declined slightly in the most recent Hitwise data. It is off a scan 0.4%, which will likely be enough for fireworks among long-suffering Google bears. Too bad this sort of small change...
My friend Howard Lindzon's Wallstrip turned one year old today, so huge congratulations to him and to the power trio at Wallstrip: Lindsay, Sean, and Adam. Here is Howard on what the future holds for Wallstrip, and for the markets:...
I'm a sucker for combative exchanges between analysts and CEOs. Does my heart good to see analysts get teeth and take 'em on. From last night's Citigroup call, here is Deutsche Bank analyst Mike Mayo tussling with Citigroup CEO Chuck...
Can someone email me a Bloomberg screenshot with the instant message window open? If you spot this post after 4:30 or so today, ignore it. I don't want to be buried in Bloomberg screenshots....
In case any readers of this site are registered to attend the boffo, blockbuster, sold out, standing-room only, etc., Web 2.0 Summit this Thursday/Friday in San Francisco, Tim O'Reilly and I are doing a standup routine Friday afternoon on Web...
Whoa, turns out today was B-day: The first time a retiring Baby Boomer ever applied for retirement benefits from the Feds:The first Baby Boomer applied today for Social Security benefits, a milestone marking the approaching retirement of a generation of...
Okay, having seen about five minutes of Fox Business programming over the web, as well as scanning the just-launched corollary website, I'm going to cheerfully wax opinionated. The upshot: I am considerably less impressed than I thought I would be....
Here is a sneak peek at some links for my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.com: Profile of hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones (NY Times) Microsoft's $12-billion advertising sales target can only be hit by major acquisitions (AdAge)...
Mention "social networks" in a stock market context and most people immediately think of a host of icky prediction sites that try to get people to wager on stocks & markets. Some of that stuff works, most of it doesn't,...
Whoa, apparently blogs are now authoritative. The NIH has released a style guide for properly citing a blog as an authority in an academic paper. Like Alex, I think it's a little bizarre that they hang on to location in...
The buzz continues about the Fox Business/CNBC smackdown set to begin on Monday, but the interesting thing is most American won't even have a ringside seat. Why? Because Fox Business is likely not on their cable system, the same way...
I've mentioned here before my low-grade mania for mentally re-ordering random collections of letters, a la Scrabble, into words. I had it happen again this morning with the ORCL/BEA deal, with that part of my brain noticing it was seven...
There is lots of buzz these days about sovereign wealth funds, so I just want to register an inane complaint. Why the hell are these large government-owned pools of money called sovereign wealth funds, or, worse yet, SWFs? The name...
Today's Oracle bid for BEA qualifies as a semi-surprise. Many people thought that BEA would be in play eventually, but Oracle as buyer is somewhat of a surprise given the latter company's advancing middleware stack. Nevertheless, today we have...
Ah, the age-old question: Is money worth more than sex? We get the latest test tomorrow, with the WallStreet.com domain going up for auction, a scant six months after porn.com sold for $9.5-million. Moniker, which is handling the auction, claims...
Nice deal for Elevation Partners tonight with the media buyout firm's first exit. Electronic Arts is buying portfolio company Bioware for $850m, which is a pretty spiffy sale for a gaming company. Now, to be fair, it's not a gangbuster...
A fairly remarkable stat from a WSJ story tonight on homebuilder Beazer Homes trying to put recent issues behind it: Beazer reported that 68% of its prospective home buyers canceled their orders in the company's fiscal fourth quarter, which ended...
Two interesting new books I'm reading at Casa Kedrosky: Plight of the Fortune Tellers: Why We Need to Manage Financial Risk Differently, by Riccardo Rebonato Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins, by Tom Perkins More on the former when...
As I frequently say, providing live commentary on market moves is sort of like reporting on Brownian motion in a coffee cup -- but that doesn't prevent people (including me) from doing it and often making unfalsifiable statements. Case...
Most people know that Fed Fund futures can be used to come up with probabilities around what the markets thinks the Fed will do at its next meeting. What people quickly realize, however, is it's pain going from Fed Funds...
Just to geek out for a moment, the Quick Add for Google Calendar add-in for Firefox is nifty. Hit a hotkey from anywhere in Firefox, enter some freeform text in a pop-up box -- like "media interview tomorrow at 12:20"...
Lots of unhappiness about weak September U.S. retail results. Some of that can be blamed on a fading consumer, but there is also ample reason to think it has something to do with the weather. Check the following figure (click...
Here is a highly dubious, but still entertaining stat on the number of Chinese billionaires by year: 2007: 106 2006: 15 2005: 0 (*) [China Daily via Marketwatch]...
The quote of the day goes to a Gartner analyst opining on Microsoft's belated arrival in late-2008 to the hyper-growth virtualization market with Veridian, Microsoft's VMware killer. ""Nothing in their history have they missed for so long." Gosh, so many...
I have some things going on unrelated to the blog, etc., that are are taking up an inordinate amount of my time. Posting will be slow for a period....
If you're anything like me -- and my apologies if you are -- then you struggle daily under the weight of expenses. Too many of them to track, too many places to which to submit them, and no easy way...
Some interesting (if admittedly unrepresentative) inflation data in the latest Zagat New York City Restaurant Guide:While overall restaurant prices in NYC remain the highest in the U.S. at $39.46 per dinner, that's only three cents higher than last year. ......
The Tax Foundation has out its annual list of the top (and bottom) ten U.S. states for business from a tax perspective:Top 10: Bottom 10:1. Wyoming 41. Maine2. South Dakota 42. Minnesota3. Nevada 43. Nebraska4. Alaska 44. Vermont5. Florida 45....
Niklas Zennstrom, founder of Skype and Joost, gets the euphemism of the day award. At a conference today in Hungary he said that Ebay likely "overshot in terms of monetization" in paying $3.1-billion for Skype. Nice phrase, Niklas.[via WSJ]...
The kind people at CXO Advisory Group have done their usual analysis to figure whether bond-meister Bill Gross of PIMCO is a skilled prognosticator. The conclusion? Not so much.Based on our judgment, Bill Gross' forecast accuracy rate is about 42%,...
There is a must-read John Cassidy piece in the current New Yorker on hedge fund manager and trader Victor Niederhoffer. It follows his career, and chronicles how excess leverage helped cause him to blow up (again) this summer, with two...
Via Bloomberg, an amusing gambling proficiency quiz:Questions 1. Blackjack: You are playing at a table with six decks and the dealer always stands on 17. i) You are dealt an Ace and a 4. The dealer is showing a 4....
My friend Barry has a good rant today about the over-aggressive terms in some of the ad deals being pitched at fellow top-traffic financial blogs by major media firms. In particular, Barry is unhappy that these firms are asking for...
There is an interesting interview with Fox Business News' Roger Ailes in Monday's Wall Street Journal, and it includes the following exchange:WSJ: Is there anyone from CNBC you'd like to hire? MR. AILES: Look, I'm the one who put Maria...
SAP announced today that, as per recent speculation, it is buying analytics software vendor Business Objects. The deal is worth $6.8-billion, which is roughly 4.5x current-year sales, or a little better than 60-times this year's projected BOBJ earnings. It is...
From today's FT:The annual art market research index produced by Hiscox, the art insurer, shows that the value of contemporary art has risen by 55 per cent over the past 12 months, an acceleration of the trend over the past...
Eric "I read equity research do you don't have to" Savitz has more on the Yahoo breakup scenario from Bernstein:Here’s his break-up scenario: * Display advertising business, estimated value of $25.488 billion, using comparable valuations for Right Media, aQuantive and...
I'm hearing from a few sources out in quant funds that troubles are building again. After August's misadventures when quant funds lost upwards of 8 percentage points in some cases, things settled down for a while in September, and even...
Fascinating article in today's WSJ on how London (England, not Ontario) has become a kind of theme park for ex-pat billionaires. Of the U.K.'s 10 richest people, just three are originally from here, according to the Sunday Times newspaper's annual...
Hadn't seen this graphical view of Wal-mart's growth before it popped up in a WSJ story today, and it's worth a look....
I remain amazed at many observers' amazement at the inevitable climb in Google share price targets. Today we have Drew Peck at Bear Stearns putting a $700 target on the stock, and it is inevitable that a major equity analyst...
Some quick links people might find interesting:Yahoo has higher value broken up, says a Sanford Bernstein analyst (Reuters)Ticketmaster is cracking down on automated ticket scalping (WSJ)RIM results: revenues and EPS in-line, guidance slightly up (PR)New WSJ entrepreneurship blog (Independent Street)World...
Wise words we might all keep in mind from directly Ridley Scott on why there was so much rain in the scifi classic Blade Runner. For atmosphere? No:Because you can't make a spinner fly without a crank. That's why it...
So you think you want to work at a multi-strategy hedge fund? Read this piece about Highland Capital of Dallas. Mandatory 60-hour work weeks, software-based time-tracking, regular seven-day work weeks, and, yes, great pay. Is it worth it? You decide....
Anyone watched the web promo for Fox Business Channel? It's good, even if their "blogs" are bizarro (you can't read them without some scrolling thingie; you can't subscribe, etc.). Anyway, you can see where FBN is going, which has been...
A quick reminder (for the few of you who needed it) that the RIM conference call is tonight. Listen in here. Should be interesting, given all the speculation around new RIM products, the iPhone price cuts, and let's not forget...
I love my friend Charley Lax at Grand Banks Capital like a son:Charley Lax, managing general partner of Grand Banks Capital in Newton Centre, says the limited partners who put their money into venture capital funds think blogging is "stupid....
I continue to read pieces like this one in today's WSJ about the spread of subprime troubles to unknowing sorts in places like Australia, where a town council was bewildered to discover it was losing money in U.S. subprime, and...
Today on NPR's Talk of the Nation program, social networks. Worth a listen.Oct. 3 · Social networking sites are all about connecting up with friends -- both real-life and virtual -- online. Facebook, MySpace and more, Thursday on Talk of...
Lots of entertaining email after my interview last night during the new Wired Science series on PBS. The topic was finding and funding commercializable nuggets in early-stage science, which, judging by the email response, is a subject that gets people...
To give folks a sense of how unusual the current futures backwardation is in the wheat market -- a subject I wrote about earlier today -- my friend Jeff sent the following screenshot from Bloomberg. It gives the 20-year price...
While some are playing the big decline in hedge fund inflows as the story in the latest Trim Tabs figures, you could equally argue it's a surprise the number stayed positive at all given August's misadventures. Hedge fund inflows in...
Typical La Jolla morning here today, endless sunshine, warm temps, and a few helicopters circling overhead. Yes, helicopters are normal, with them buzzing about doing Cops-style stuff, hanging out over traffic accidents, etc. That's why I didn't think much this...
If this is Wednesday (or Monday, or Tuesday, etc.) it must be time for another moonshot tech IPO. I was relentless early this year calling it the year of the tech IPO resurgence, and that is definitely the way things...
Here is a keeper bubble quote from my VC friend Dave:Having a web bubble of silliness without the Nasdaq north of 5,000 is like a frat party with dealcoholized beer.As a related aside, the context was a press release from...
Yo, BusinessWeek, the Trouble with VCs is not a new story. And Web 2.0 is not a "legitimately exciting frontier". Nevertheless, it is good fun reading this wildly bearish piece about the venture capital business. It touches on some legit...
Just curious, but my main thought in reading the woeful new BTS release on August air traffic delays is, Why isn't there an air traffic data map mashup? Why can't I see the air equivalent of the highway system with...
You know, I completely whiffed on ComScore. Spent a bunch of time on the offering, liked it, pushed it on others, and then got distracted with some other things and never bought stock, not even on its late August lows....
A hedge fund friend points out an interesting semi-anomaly in wheat futures prices that he has been trading: You can sell wheat for Mar '08 delivery at $925/contract, while you can buy July '08 wheat for $600/contract. That's a sizable...
Is Maxim the new prizewinner for largest market capitalization pink sheet stock? With the company having been kicked to pink sheets, its $9.1-billion market cap looks outsized among a more typical pink sheet value of a few million or so....
Speaking of wildfires, my book of the day is Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894. It is the sharply written story of a how a Minnesota town of 1,200 was devastated by a catastrophic firestorm that...
Two curiously elegiac technology-related articles in the major media yesterday and today. The first came in the NY Times, with the subject being the decline in staffed fire lookouts. The focus, in particular, was one Mike Gates who summers in...
According to a recent paper, quantitative investors aren't the only ones who cluster more than expected in the same stocks. The paper looks at trading by a sample of 37,000 retail clients at one of the three largest European discount...
Recently I was golfing as part of a foursome of VCs. Early in the back nine one of the foursome, who was until then playing indifferently by his standards, had to get onto a board conference call, so for the...
A year in the financial life of a startup. A great read.[via Guy]...
News out of Miami today reminded me of a favorite Star Trek episode, "The Man Trap", about a mysterious alien who must have salt to live:Seven men plotted to bring down the U.S. government with attacks ranging from poisoned saltshakers...
Yale beat Stanford again this year on endowment performance. While the former turned in 28% in the past year, Stanford just announced 23% y-o-y performance on the back of international, private equity and ... real estate. Let the rivalry continue:Stanford...
Once you move on from the hedge fund business and you need something about which to get fired up, golf doesn't always fill the bill -- unless you go extreme, of course. With Tiger Management founder Julian Robertson having announced...
Gosh, this Google thing could work out after all. Now that the company's stock is pushing through all-time highs at $591, I wonder where all the Google bears are that were besieging me a month or two ago when I...
Turns out that the main driver in the latest avalanche of email spam wasn't stock stickers -- that was earlier this year -- but malware-toting emails advertising in their subject lines nude pictures of Angelina Jolie. If spammers figure out...
Interesting to see that BBC Worldwide has bought travel content company Lonely Planet. The deal gives a couple of data points for content purchases, so let's play with 'em.Lonely Planet has two main businesses: print publishing and web content/community. Assume...
As expected, the Financial Times has announced it is, as of mid-October, kinda dropping its paid subscription model in favor of an ads-driven model. The cause? The rumored imminent announcement of a free online Wall Street Journal. Why only "kinda"?...
Some highly funky Digg-style stuff in a highly Web 2.0-ish community update to CBS Marketwatch. In essence, they have created a Digg-style page, complete with comments, recommendations, ticker picks, etc. Curious about thoughts. Anyone out there think they would use...
That Paul Kedrosky guy pops up everywhere. Won't he just be quiet? Anyway, last week I was hanging with Lindsay on Wallstrip, and this week I'm in a sitdown interview on the new PBS program Wired Science. A Conversation with...
Fair enough, eBay's deal for Skype hasn't panned out and there are more writedowns coming. Was it a mistake though? In other words, was there anything we knew at the time that would have let you to believe that Skype...
Deutsche Bank is reporting this morning that channel checks are upbeat for Apple right now, especially iPod Touch and iPhone:Channel checks highlight very strong demand for iPod touch, iPhone and Macbook Pro We conducted a series of channel checks at...
Some interesting stuff on changing debt markets in Bill Gross's latest column on the Pimco site, including a back-handed love note Jim Cramer:Yet the validity of Cramer’s [Fed knows nothing rant on CNBC] rant remains to be disproved. The modern...
Some multiples from Nokia's announced $8.1-billion deal for NAVTEQ today:10x sales ($800m forward annualized)41x earnings ($200m forward annualized)This GPS/nav thing could one day be big....
