January 2008
While Google generally weaved, bobbed, and successfully skirted the issue on its conference call tonight, the main data point behind Google's weaker than expected results is shown in the following graph: Granted, the law of large numbers applies to Google...
Google's results are out, and it looks like we have a species of miss from the search/advertising kingpin. Keeping in mind that the company doesn't give guidance, per se, net revenues, while up 17% in the quarter, were $3.39-billion, below...
The expression "mortgage rates" made it last week onto Hitwise's list of fast-growing searches on major search engines, like Google. I mentioned this earlier in a brief link, but I now have more data via Hitwise. The uptick was undoubtedly...
Quote of the day comes from a seminar on repugnance (don't ask) earlier this month at the American Enterprise Institute. The speaker is Paul Bloom of Yale University. “The problem is not that economists are unreasonable people, it’s that they’re...
On a busy travel day, emptying my burgeoning browser tabs: Top 10 Entertainment & New-Release Movie Online Ad Spenders (Marketing Charts) comScore Releases 2007 U.S. Internet Year in Review (comScore) "Mortgage rates" made the list of fastest-growing search terms last...
Michael Shermer's new book The Mind of the Market is well worth reading. It applies recent developments in evolution and brain research to economics, including such topics as snap purchases, trust, financial decision-making, etc. For those of you without the...
What is the relationship between corporate earnings and stock market performance? The naive view says that higher earnings -- or at least the anticipation thereof -- leads to a higher market. But is it so? Well, let's just that it's...
What was the best book you read last year, investments-related or otherwise? I know Steve Jobs says people don't read books, but I sure see a lot of people reading something or another between covers. And speaking for myself, books...
Maybe it's just me, but there is something sort of bizarre about Federal Reserve board member William Poole's dissent on last week's rate cut, and then non-dissent on this week's cut. In short, he dissented on the 75-basis-point cut, saying...
Search and ad kingpin Google reports Q4 results tomorrow, and it will be a lightning rod. While most people are expect a solid quarter, there is a chance of a hiccup given reported weakness in U.S. search inventory toward the...
Good missive today from Tom Sowanick of Clearbrook Financial arguing that most investors are filtering out good economics news, ignoring the Fed's highly stimulative econo-therapy, and their portfolios are therefore not aggressive enough: Consider that the recession mongers feasted on...
From a Planalytics email today, some wild weather across the U.S.: There was a 105 degree F. difference in high temperatures between the -17 measured at Devils Lakes, North Dakota and the 88 degree reading at McAllen, Texas. Many cities...
Good rant in the NY Times letter section today about London's Heathrow Airport as the worst airport in the world. It certainly gets my vote. To the Editor: Regarding the Journeys column "Europe's Worst Airports: Congestion and Other Terminal Illnesses...
Herb Greenberg was saved by Ma Bell today in our scheduled "blogger bears" debate live on CNBC. The network was getting a bad signal from the studio here in San Diego, so they yanked the segment at the last second....
I posted two days ago here on the Anasazi in Temecula, California, how subdivisions in that area are rapidly emptying out via foreclosure. Here, via ForeclosureRadar, is graphical evidence. Along the east side of the 15 freeway just north of...
It's so tempting to jump on Yahoo in here. Whatever your feelings about the search/advertising company's strategic and tactical miscues, or about the problems the company is having coming up with a crisp and coherent plan for where it goes...
I'm on CNBC's Power Lunch tomorrow (Wednesday) at 9:45am PST (12:45pm EST) debating my friend Herb Greenberg about all these damn blogger bears. And, while I'm thinking of it, I'm also guest hosting The Call on CNBC from 11am to...
Today's financial results from Yahoo were weak and worrisome. The company's value as a standalone company is spiraling downward, as is its value as an acquisition, strategic or otherwise, and drastic action is required. Here is a company that, despite...
Gorgeous day here in Palm Desert. Toughest part is staying focused on Demo 2008 given clear skies and magnificent views....
A few weeks ago I said here I wasn't going to read econo-talkshow host Ben Stein's NY Times columns any more. They are anecdotal arguments from pseudo-authority rife with pandering and half-cooked conspiracy theories. In other words, they are just...
Catching up and emptying my burgeoning browser tabs: Metal-workers versus ballerinas (NY Times) Tentpegs of the World, Unite! (Underbelly) Tiger's Julian Robertson roars again (Fortune) Why Ben Stein is best ignored (DealBreaker) Reuters launches Stock Buzz (Reuters) Latest John Mauldin...
Here is a fun telecommuting job for someone. It's playing "tech-spotter" for the ever-eclectic TED conference: Tech-spotter / Researcher To keep TED at the absolute forefront of all things interesting, we're hiring a part-time researcher/tech-spotter to continually scan the cultural...
This used to be real estate Now it's only fields and trees Where, where is the town Now, it's nothing but flowers - "Nothing but Flowers", by Talking Heads Almost two thousand years ago the Anasazi people lived...
With Google and Yahoo in the earnings cross-hairs, everyone is asking about the connection between advertising spending and the changes in the broader economy. Anyone who says there is no connection -- and there are those who makes that case...
I get irritated at the line of argument that says the world was a better place when consumers let burdensome loans wreck their families, and drive them personally into the ground like over-sized tent pegs. Enough. Yes, people used to...
This week's 60 Minutes has discovered the subprime problem. While we've all heard it before, 60 Minutes does know how to get its point across. Watch it....
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at The Street.com: Inside southwest Florida's real estate market where everything has stopped dead (Boston Globe) Productivity growth going forward looks like a return to...
Granted, the following claim is from an anonymous post on a public site, so it's a little like some masked stranger shouting it at a busy street corner, but the allegation is at least worth a ponder on the SocGen...
[He was] manic depressive but pleasant enough. -- A colleague of SocGen rogue trader Jerome Kerviel, quoted in the Independent...
There is an article in the NY Times today where some guy named "Paul Kedrosky" (what kind of name is "Kedrosky" anyway?) pops up opining on the subject of blogger bearishness. Bloggers disagreeing about something? Say it ain't so! Mind...
Preemptive apologies for some momentarily childishness, but a search hit in my regular profanity scan of financial filings reminded me that I remain a devoted member of the Golden Health Holdings CFO fan club. He has simply the best name....
Fun little widget that eBay people have put together for the auction of a TED conference ticket. Nice. And check out the current price: $33,535! I'm impressed! That's roughly $1,000 per conference hour. Better be sure to do a lot...
epiphany risk The sudden realization that you did something terribly, terribly stupid and will cost you a lot of money. Source: Paul Davies, LSE (via NYT)...
Okay, trust the U.K. papers to come up with some of nuttiest quotes so far on rogue SocGen trader Jerome Kerviel: "We often told him he looked just like Tom Cruise. "Like Tom Cruise, he's not particularly tall but he...
More details are coming out on the trades of SocGen rogue Jerome Kerviel (whose CV is here). It's becoming increasingly difficult to believe he acted alone, and only marginally less difficult to believe that his trades didn't have an impact...
So much, for this week anyway, for the mortgage refinancing boomlet. While rates had tumbled earlier in the week on the Fed's 75-basis-point move, hitting as low as 5.0-5.1% on 30-year fixed conforming loans, over the last two days rates...
It's not a regular thing that the view off my back deck here in San Diego includes (even somewhat) snow-covered mountains. Nice!...
Funny Jon Stewart interview with CNN's Gerri Willis where he tries to get under the hood of the current economic troubles: Jon: So, we did the war thing, and everyone got really mad at us. But what they didn't realize...
We optimists will take succor wherever we can get it, so I'll point to this BCA chart today showing that housing inventories -- both new and existing -- have seemingly turned a (small) corner recently. Yes, yes, I know. Housing...
I'm briefly at DEMO conference in Palm Desert early next week. If any readers are planning to be there, feel free to email me or track me down....
The good folks at TickerSense have a harrowing post up about how one analyst utterly missed it as monoline insurer Ambac fell 93% over the last year. Harrowing reading. As shown, the analyst maintained a "Buy" rating on the stock...
Funny. Write a few non-bullish things here on the site and suddenly a few readers declare me a perma-bear. Got a few emails today saying as much. How does that work? The reverse isn't true. If I've been generally bearish...
Forbes magazine has out its latest (highly subjective) list of tech's top VCs/bankers/angels/etc. I haven't spent too much time with it, but I was interested to see that, for the first time ever, four of the top ten spots went...
TED has gone on sale on Ebay. No, not my cousin in Boston. And no, not that guy from Cheers. But the highly-exclusive sold-out annual event in Monterey & Aspen (and soon to be relocating near a big-box store in...
For those of you keeping track at home, SocGen rogue trader Jerome Kerviel started the day with 8 Facebook friends. That fell quickly to four Facebook friends once news leaked this morning of his $7-billion in trading losses. Now, however,...
I am just off the phone from calling a few major mortgage lenders about what's up with refinancing now that we're a few days past the Fed cut. Because, according to Bankrate, you can newly find 30-year fixed conforming loans...
The NASVF has out some new analysis purporting to show a decline in seed (and early-stage) venture investing. At first glance, admittedly, the following graph looks fairly compelling. The percentage and number of deals that can be called seed/early has...
Market-moving story making the rounds that Apple is cutting Asian manufacturing order for iPhone: Apple has lowered its projected shipments of iPhones from two million units to around 1-1.2 million units for the second fiscal quarter, which will end March...
Somewhat bizarre headline in the WSJ today saying that WSJ will remain subscription-based. After all, comments from Rupert Murdoch at Davos that sparked the piece make it clear he is going to greatly expand the free part of the WSJ,...
I see that Jerome Kerviel, the rogue trader who cost his bank $7-billion on errant bets, has a Facebook page, which you can find here. While there are currently four friends listed, the Guardian says friends have been disappearing from...
As a further thought on the SocGen knave trader debacle revealed today, it puts the controversial and market-moving IHT article Friday in a different light. Because according to SocGen, it learned of its traders' position problems on Friday the 19th,...
You know, life without rogue traders just wouldn't be the same. They give the usually random story of the market a plot, with their revealed presence reinforcing the idea that there are people out there behind the market's gymnastics, even...
A good chunk of the Apple growth story going forward -- doubly so in this lower-growth iPod era -- is about the company's Macintosh. In particular, it's going to require real innovation and growth in Apple Macs, like the Macbook...
Lots of people are rightly remarking on the savage Dow bounce-back today. After all, at one point in the day the Dow was down 200-plus points, only to turn the corner and close the day up 300-plus points. That's...
I don't point very often to sports pieces, but Frank Deford's latest SI column touches on one of my favorite debates: Who's better, Roger Federer or Tiger Woods? It got me thinking about the spread of excellence in some sports,...
Tech is generally a wreck today. Major companies' stocks are going through the floor, with some lowlights below: Google: -7.9% Amazon: -7.0% Apple: -15.0% Corning: -7.1% Palm: -10.1% VMware: -6.1% Citrix: -6.9% All is not lost, however. As I said...
So much (so far anyway) for the supposed bounce in the markets today. Despite a pop in some international markets overnight, and despite much nattering from nabobs yesterday and this morning that we are at a market capitulation, the Dow...
New data out on San Diego County real estate foreclosures shows the continuing rapid ramp in such things. Eye-popping figure in today's Union-Tribune. ...
GMO's Jeremy Grantham has out a typically lucid new market commentary, and it contains some quotable musings on quantitative investors. Here's Jeremy on next-generation quants, Zulu warriors, and outlier events: The good old days of the domination of the first...
Useful chart from JPMorgan analysts today comparing major Internet stocks on the basis of per-employee productivity on a revenue/person basis: JPMorgan uses the chart to make the point that Yahoo has considerable room to improve, reinforcing the layoff argument....
"But the Solar System!" I protested. "What the deuce is it to me?" [Sherlock Holmes] interrupted impatiently: "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference...
There is a length and interesting article in the February issue of Harper's Magazine on the next bubble. Definitely worth reading, and here is the opening: Bubbles were once very rare—one every hundred years or so was enough to motivate...
The story behind the story at Apple is not over-conservative guidance -- and so I'm not sure why people keep repeating that gotcha mantra about Steve Jobs guiding down every year at this time -- it is the declining growth...
Bad day for Apple today. While the company's Q1 2008 numbers are out and beat consensus, even coming close to higher targets out there for sales and earnings, iPod unit sales look light at 22.1m (I had expected somewhat over...
Reuters is currently running a story headlined "Many Americans say unfazed by Wall Street woes". So, it's a snap survey, right? A quick poll of a few hundred people around the country asked about how they feel with respect to...
The big Davos oxygen-consumption conference is on this week in Switzerland -- as if you didn't know that already, you hoi polloi readers you -- and I'm deliriously happy at not being there. I have a staggeringly low tolerance for...
Given all the bearishness and general depression-talk out there in the markets, I thought damn it, if we're going to talk financial depressions, who better to talk with than Ravi Batra. He is the author, of course, of the cult...
Here is the bluffer's guide to Apple's earnings call later today, and what to say you'll be watching for: iPhone unit sales: 4m-plus New iPhone geographies: Canada, other? iPod units sold. Last year at Christmas Apple sold 21m. Anything under...
Apple CEO Steve Jobs must be part of the Plunge Protection Team. Who knew? Because with the Fed cutting rates by a surprise 75-basis-points, Apple has made a major product announcement today, hoping to remind people what a great,...
I have no problem with bearishness, and a good deal of it is warranted right now, with an economy in recession, markets tanking, the Fed's riding in for the rescue, and so on. But most financial blogs -- and their...
I have a just-for-fun over/under bet with my friend Barry -- who has up a typically lucid and compelling analysis of the Fed's actions this morning -- that, regardless of where you think things go in the next weeks, the...
I love Google as a stock (and slightly less as a company), even if I've been in out and too much, as I've documented here in the past. Today, however, we have an interesting question: Google stock is off 3%...
What a night, like something straight out of an old Saturday morning serial. The U.S. capital markets are closed, the market crash is speedily following the rising sun around the globe, and then our hero arrives: the U.S. Fed....
I've confessed here many times -- and on TV -- that I generally have an economically sunny disposition, and that I definitely tilt to a more bullish than bearish view. But that said, I have real trouble with the Ben...
Hong Kong-listed Chinese banks are getting crunched tonight. No surprise to anyone reading this site, or generally paying attention to the continuing opacity problems with said financial firms....
Lots of people messaging me tonight, whether via email or on Twitter, everyone watching the remarkable market declines going on in Asian markets right now. Some highlights: Worst two-day decline on Japanese markets in more than a decade Emerging markets...
Fascinating watching some of the side consequences of the current troubles in mortgage markets, especially as it migrates over toward corporate debt and the so-called "monoline insurers". Today's case in point: Arsenal Football. Yes, that Arsenal. (A quick explanation first:...
Tough call whether today's announcement of a $2.75-million investment in ActiveRain, a real estate social network -- and here I thought that was my local Starbucks, which is filled with idle real estate reps -- is the best or worst...
While we're still not talking giant numbers, apparently Bank of China is set to disclose subprime-related writedowns 6x what was originally provionsed for by China's largest bank. Instead of the $322-million it allocated last quarter, the bank is apparently set...
Somewhat snarky piece in the NY Times Dealbook late today pointing to the speaking presence of two well-known market bears at Davos this year. Both Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach and my friend Nouriel Roubini are there, which the NYT can't...
Fans of the U.S. economic decoupling hypothesis -- the idea that current U.S. economic weakness won't be as damaging worldwide because the rest of the world relies on the U.S. less -- got backwards help today. U.S. markets fell only...
Whether the subject is buying or selling stocks, avoiding chocolate, or subscription software, you think you have more self-control than you do. That point was driven deliriously home today in scanning a 2002 paper on the deranged economics of health...
Those large, rumored Yahoo layoffs that are currently giving succor to some hoping that Yahoo will finally focus, drop search, and generally do things to drive up its share price? They get shredded (or least frayed) today via an insider-sourced...
Any reader of the site going to TED@Aspen? Through some horse-trading with a reader I'm now going, and looking forward to it. If anyone else is planning to be there, be sure to let me know....
Lots people are pointing to an IHT interview last Friday with Christian Noyer, governor of the Bank of France, as an impetus for today's European market meltdowns. In the interview he said that he was "reasonably confident" about things, even...
My favorite financial post today comes from a discussion in the FT's Alphaville live market commentary: PM: There’s only one topic - gloom PM: And it is difficult to stretch that across 1000 words or so PM: doom doom doom...
The Money:Tech conference is getting awfully close, and more good stuff is still getting added: Motley Fool and LinkedIn have been added to the program, both with some very neat stuff Two new stealth companies will launch, taking to total...
Lots of talk in the venture business, as everywhere else, about the impact of recessions on the business. In general, recession vintage venture funds have been among the better-performing funds. Here are some related points: Recessions reduce the flow of...
I'd love to see the internal economic rationale -- because I bet it's dodgy as heck -- but MySpace has apparently launched a new seed fund. With fbFund (for Facebook apps) and MySpace (for MySpace) apps, plus VCs and angels...
I love corporate speak way too much. Here (via PaidContent) is Yahoo doing a non-denial denial of recent rumors that it is set to shortly layoff as much as 20% of its staff: Yahoo! has embarked on a multi-year transformation...
Here are global market declines from the highs reached October 11th 2007. Was anyone else caught by surprise by the size of the current declines in the Irish and Swedish stock markets? [via Bespoke]...
With global markets in full tailspin today, but U.S. markets closed for the holiday, time to revisit the double-dip hypothesis. It becomes even more real (in a back-door way) with a startling release from Citi mid-day: We now expect the...
Emptying my burgeoning browser tabs: Recession Hits: What It Means for Ad Biz (Advertising Age) Overseas Investors Buy Aggressively in U.S. (New York Times) The Construction Site Called Saudi Arabia (New York Times) Heads Up: Rising Hotel Rates - Number...
Okay, I'm officially banning the metaphor "like the swallows to Capistrano". For starters, it's hackneyed, an expression that lost whatever freshness it had about a month after its first usage. Second, the birds that are generally shown in the media...
Continuing my recent theme of Vancouver sunset shots, here is a lovely one to which I was sent a link today: Thanks Ray!...
This has to rank up there as one of the strangest moments in recent television history. We have Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, playing off-kilter right-wing talkshow host "Stephen Colbert", who in turn is playing Esteban, himself some sort of Colbert-created...
It's Friday and it's sunny and warm here in southern California, so enough market chatter already. Here is a fascinating video of Teller (of Penn & Teller fame) talking at a neuroscience conference last summer about implied causality and the...
No market sector is a safe haven when the market is in the mood to throw all equities out as a group, but there had been a feeling, until recently anyway, that technology stocks were safer than some. Among the...
This $145-billion U.S. economic incentive package being proposed today is coming across badly. Henry Paulson's press conference is a fuzzy mess, making the ill-defined package seem rushed, ill-thought, and generally panicky. Markets, after initially being nonplussed, seemingly like it, however,...
Amusing clip from Fed Chair Ben Bernanke's testimony today on Capitol Hill. Apparently from a Congressional point of view in an election year -- or at least from the perspective of 13-term (!) Democratic Budget Committee member Marcy Kaptur --...
The financial quote du jour goes to Warren Buffett. Here he is on the growing problems among mortgage insurers trying to unwind their complex swaps and contracts: "We lost over $400 million on contracts [at General Re in 2002-2006] that...
Even if you're as suspicious of Chinese government statistics as I am -- any statistical-sounding Sino release that contains the phrase "the state-owned Chinese Internet Network Information Center said" should generally be read with as much skepticism as the...
Catching up and emptying my burgeoning browser tabs: The New Power Brokers: How Oil, Asia, Hedge Funds, and Private Equity Are Shaping Global Capital Markets (McKinsey) WisdomTree Files For Currency ETFs (ETF Watch) Michael Lewis on those sneaky self-contrarians at...
The following chart (via Compete.com) of top Internet domains ranked by traffic gains/losses in 2007 is interesting. Other than porn and video, there is not much commonality among the gainers, but it is intriguing that three of the biggest traffic...
Adding some data to the current debate about what happened to online ads in December -- bears say the advertising floor fell out like a baddie's elevator in a James Bond movie -- here is what what one ad-industry CEO...
Analysts at Breakingviews do a nice job today of arguing a) why Yahoo could be broken up profitably by an activist investor (spin out its Asian investments and dump search); and b) why the break-up value is at least a...
This morning on CNBC my friend Jim Cramer had a truly impassioned harangue of the banks, SEC, and mortgage insurers. Definitely a must-watch. Along the way, Cramer makes -- in his inimitable way -- a book pick. You have to...
Fascinating Richard Rhodes discussion of the growth of nuclear arsenals during the Cold War -- and the remaining risks....
Roger Lowenstein has 7,995 words about Ben Bernanke in this weekend's NY Times Magazine, which the paper has obligingly gone ahead and run for the rest of us today. It is really, really long, and I haven't had time or...
I'm out today, so there will be no posting. Feel free to make up market rumors and generally entertain yourselves....
The 27-hour day is just such a smart idea. From a letter to NY Times columnist David Pogue on the trouble with online movie rentals schemes: Hi David–You know what this country needs? A good 27-hour on-demand viewing timeframe. Typically,...
You have to give Danny Hillis's Metaweb credit. It announced today a giant $42.5m financing from Benchmark, Goldman Sachs, and others, all in service of its Freebase service. What is Freebase? Well, here's the PR from the latest release: Freebase.com...
Some choice paragraphs from a scathing new Martin Wolff column on the trouble with banks: The world has witnessed well over 100 significant banking crises over the past three decades. The authorities have even had to rescue important parts of...
Emptying my browser tabs and posting links to articles that readers may find interesting: Bank are necessary, but their power must be curbed (FT) Why people believe weird things about money (LAT) Layoff tracker at recession watch blog (Layoffs) Metaweb,...
I'm generally liking the new Finance portal at AOL. I only spotted the traffic growth via in peppering my referral logs, having missed the mention at TechCrunch, but it is nicely done. Clean, informative, and lots of realtime/unique/interesting news and...
If housing prices continue to drop at this rate here in southern California, they will soon come free with magazine subscriptions: The median home price in a six-county region of Southern California plunged more than 13 percent in December versus...
Oprah is getting her own television network? Yeesh, don't we see enough of her already? I want my own damn network. It's time for Paul TV. Ms. Winfrey is forming a 50-50 joint venture with cable programming company Discovery Communications...
Meant to mention this sooner, but you have to love that Alan Greenspan has joined John Paulson' s super-successful credit hedge fund as an advisor on (one would assume) subprime. Doesn't the SEC normally look askance on this sort of...
Live media events are great, when they work. But watching live services like Twitter collapse around the Steve Jobs keynote this morning provides more great examples (if needed) why the Interweb isn't yet TV. While TV costs less to provide...
If any interesting and market-moving data comes out of the Apple keynote this morning, I'll post it here. 4-million iPhones sold since launch. That's slightly higher than expected, at least as I have it. iPhone has 19.5% smartphone market share....
What temerity these Citi people had in scheduling a conference call around a dividend cut, layoffs, and $18.1-billion write-down on the same day as an Apple CEO Steve Jobs keynote. Don't they know that new toys from Apple trump the...
An update on my post yesterday of some of the best live blogs covering Apple CEO Steve Jobs' keynote at 9am PST (in 55 minutes): Engadget Gizmodo MacRumorsLive Crunchgear Fake Steve Jobs Note that both Crunchgear and Fake Steve Jobs...
Bloggers are missing an important ten-year anniversary this coming week. It was ten years ago, on the evening of Saturday January 17, 1998, that Matt Drudge posted a story on his site -- which we can call a blog, even...
Yes, yes, Apple CEO Steve Jobs' MacWorld Expo keynotes are wearingly over-hyped, but they're still good, clean fun. So if you're in the mood, festivities kick off tomorrow at 9am, and here are links to the live blogs I'll be...
Emptying my burgeoning browser tabs with some articles others may find interesting: Lengthy and thought-provoking piece getting under hood of current banking crisis (TheDeal) Harry Reid's problem with Nevada water supply (Portfolio) Prediction markets and the 2008 elections (Portfolio) Dylan...
GPS-maker Garmin is getting smoked today in the markets on news from Harman, and so let me speed-post a bearish thing I had been working on over the weekend but hadn't finished. Too bad it wasn't out earlier, but still...
I buy the food thesis going forward, and alongside my longstanding ownership of PIO for water I have added to holdings in PBJ (the wonderfully-tickered PowerShares Dynamic Food & Beverage ETF) and DBA (Powershares DB Agriculture Fund). More later, but...
People just don't get how good web apps on mobile can be. I get stuck in many conversations about native apps on mobile, which always strikes me as vestigial. The same way that I live in mostly browser-based apps on...
Along the way to making a bullish call for Yahoo stock -- partly valuation-based and partly-catalyst-based -- JPMorgan analysts this morning point out some factors working in online advertising's favor: We think traditional ad dollars will move to online graphical...
Doug Kass of TheStreet's piece today on the financials is a must-read. He makes a strong case for why they have currently bottomed, and their capital is being replenished. While news headlines will be nasty for some time yet on...
There are some interesting, if not entirely surprising, factoids in a NY Times piece tonight. It seems that traffic from Apple's iPhone to major websites like Google and Yahoo is growing faster than anyone expected, to the point that over...
I'm such a sucker for Katkam sunset shots northeast over Vancouver during winter:...
Not to make this a weekend habit, but here is the most interesting article I read today (out of a hundred or so that I scan most Sunday mornings). It's on the unusual problem that commercial planes don't crash often...
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.com. Boston's Big Dig has 237 leaks, and Bechtel is taking heat (Boston Globe) Interview with VMware CEO Diane Greene (CRN) American credit card...
Funny quote from a CS Monitor piece on the rapid rate at which boom-era real estate agents are dropping out of the once-burgeoning business: One problem for out-of-work agents is that their skills may not transfer easily to other careers....
After I decided not to be a paleontologist, but before I decided to be a marine biologist -- and well before abandoning both for greed, money and markets -- I was twelve-years-old and set unalterably on becoming a mountaineer....
Set the stage: It's the Bank of America call this morning. Subject is the bank's big deal for failing mortgage company Countrywide. Analysts are assembled, the financial world is watching. And so ... Call kicks off with BofA CEO Ken...
Colonel Flagg (M*A*S*H*): Nobody can get the truth out of me because even I don't know what it is. I keep myself in a constant state of utter confusion. Flagg: It's my trade mark. I'm like the wind: nobody...
Some quick additional comments from my CNBC appearance this morning: On Countrywide/BofA ... As I said on-air, why should I have more confidence that Ken Lewis and BofA have timed this infusion better than their last one? After all, since...
I'm on CNBC's The Call tomorrow live from 11am-noon EST. Topics are likely to include Countrywide/BofA chatter, BenB's musings today, the outlook for Q4 earnings, etc. Buy everything advertised during the hour -- I get commission. Kidding....
In my mind and in my car, we can't rewind we've gone too far Oh-a-aho oh, Oh-a-aho oh Video killed the radio star. -- "Video Killed the Radio Star", The Buggles Last night I somehow ended up briefly...
There is a toweringly bearish piece in the WSJ today about how much the technology industry sucks -- or at least how much the technology industry has sucked so far this year, or at least how much tech stocks have...
Highly useful data in a new paper by some Google engineers. First one that I have seen to give a real inside sense of where Google's capital expenditures are going, showing huge growth in processors, storage, and terabyte-class data analysis...
Not to get all numerological or anything, but Nasdaq keeps going negative today, and a close in the red would make it a nine-day down streak. With that in mind, and knowing that the last nine-day streak (of which there...
When California sneezes, does the rest of the Union get a cold? That is the question tonight, with the largest state in the U.S. now firmly projecting a $14-billion budget deficit for the coming year (more than double what was...
A couple of quick Paul-specific media items: Interviewed recently for a podcast where I talked economics and stocks (Disciplined Investor) Guest-hosting CNBC's The Call live on television this Friday from 11am-noon EST (CNBC)...
Things were absolutely gruesome today in financial stocks. Good news was bad news, bad news was worse news, and no news meant the world was ending. The financial sector ETF (XLF) was off 3.6%, but that gives an over-sanguine view...
Some amusing (and intermittently troubling) stuff about Google and health-related search in a press release from a medicine-related public interest group: To determine what patients typically see when searching for information on prescription medications, CMPI took a snapshot of the...
With the market having turned for the worse today, the Nasdaq Composite is now down again. If it closes the day in the red, that will make it eight straight down days. Assuming so, that would be the longest slide...
Better late than never, but I really should announce the winner of my Blade Runner DVD contest. The idea, as you may recall, was to have people write the shortest and most amusing paragraph of text using Lake Superior State...
The inaugural Money:Tech conference is approaching fast -- February 6th and 7th in New York at the Waldorf Astoria -- and the final program is now (mostly) in place! The conference is, of course, all about the confluence of Wall...
With this morning's latest release of pending home sales data, and the inevitable NAR spinning of the figures -- it's bottomed! it's bottomed! -- here is a nice summary of the life and lies of the NAR in its deliriously...
It is hard not to read these two pieces of news as flip sides of the same coin. On the one hand we have Hitwise saying this morning that Google's share of all searches in the last four weeks of...
Emptying my burgeoning browser tabs: I still hate dividends, Professor Siegel (Andy Kessler) The improbable origins of Wisdom Tree ETF (Forbes) At bonus time on Wall Street, no one can hear you scream (Andrew Clavell) Stock of Barack Obama for...
There are some fascinating insights into Google's management culture in a Ken Auletta piece in the current New Yorker. There are also some clear signs of where, when it happens, the inevitable cracks will appear in the Google armor. For...
Okay, I have always wanted to say this: Paul Kedrosky Announces Strategic Initiatives to Increase Shareholder Value. That's all, and so I now return you to your regular blog reading. I'm sure the preceding corporate-speak non sequitur was just an...
Mozilla IPO watch continues as it appoints John Lilly as Chief Executive Officer (MarketWatch) Why to do with CNET (Breakingviews) CES has reached the point of rapidly diminishing utility (Breakingviews) The other Howard (Schultz) takes back over at Starbucks...
TNS has out its latest ad spend forecast for 2007, and it's unpleasant -- other than for online. The company is calling for 4% growth, despite it being an election year, but double-digit growth online. Here are the breakout projections...
Nice chart from Tom Sowanick at Clearbrook Financial showing how U.S. rates currently compare worldwide. In a nutshell, out of 35 economies cited -- including most of the majors -- there are only five countries that offer lower rates than...
For all the reasons that tech represents a safe haven from subprime and credit worries -- less debt, more international exposure, etc. -- it is worth reminding yourself that in a maturing sector technology spending is increasingly correlated with the...
I've long said that if the Bill Gates who appears regularly in hilarious Microsoft videos actually ran the company I'd buy Microsoft stock. We had a great example yesterday, with a short "Bill's last day at Microsoft" video that played...
Over the weekend the cries went up again at the big CES show that content is king. That may be true in future, but it's never been easy to prove in the past by stock prices. Case in point: The...
I keep mulling a weekend Telegraph article about the resurgence, at least in the U.K., of department stores. Granted, that may say more about me than about the article, because I loathe shopping, but the article's upshot certainly reflects a...
Nice article in the NY Times today showcasing some new research on Google's internal prediction market. Two of the underlying paper's three authors -- Justin Wolfers of Wharton and Bo Cowgill of Google -- are speakers at the upcoming...
Mike Arrington and I show up in a NY Times piece today on how blogging can be bad for your health. The catalyst, of course, is the health problems our friend Om has had recently....
Late tonight Goldman Sachs downgraded Salesforce.com to a Sell rating. Even if it was on a valuation/price basis, this coming on top of downbeat stuff in Barron's on the weekend about software-as-a-service stocks in general, this won't be good for...
Whoa, I'm #4! I'm #4! That puts me ahead of the NY Times' DealBook on the Wikio list of business blogs. Waitaminute. What the hell is Wikio?...
As a kid I used to have a drawer stuffed with maps under my bed. There were hundreds of maps in there, plus a dozen or so taped to my walls, ranging from the moon's surface to the Northwest Territories,...
While a few hundred bloggers crammed into a Bellagio suite at the so-called Bloghaus during CES in Las Vegas might strike a cynic as more like scary reality TV than new journalism, there is still undeniably something new and deeply...
In the Middle Ages, gold was priced at an inflation-adjusted $3,000 an ounce, versus today's $850. With that in mind, here's a graph of gold prices over the intervening period (click for a larger version). I'm a sucker for this...
Nerds are always wrong about investments. That was the point of an amusing Howard Lindzon post the other day, that, whatever his own feelings about Facebook, he was interested because the "nerds" hate it so much. One true glimmer of...
Andrew Lo of MIT thinks we need the capital markets equivalent of the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent and disinterested group that comes in after crashes, literally and metaphorically speaking, and sifts through the wreckage. He makes the sure-to-be...
It is awfully hard not to get giddy about the outlook for the perennially boom-bust storage industry these days. If it isn't terabyte home storage networks, or Sarbanes-Oxley forcing reams of data to be stored in the enterprise, it's the...
The web has claimed Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges as one of its own, as a lovely piece in the weekend NY Times explains. Works like The "Library of Babel", "Funes the Memorious", and "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" are...
Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column at TheStreet.com: Skeptics about about the XBRL financial data reporting standard (CFO.com) Busted Imperium IPO lowers likelihood of alt-energy bubble (VC Ratings) Bill Miller's Legg Mason...
This quote strikes me as sort of the reverse of the old story about Eskimos having a bazillion words for snow, but it's still worth noting: The fact is, analysts say, that for all that it has a secular constitution,...
Here, according to Amazon, were the top twenty most popular books purchased via this site in 2007: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups Early Days The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable The Poker Face of Wall Street...
Startling and strangely reassuring look at how traffic works without signals or police officers at one Indian intersection. As someone says at Boing Boing, it's like a hive mind at work:...
Eye-opening statistic from the weekend Barron's: The Dow Jones Industrial Average skidded 566 for the week, or 4.2%, to end at 12,800. It was the Dow's worst three-day start since 1932, the depths of the Depression....
No-one in their right mind really wants to be at CES. Matter of fact, the only reasons to go are because your company made you, or because your inner Canadian loves standing in long lines. So, if you're not there,...
In noticing the addition of a new no-name Web 2.0 "partner" at venture firm Kleiner Perkins (recall: in Kleiner-speak "partner" means more like "vice-president" does at a brokerage firm, but I digress) I ended up on the firm's team page....
It's pounding rain up north of here in San Francisco. Like really pounding, with people reporting outages, downed trees, flooded houses, and on and on. The Bay Bridge is closed, there are 70mph winds, etc. Epochal stuff, at least in...
Great post by Tim O'Reilly in a Money:Tech conference context about the never-ending race between humans and machines in markets. The former's algorithms are constantly thwarted by the latter's wilful misbehaviors, and so is there a solution in computation? This...
Ah, so much for the Intel bulls. On a downgrade today, Intel is getting hammered -- and taking all of tech with it. Check the overall market map for a sea of red, with tech standing out: Now, here is...
I'm a sucker for these market surprises lists, and so it should come as no surprise that I've got another for you. This time it's Byron Wien of Pequot's 2008 list: 1. In spite of Federal Reserve easing, and other...
Hadn't seen this BusinessWeek figure on option ARM prevalence by U.S. region until now. It's a doozy:...
Amazing to me how many Californians reflexively head to Zillow to "check" (they think) the value of their house during the current decline. As the foreclosure sale of one San Diego property shows, what Zillow thinks a property is worth...
The initial ratings for the newly launched business network are ... crummy. According to new Nielsen's data, about 6,300 people are, on average, watching Fox Business Network on any given day. Nielsen's relevant figure for CNBC is something like 283,000....
Sobering news from my friend Om Malik of GigaOm fame has slowed me down today. Om has, at age 41, had a heart attack. Get well soon, my friend. I have been feeling your recent absence, even without knowing the...
My friend Doug Kass over at TheStreet.com has some punchy predictions in his list of 20 surprises for 2008. One that caught my eye, however, had to do with tech. Under the thesis the investor are highly nervous about 2008...
Emptying my burgeoning browser tabs this morning. I'll add as the day goes on: Oil Hits $100, Jolting Markets (WSJ) 13 Things You Wish You'd Known in 2007 (TheStreet/Barry) 20 stock market surprises for 2008 (TheStreet/Kass) Research: Real estate has...
Just finished watching a sad and funny documentary about the life and times of Groucho Marx. It's thoughtful and provocative look at a smart, creative, and deeply unsettled man. Well worth the time, so check it out....
A quick project for readers. Anyone think the preceding snippet from a well-known investments newsletter out today actually means anything? Cyclically, 2008 is a pivotal year. The beginning of the year will look much different than the end. Looking back...
Emptying my burgeoning browser tabs: Wien: Top surprises for 2008 include a second-half rebound, and an Obama landslide (Bloomberg) Tom Wolfe's new novel is (sort of) about Florida subprime (CP) NY Times launches foot ball prediction market (Predictify) Recession now...
Pretty obvious that the bulls are back in town on Intel's stock, but most of them are making very vague cases. It's nattering about "demand", "good times", etc., as opposed to getting down to specifics. The real Intel bull...
This is for weather geeks only, but here is a nice shot moments ago taken from a mountain top near San Diego of an approaching Pacific storm that is forecast to bring as much as 4-inches of rain over the...
Fun study out from researchers at University of Utah showing that cell phone users drive slowly, don't change lanes often enough, and are generally irritating on the freeways. Why do we care? Because, as in all complex systems, small delays...
Lake Superior State University has out its annual list of over-used words & phrases that need to be banned from our collective vocabulary. Here goes: perfect storm webinar waterboarding organic wordsmith/wordsmithing authored post 9/11 surge give back 'X' is the...
Interesting that the same day JPMorgan comes out with a bullish upgrade on its paid search forecast for 2008, my friend Mark Mahaney at Citi has tempered his U.S. ad growth forecast. On what is, I think, an apples-to-apples basis,...
You have to love my friend Jim Cramer. On CNBC he just called the Fed your enemy, and said studying it for the future of U.S. markets is up there with being a Kremlinologist, both in terms of its...
JPMorgan's new 312-page "Nothing but Net" report on the outlook for Internet-related tech equities in 2008 is good reading, but the initial headline takeaway is a big ramp in the forecast for online ad spending this year. From a prior...
Wildly geeky list of the top ten electronics products of the year. This sort of thing is always an interesting indicator of where innovation will show up next, so it's good to scan. 1: High-energy capacitor achieves ultra-high capacitance 2:...
I've recommended here before that entrepreneurs and investors read Charles Perrow's excellent book Normal Accidents, so it will come as no surprise that I was fascinated by his recent MIT talk on disasters, normal and not-so-normal. Watch it here, but...
An interesting report on top ten stocks by dollars traded in 2007: Symbol Company Rank Last Year Change AAPL Apple Inc. 1 2 1 GOOG Google Inc. 2 1 -1 XOM Exxon Mobil Corp. 3 5 2 GS...
Debates about privacy, shared data, and advertising are getting play outside technology, with Breakingviews picking up the story today. The financial news services offers that privacy is dead. Get over it. Worth reading....
Prices at Las Vegas's Venetian hotel from January 7-10th during next week's huge Consumer Electronics Show. For those of you still planning to come by, don't forget to bring coats: Highs of 42 F forecast....
Still in a ruminative frame of mind, so this photo of "peer-to-peer" New Year's celebrations in Oslo, Norway caught my eye.pizdaus via Reddit...
This year's Big Question at Edge from John Brockman, et al., is this, What have you changed your mind about? This is, at least, an interesting question, so I'll start by saying that what I've changed my mind about is...
Nicely timed, given the upcoming Money:Tech 2008 conference in New York, because the trade magazine Wall Street & Technology has as its January 2008 cover "Wall Street 2.0". The subtitle: "What do wikis, blogs, and social networks have to...
