December 2007
Pretty webcam shot from last night at sunset looking over Vancouver toward the snow-covered North Shore mountains. [via Katkam]...
I have spent so much time recently (don't ask) thinking about spontaneous knot formation that my eyes nearly crossed with glee upon spotting this article about tangles. The following snippet is downright spooky: They put a string in a cubic...
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.com: The year in storage IPOs (Byte & Switch) The most unhinged business & investment moments of the year (WSJ) Six innovators to watch...
Some economy-related snippets from humorist Dave Barry in his year-end review. I'm particularly fond of his subprime comments, like the problems with dogs and mortgages, and Wall Street executives being forced to accept lucrative retirement contracts. On the dollar: On...
As a skeptic and empiricist I have an admitted weakness for forensic analyses of political posturing, but it's still remarkable the falsehoods that candidates so blithely spew in an age when they are so easily debunked: Mitt Romney says he...
Provocative comment in a CS Monitor piece about a (rare) South African entrepreneur: The problem is self-esteem. For so many of us, it is too low....
Here, according to the Air Travelers Association, are the top ten airline passengers trends/issue for 2008: The Battle with the Government over Delayed Flights versus High Fares will Continue. The Airline System will Continue to Operate at or Near Capacity....
Eye-opening chart comparing wine and oil prices in 2007. Remarkable. [Wine Collector via WashPost]...
Here is a fairly remarkable/demoralizing stat. According to entertainment blogger guy Perez Hilton, he generated a scant $5,000 in revenue on 25-million YouTube page views. More here. [via Rob Hyndman]...
As most who know me can testify, I struggle regularly with the whole punctuality thing, but I'm getting better. By way of self-defense, however, here is writer Evelyn Waugh on the subject: Punctuality is the virtue of the bored. ...
I shaved my head. And I'm not sad, and just maybeI'm to blame for all I've heard. And I'm not sure. - from Lithium , by Nirvana (1991) Yeesh, we're turning Transportation Safety Administration airport inspectors into a cross...
My favorite quote today comes from a Financial Times lunch interview with ex-tennis player Andre Agassi: Retirement from tennis must have left a gap in his life, I say. “No,†he insists. “I tell you the area where I have...
Been meaning to post about this for a week or so now, but holidays keep intervening. Anyway, the Remember the Milk task list Firefox extension for Gmail is fantastic. It is, as the name suggests, a mere todo/task manager, but...
Meant to mention it sooner, but I was on CNBC's Kudlow & Co. back on the 26th talking about the 2008 economic outlook. In more current media news, I am interviewed in today's NY Times for a piece about the...
Will someone please explain to me why Scripps (NYSE:SSP) is not a raging short? Much like my earlier call on some of the overpriced aspirational restaurants, i.e., PFCB, CAKE, etc., that are concentrated in subprime-struck regions, Scripps strikes me as...
Three brief quotes about long/short funds, one of which I read today, and the other two that immediately came to find upon reading a longer piece about the troubles said funds have had this past year: Historical relationships that hold...
Once again I'm hanging out with family and the blog-o-sphere goes mad about another inane issue. Earlier in the week it had something or another to do with the author of a fake blog about a real CEO writing as...
Happy Christmas eve. I'm catching up and emptying my burgeoning browser tabs. May add more here as day goes on. So Many ETFs, So Few Investors Who Care (TheStreet) It's a doggy NYSE (PRnewswire) Death of DVDs (Eric) Great post/analysis...
Once again, I need a new word. What do you call it when an online pseudo-scandal emerges, explodes into everywhere-ness and then disappears into self-referential inanity and irrelevance, all while you're not paying attention? Offline, you might call it a...
Benford's Law it isn't, but this is still a fascinating research finding from Chinese stock markets: This paper builds on prior research by analysing the impact of cultural factors on both price clustering and price resistance in China''s stock markets....
Here is a sneak peek at a few links from my weekly Weekend Reading column at TheStreet.com: Mayor Bloomberg calls ethanol subsidies in new bill an "outrage" (NY Observer) The big economic risks to watch for in 2008 (Economist) Business...
Absolutely fantastic graphical animation of U.S. real estate price changes from 1975 through September 2007. The 1999-2003 transition from relative real estate normalcy to red-drenched nuttiness is riveting and alone worth the price of admission alone (were there one). The...
SEC Commissioner Chris Cox announced on Friday a fun new tool for comparing executive compensation at U.S. public companies. Built on the XBRL reporting standard that he is steadfastly supporting in its ongoing roll out, you can compare executive compensation...
Been in meetings and coming to the RIM earnings breakout story a little late today, but hard not to feel that with this quarter's results RIM has successfully crossed the consumer chasm. In other words, while consumer sales have been...
Subprime lawsuits are rising rapidly, which you had to know was going to happen. Hey, what were all those lawyers going to do after the decline in option-backdating suits? Get real jobs? Become economically useful? Naaah. Somewhat more seriously, the...
You can't tell your players without a scorecard, so here is a quick list of the major U.S. investment banks and the Asian investor who has made a recent cash infusion: Bank Investor Amount Morgan Stanley China Investment Corp $5b...
I love these Zen-ish financial questions: Why do hedge funds stop reporting performance? As most people will know, hedge funds are not required to report performance, but many still do, at least until they don't. So, why do they stop?...
Travel meta-search firm Kayak is apparently buying competitor Sidestep. Not entirely surprising, but still interesting in this consolidating space where Kayak is the clear leader. Purchase price is allegedly $200m. via Techcrunch...
Apparently E-Trade is gunning for some sort of record. After tumbling, ascending, then declining again, all in a few days, it's now doing the water torture thing to investors, having fallen for eight days running. Here an excruciating series of...
This is a pre-holiday joke, right? No-one would use the world "fluctuate" in a real business headline, would they?...
Commercial real estate is Wall Street's next crisis. Portfolio posits as much, which is not news to anyone who has been following the bouncing bean of loan syndication across markets, but it's still a decent read. In their own way,...
Okay, maybe only I care, but I think it's great that the Wall Street Journal has newly (I think) added auto-complete to its on-screen search box. You get suggested tickers, plus, almost as useful, you get related topics from the...
I'm discovering that I'm not the only one not going to the massive Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early next month. Dating myself, I know, but I found it more interesting and useful a decade ago. Now it seems...
The $3.1-billion Google deal for display advertising firm Doubleclick has received Federal Trade Commission approval, removing the last major hurdle (unless you really think Europe does it in) to its completion. Most of the recommendation analysis is worth a quick...
Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman was on CNBC this morning talking about his company's new advertising deal with Microsoft. The interviewer was the usually astute David Faber, but he missed a key Dauman comment. It came at the end of a...
I'm sure others will have the conference call transcript up shortly, but today's Sallie Mae call was, in a word, awesome. Profanities, short tempers, and threats of metal detectors: It was better than an Overstock call, and that's saying something....
Tonight the NY Times reported that Gerson Lehrman Group, the newfangled Web 2.0-ish (in the sense that it's tech-heavy and peer-to-peer) equity research outfit, has sold a 25% equity stake to Silver Lake Partners. According to the NYT, the deal...
I tried to come up with something useful to say about the National Venture Capital Association's forecast/survey for venture capital in 2008, and about the best I can up with is that it's largely indistinguishable -- both in topics and...
Much heralded real estate search and valuation service Zillow seemed perfectly timed for the last two years, and now it seems, well .... vaguely embarrassing. After all, the company is valued, allegedly, at more than $350-million and it raised $30-million...
My friend Barry is more optimistic than I am about the business acumen of television writers, not to mention the entertainment industry smarts of venture capitalists, but I applaud his applause anyway. Television execs are doing themselves no favors by...
Catching up on a few things in a day filled with meetings and calls: Congrats to the folks at Kango for announcing their funding. Having played with it a bit, it's nicely done Congrats to Weiting and everywhere at SocialPicks...
Geeking out over here, but after much legal saber-rattling and general fooling around, New Line and MGM have signed a deal with director Peter Jackson to do two (!) new movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien's classic book The Hobbit. New...
One of the wisest words anyone ever said to me about the venture business is this, "No-one raises a second seed fund". Why? Because seeds funds are really, really hard to do, and there are really only two possible outcomes:...
Catching up and emptying my burgeoning browser tabs: Out of the shadows: How banking’s secret system broke down (FT) The year in review 2007 (TheDeal) Mortgage-Relief Plan Divides Neighbors (WSJ) Why markets believe banks are behind the curve (FT) Ancestors...
Whoa, apparently GOOG-411 is putting us all into the matrix doing unpaid labor for Google. Fascinating. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds...
I really don't know how best to summarize IowaHawk's you-are-there white-trash treatise on the origins of the subprime crisis other than to say, read it. If you crossed Hunter Thompson and Michael Lewis, you might get something this angry and...
I hadn't heard of these guys before, but I'm amused to see that some outfit called Thrasher Funds has launched a new fund to allow people to invest around mobile/Web 2/GenXY, etc. I know, I know, but at least hold...
Interesting to see how Wall Street is finally figuring out that Web 2.0 technologies aren't mere novelties. Two companies (Cake and Fidelity) are profiled in this Wall Street & Technology piece, so it's worth a scan with the Money:Tech conference...
Barron's columnist Gene Epstein has out a holidays list of economics books worth reading: Simple Rules for a Complex World Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World's Largest Private Company Immigrants:...
Pardon me geeking out for a moment, but some recent research on rogue waves turns out to have interesting implications in fiber optics. The notion of non-Gaussian "L-distributions" alone is worth the read -- with myriad market implications -- but...
Thought-provoking new paper out on investing around stock market bubbles: We document patterns in U.S. industry returns that support riding bubbles as an optimal response, consistent with the theory of Abreu and Brunnermeier (2003). An investor who rides bubbles can...
Around the late spring of 2006 Barron's carried a survey of stock strategists who rhymed off a list of things that might cause the stock market to get unsettled in 2007. Nowhere on that list was subprime, which made it...
Jim Grant does a nice job in the weekend NY Times showing why bears are so darn compelling. His column on the coming recession, and the U.S. debt load, is compelling, empirical, and, yes, lyrical, like an unholy offspring of...
Moments ago during President Bush's economic speech & press conference: We're not bailing people out; we're helping them refinance their money. Clip 'n' save....
You knew this was coming: A quick visit to FlightWait. It's unsurprisingly unpleasant at Chicago, Washington, and New York airports, but, then again, not as bad as back at Thanksgiving. You can scan the ever-entertaining JetBlue cancellation page here. And...
This storm over eastern North America is massive. In perusing the satellite shots, and including the portion of it over water, the storm looks roughly 1/3 to 1/2 the size of the continental U.S., which would put it at around...
A brother of mine in Ottawa, Canada, just sent me this photo of his backyard during the current snowstorm. The thing under the puffy, marshmallow-like two-foot pile of snow is a backyard patio table. No, really....
I'm a fan of investor and Elevation Partners' co-founder Roger McNamee -- he's smart, contrarian, and unabashedly marches to his own drum -- so it's no surprise that I avidly consumed the lengthy and well-written Amy Wallace piece (hey,...
The NY Post piece today on the collapse of primetime television is worth more thought and consideration. In particular, the comments from GE's Jeff Immelt on the financial future of television -- "the TV network business has to change, and...
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.com. Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft (New York Times) Trump's a grump about column on his 'priceless' tips (Los Angeles Times) Is...
A story in the WSJ got me trying to excel tonight at the Traveler IQ online game. Well, there went the evening. God, I thought I was so much better at geography. Depressing....
The inevitable has happened, and, as tipped here previously, California governor Schwarzenegger has conceded that the state budget deficit is ballooning to record levels. From forecasting breakeven, as of last August, the state is now saying that it is looking...
If you think about it, the classic Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life is really about subprime mortgages. An example: George Bailey's emotionally manipulative speech directed at bank manager Mr. Potter in support of a $5,000 home loan given...
Catching up and emptying my browser tabs after a busy day of non-posting: Off-roading addicts trapped in Malaysian jungle (Bloomberg) Warren Buffett talking U.S. deficits in San Francisco (Rational Angle) Crazy For China (Forbes) Is China For Real? (Journal of...
Sensationally interesting January 2008 issue out of the Journal of Indexes. The subject is China, and there is lots of thought-provoking stuff. Go read it....
It hasn't launched yet, but I find myself wondering already whose businesses Google's soon-to-be-launched Knol service will break. At the very least, by paying people a share of ads running on sub-sites sure to rank high in Google results the...
Must read from tomorrow's WSJ: How Goldman Won Big on the Mortgage Meltdown ...The group's big bet that securities backed by risky home loans would fall in value generated nearly $4 billion of profits during the year ended Nov. 30,...
Okay, this press release from the Corn Refiners' Association doesn't go so far as to claim that high fructose corn syrup cures blindness, but it comes damn close. Nevertheless, as an example of PR spin and wilful statistical abuse in...
Sad stuff, this Mitchell Report on drug use in Major League Baseball. In giving it a quick read, however, with my stock ticker hat on, about the only company that shows up in a negative way is Quest Diagnostics (NYSE:DGX),...
Even though the stock market has rightly been called the triumph of the optimists, with bulls stomping bears over and over for one hundred years, stock market bears not only haven't gone away, but they generally have the most compelling...
It's nice to see that Farecast's air travel price prediction service now includes Canada (sort of). Mind you, you can't seemingly predict fares between San Diego and Vancouver, nor between Toronto and Vancouver, so I'm not really clear on what,...
Catching up and emptying my browser tabs: Beijing lectures US on weak dollar (FT.com / Asia-Pacific) Home Equity | Negative Equity Calculator (This is Money) TNS: US Advertising Spend Grew 0.2% in First Nine Months of 2007 (This is Money)...
When I was growing up my mother used to say the same person caused every mishap around our house. That person stuck a screwdriver in the TV, broke the talking robot, hid the dirty dishes under the fridge, poured lemonade...
Quiz question for readers. First, however, a quote:"In the past 25 years, at least one aircraft a month overran a runway somewhere in the world - one aircraft a month," said Wendy Tadros, chair of the [Transport Canada Safety Board]....
I really like the idea that my friends at TheStreet.com are now putting out a daily report on the most searched-for tickers -- metadata is wonderful stuff -- but where is the text to go along with the video report?...
As Martin Barnes says in the latest from BCA, the Fed gets an "F" for clarity in its recent communications. Despite have declared that it will be more straightforward and less opaque, here is what we have seen in recent...
Catching up and emptying my browser tabs: John Hawks Anthropology Weblog (Source) Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution (application/pdf Object) (Source) Why Pregnant Women Don’t Tip Over (Source) Confirmed: Leaving PodTech, Scoble finally finds a real job (Source) AppleInsider |...
I just finished watching my pick as the best film of 2007. Its name? Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. Granted, I didn't exactly see many films in 2007, but nevertheless, I know greatness when I see it. This...
With the Twitter messaging service seeing a new round of rapid growth, it's fun watching people falling all over themselves doing some meme-labeling. Twitter is a conversation ecosystem! Twitter is a two-way conversation! Twitter is a conversation hub! It's Twitterific!...
A few more interviews like this one from Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and naked short-sellers and stock manipulators won't have anything to do: BYRNE: ... I do think that we are in — I have been saying for about two...
In musing about today's Federal Reserve committee meeting, and the likely rate cut, I wandered over to Google Trends. How have things been looking at Google with respect to people searching for "fed rate cut", and where are people the...
Catching up and emptying my browser tabs: Ranking cites by airline seat-miles, headed by Cincinatti (WSJ) Self-organized criticality & power laws in the stock market (Mauldin) Size frequency distributions for snow avalanches (AGU) Tech spending to slow in 2008 (WSJ)...
Probably the best executive non-apology apology of all time: ex-media baron Conrad Black to the court in his sentencing hearing today: Conrad Black rose moments ago to address the court, unusually sotto voce and subdued - at least to begin...
Congrats to my friends at Arch Ventures for closing Arch VII at $400m. What Arch does -- starting companies from early-stage science -- is very, very hard, and they deserve the support they get from LPs. More here....
Interesting that Microsoft has landed CNBC for online targeted ads. The latter company claims 2.6-million uniques a month at the site, and Microsoft says it will ads against that traffic, as well as in combination with buying ads on MSN...
Traveling today, so posting may be lighter than usual. Then again, it may not. Btw, who is this "Fed" person I keep hearing so much about? Apparently something's happening to him/her/it tomorrow at 2pm....
Worst business deals of 2007 (via Time): Top 10 Worst Business Deals http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/top10/article/0,30583,1686204_1686305_1692095,00.html 1. The Public Invests in Blackstone Group 2. Bear Stearns Cancels Everquest Financial IPO 3. DaimlerChrysler Pays to Unload Chrysler 4. Microsoft Overpays for Facebook 5. Cerberus...
Best business deals of 2007 (via Time): Top 10 Best Business Deals http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/top10/article/0,30583,1686204_1686305_1691971,00.html 1. News Corp. Buys Down Jones For $5 Billion 2. Blackstone Buys Equity Office Properties Trust for $39 Billion 3. Google Buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion 4....
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.com. The Fed will cut rates next week by a quarter-point, plus another quarter of soothing words (NY Times) A (flawed) list of the...
Religion and business don't mix, at least not well and not on Fridays at the Wall Street Journal. Case in point: A semi-innocent question asked on the work-life balance blog at the WSJ having to do with finding time in...
Well, here's something I didn't realize. PBS talker Charlie Rose is a Kleiner Perkins limited partner, i.e., an investor in the famous venture fund. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised -- Charlie isn't poor -- but I can't recall in...
Apparently Christmas trees are being caught in Europe in an upward price spiral. Amusing reading....
No idea why, but I'm endlessly fascinated by the ever-increasing number of smuggling tunnels being found between the U.S. and Mexico near here in San Diego. With the most recent tunnel found this week -- a 1,300-foot engineered marvel, complete...
Not a particular surprise given that it has been chattered about for some time, and pretty much all of its competitors are already doing the same thing, but a job ad from the Wall Street Journal confirms that the company...
Lots of chatter about the Federal Reserve Meeting next week. Initially there was some thought that there might be no rate cut in December, and then it quickly jumped to a 25-basis-point cut, and now a 50-basis-point is seemingly banked...
Missed this until now. Apparently Cliff Asness's $4-billion AQR Absolute Return quant fund lost 5.8% in November, on top of 3.2% in October, bringing the full-year figure to negative 11.9%. Ouch. More here....
I complained earlier about the 1-800 number President Bush promoted for credit counseling during his press conference today. Later that number mutated magically to a 1-888 number (1-888-995-HOPE), which struck me as strange -- even if I could get through...
Nice comment from Rick Bookstaber on how amateur-hour behavior in marking to market leads to unnecessary credit market alarmism: I have seen a number of sources extrapolate the E-Trade transaction, asking what would happen if all the Level 3 positions...
Breakingviews TV is worth a look. Love all these guerilla biz "TV" services, even if they're all admittedly still somewhat amateurish -- in a nice way....
Perhaps unsurprisingly, U.S. adoption of big-screen TVs has had unintended -- and tragic -- consequences. This story is in the San Diego paper today: A 3-year-old girl has died from her injuries after a television and dresser toppled on top...
My friend Nouriel as a typically lucid comment on the subprime bailout. A snippet: What one should thus clarify is a lot of the nonsense that one has heard in the last few days about this proposal. This nonsense takes...
I think the big news on the Bush Administration's subprime bailout is that it somehow was able to convince 61 economists to agree on something: They don't like it. Read the whole letter here, and pay attention to the signers....
Bush just said at his news conference the solution to subprime is available via calling 1-800-995-HOPE. I called; the line is busy. Wonder if it's an offshore call center? Anyway, will keep trying and report back whether I get HOPE....
While it was nothing like that other Big Wednesday back in 1998 in Hawaii, yesterday brought the largest waves in a few years to San Diego. Regular sets were 10-12 feet, and there intermittent sets to 20-feet, and even a...
Three quotes that I came across recently come from disparate sources: golfer Tiger Woods and Foo Fighter founder Dave Grohl. Tiger Woods on returning to golf after a break: First day I hit it like a god. Next day I'm...
Unbelievable. Dow Jones has launched a 2008 Summer Games index. Of course, instead of being something useful, like a prediction market of who will win the most medals, it is defined as follows: The index universe of the Dow Jones...
This kinda has to be seen to be believed, and it's definitely linkbait, but it's still amusing stuff. Some accounting students at Texas A&M rap a take on the new FAS 159 accounting standard, marking to market, credit, etc. etc....
Readers of this site will know I'm a statistics junkie, so herewith some highlights from the latest issue of American Statistical Association's ever-fun journal: Turning points in the Iraq conflict: Reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo in political science Chocolate...
Hard not to notice that Genentech began sliding today well before the FDA announced its decision on Avastin. Something leak on the FDA website? Insiders lose their minds? Hey, maybe it was one big coincidence. [Update] Okay, I'm told by...
Returning to a bugbear for me, we need better webcam headsets. Specifically, I want a headset that uses one ear bud on a wire and an attached lavalier microphone. Why is there nothing like that out there? It's completely nuts....
Anyone planning to go to TED@Aspen? I know, I know, it's a mere electronic shadow of the real thing, but it's nice to imagine combining skiing and interesting conversation. Speaking of TED, anyone been a regular there recently? My...
Speaking of subprime collateral damage and the Pottery Barn rule of You Break It, You Bought It, I am wondering about the current troubles with Florida's State Board of Administration pooled funds. As you may recall, the fund was closed...
In an otherwise downbeat and depressing story tonight about a young New York couple caught for insider trading, and whose two-year-old son will end up bearing much of the brunt, there was this lovely revelation from the couple's lawyer: At...
Apparently the Pottery Barn rule -- you break it, you bought it -- applies to subprime-afflicted banks as well as to irritatingly aspirational home-thingie stores. Case in point: Tonight's story from the Telegraph about one possible outcome for badly-busted U.K....
I must have been sent this video about the current bubblicious Valley environ twenty times today, but resisted watching it until now. You know what? It's actually amusing. As a related aside, my main reaction to the early screen showing...
Ouch. Bill Miller looks set for two straight years of lagging the S&P 500 after beating if for fifteen consecutive years. Conceding upfront that he is a very smart and skilled guy, anyone want to change their estimate, ex post,...
"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." That is the defense Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is mounting for his troubled deal with subprime lenders to supposedly cut people some slack. Fair enough. The "perfect" shouldn't be the...
Surprise, my friend Herb Greenberg agrees with me about Ben Stein's loopy weekend NY Times column. He thinks it was a huge stretch, and told Stein same. The main difference in our views: I think Stein jumped the shark, writing...
While I am in the camp that says Citadel's Ken Griffin got a very good deal on E-Trade's asset-backed security portfolio, at 27 cents on the dollar, and considering defaults are over-estimated, but maybe the deal was even better than...
There was a segment on CNBC moments ago citing some ICSC/UBS data that purportedly showed most consumers had something like 21% of their Christmas shopping done, down from 25% last year. The factoid stopped me cold. How do we know...
My bearish friend Nouriel Roubini has a typically lucid and impassioned comment up calling for central banks worldwide to cut aggressively and now. He cites Canada's surprise rate cut today as an example, and continues: Today the Bank of Canada...
Some wildly bullish musing on content and the likelihood of related acquisitions from the very financially savvy Alan Meckler of Mecklermedia. The Internet has finally achieved what I had predicted in the mid-1990s: that the Internet would spawn an enormous...
Whoa, bad day in capital markets. I was sent this Google Finance screenshot by a reader earlier today: Down -2894660000.00%? That was briefly one nasty day. Happily, however, things have recovered smartly....
Check this: Some monster wave sets -- 25 feet! -- coming to SoCal tomorrow in the approaching Pacific storm. More here, here, and here....
How come investor Jim Rogers has all the best book titles? Investment Biker was a great title, and his new book A Bull in China is right up there too. Anyway, the fund manager and boffo China bull has...
Catching up and emptying my browser tabs: CNBC launches an energy blog with my friend Melissa Francis, but where's the RSS? (CNBC) Jim Roger is, quel surprise, still boosting all things China (Bloomberg) Totally predictable, but Canada has cut rates...
The NYSE should simply concede the obvious and ask the various television networks to ante up money to support actors futzing in front of a trader backdrop in the cavernous NYSE trading rooms. Call it a cost of doing business,...
I have set a record this morning. I have officially been been forwarded by Wall Street-ers today's Seth Tobias story from the New York Times more times than any other single story. That says something. So, are the allegations true...
With news late yesterday that Google was delivering a new feature in Gmail, the company hit a kind of recent low. Colored labels in Gmail? That is worth an announcement? Next up: Gmail tastes great! Or is that Gmail's less...
Huge congrats to my friends Leila and Paul at Idee for landing a deal with Digg to look for duplicates in new submissions at the newly launched Digg Images. Great stuff. By way of background, Idee is little-known, but nifty....
This past month was worse for hedge funds than was August of 2007. Granted, we don't know the distribution of badness, so maybe there were fewer true outlier funds, but I'm still expecting some entertaining "Dear LP" notes soon. Hedge...
Welcome to Bizarro World in the land of personal computer upgrades. Normally operating system upgrades drive PC purchases, but today the situation is arguably the reverse. Why? Because I keep hearing from people who want to upgrade their PC but...
Fast Company has an attention-getting anti-Apple cover piece out in its new December issue on Apple's supposed Achilles heel. No time to critique it, but feel free to add yours here....
I think we need to create a drinking game around U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Feel free to add subprime/bailout/SIV items, but here some of mine around U.S. dollar policy: When Paulson says he has been "very clear" about the...
Financier Carl Icahn as stand-up comic? From 2003, but highly worth watching. [via Livermore Report]...
I know a few of my readers are in U.S. airports today, and, as they are painfully aware, they picked a bad day to fly. More here at FlightWait....
Whoa, apparently European banks are newly following the Helicopter Ben model of currency distribution: A German motorist surprised by euro notes swirling in the air around her car hit the brakes and collected a "substantial amount of money" before turning...
Like most people, I am painfully and personally aware of the behavioral finance finding that investors exhibit loss aversion, generally getting more pain from losses than pleasure from gains. Interestingly, however, loss aversion apparently reverses itself when smaller amounts of...
Catching up and emptying my burgeoning browser tabs: Fascinating discussion of Fibonacci sequences in nature (BBC) MySpace + Skiers = SkiSpace? (SkiSpace) YouTube leads in online video market with 28% share (MarketingCharts) Who clicks on ads? No-one you want to...
Interesting stuff from a recent mobile campaign run by Land Rover: So far, the campaign has garnered 2.5 million impressions. But the click-through rate on the iPhone was 0.3%, higher than the average of 0.22% for the entire campaign, she...
Latest Indian venture capital data is out: Venture capitalists invested more than $777 million in 57 deals for entrepreneurial companies in India during the first three quarters of 2007, according to the Quarterly India Venture Capital Report published for the...
I keep getting this question, so a quick reminder that you can get all these posts -- and more -- via my Twitter feed. Subscribe to updates here....
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over TheStreet.com. Many analysts argue mortgage plan only delays pain (Reuters) Automated trading to comprise 90% of futures by 2010 (Risk) House bill taking shape with...
I'm trying really hard to care about this whole Facebook Beacon imbroglio -- the social network launched a new advertising-ish service whereby your friends could see what you had recently bought, and then privacy advocates promptly lost their minds --...
