It's not often that Wall Street strategists notice the tiny semi-asset class otherwise known as venture capital. But that's what happened today as Merrill's Richard Bernstein wrote in a contrarian strategies report that it may just be time for investors to take VC more seriously again:

There may be two areas of alternative investments that seem relatively attractive in the current financial environment.  In both cases, these are areas that might benefit from the tightening of global credit.  The first is early-stage venture capital.  ... If return-on-investment does indeed tend to be higher when capital is scarce, the significant tightening of traditional credit funding to smaller companies seems to make early-stage venture capital strategies more attractive.

Granted, Bernstein is making some big assumptions, like that there are things worth investing in, that VCs will find exit markets receptive (the NVCA said recently that we have gone through the first period with zero venture-backed IPOs), and that investors have adequately starved the asset class for money, but it's still good fun to see VC get picked as a contrarian play.

[Merrill via Brad]

The IPO market sucks. Maybe. Mostly. Let me explain.

Near as I can tell, there hasn't been a single venture-backed IPO in the second quarter of 2008, which would be the first quarter in which that has happened since ... well, as long as I have data. Admittedly, the first quarter was no hell either, with only 5 VC IPO babies making it out the door.

Here is the quarterly VC IPO data from 2005 until today:

Interestingly, however, while it sucks to be a VC relying on IPO exits, it hasn't been so bad for IPO investors. Consider: There have been 22 IPOs this year with market caps greater than $100m and initial share prices over $5 (a decent naive screen for likely institutional interest).

If you had bought an equal-weighted portfolio of said IPOs so far in 2008 here is how you would have done year-to-date:

The biggest gainer? Intrepid Potash (IPI), up 71% from the first-day close. The biggest loser? Verso Paper (VRS), down 17% from its first-day close. Overall, however, fairly impressive performance from 2008 IPOs considering what a crummy investment most people think IPOs have been this year.

A wildfire popped up here in San Diego yesterday about 2 miles east of my house. It was more than a little unnerving, as the picture here from someone closer to the fires shows (courtesy of NBC San Diego.)

I don't like not knowing about stuff like this as it's happening, so my response was to build a Yahoo Pipes mashup extracting fire spottings from live California Highway Patrol incident reports for San Diego. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the CHP knows about everything in California first, from carjackings to wildland fires.) I then took that extracted fire data and sent it, via TwitterFeed, to a new Twitter ID I created, which in turn I authorized to be sent directly to my mobile phone as SMS bulletins. The result? Live wildfire reports to my iPhone.

Relatedly, check the following map of all the currently active wildfire complexes in California. To have more than 800 hotspots out there is remarkable stuff, especially given that it's only the beginning of summer. (Click for a live zoomable version.)

Great slide deck here from Jeff Rubin over at CIBC WM on the current "age of scarcity". Definitely check it out.

I'm looking for a few good bloggers to fill in for me while I'm out on holidays in July. I have a couple of people lined up already, but I thought I'd open it up and ask for a few others -- like three or four -- with interest. If you're of a mind to submit a thing or two in the July 16-31st period, let me know via email.

[Update] I'm already buried in emails, so let me sort through and respond over next day or so. Thanks oodles for all the interest everyone.

How ignominious things have become in financially struggling San Diego. To secure some loans, it has, in the past, put up as collateral the Torrey Pines golf club. Yes that Torrey Pines, the one that just hosted the Tiger-won U.S. Open.

Things are now to the point where the city has had to put up the police headquarters downtown as collateral. Should be great in the near future as real estate prices continue to collapse and property taxes plummet further: "Come on downtown to the police tent for booking."

More here.