For someone like me who believes a higher power sees all anyway (a notion illustrated on our dollar bill), the real question about privacy is in its abuse... what counts as abuse, what are the penalties, and how do you render justice? If we want the IRS to collect everyone's fair share, if we want our Federal government to protect against terror cells (or just crazies), if we want those who would lie about us to be caught, then we must cede some control not only individually but collectively. Perhaps we start taking up masks and burqas, but a better way would be to define abuse, painful penalties for it (impeachment needs to be on the table), and the technological tools and regulations required to render justice by discerning evil intent, negligence, and just poor judgement.
Are We Ready To See Gold Heading To $4,990? [View article]
When an engineer in China earns 1/6 of what an engineer in the US earns, something's going to change. It seemed to me that gold doubled as part of that change, and I think it still has to double again. 4900? 800 x 6? The pay disparity between Manhattan and Illinois didn't correct overnight, so it's going to take awhile. But we may be wondering in a few decades who's Manhattan and who's Illinois, and political realities being what they are, hidden pay cuts are easier to effect than real ones.
And, and btw, Vietnam and Indonesia are West Virginia.
Why Batteries Are Too Valuable To Waste On Solar Power Integration And Electric Cars [View article]
I appreciate the data and the comments, and appreciate even more the magic of price signals and free enterprise in doing a better job of making consumption and investment decisions than central planners arguing over models and assumptions.
And don't discount the power of sub-$1/hour labor to make an idea viable. We're looking at a global labor glut for decades.
CenturyLink Shocks The Market With Its Dividend Cut [View article]
This company has millions of subscribers, most of whom need broadband and CTL is the only game in town. As long as they don't screw up pricing strategy or waste too much money trying to out-Amazon AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Rackspace they should be solidly profitable, pay down their debt, and increase earnings. Interest rates aren't going to go up for a long time, and higher return projects carry the kind of risk that comes with trying to compete with low-labor-cost privately-held businesses.
That heavy a dividend cut coupled with that large a buyback sent a bad message (thank goodness these guys don't run the Fed), but the underlying business should pull them out of the stink. Other than the scapegoats sacrificed to assuage the angry cabal of shareholders; who's up for retirement?
CenturyLink (CTL): Q4 EPS of $0.67 misses by $0.01. Revenue of $4.58B misses by $10M. Expects Q1 revenue of $4.46B-$4.51B and EPS of $0.67-$0.72 vs. consensus of $4.55B and $0.66. Expects 2013 revenue of $18.1B-$18.3B and EPS of $2.50-$2.70 vs. a consensus of $18.2B and $2.64. $2B stock buyback program authorized, dividend lowered to $0.54/share from $0.725/share. Shares -10.7% AH. (PR) [View news story]
Call me dumb, but decreasing the dividend 30% while buying back $2B worth of shares when you only miss by a penny and expect next quarter to outperform seems a bit odd. Hopefully a minor bump in the road but wouldn't want to be in a position of having to sell shares to fund a wedding or something at the moment.
GLD: Can The Bulls Catch A Break(Out)? [View article]
I suppose if you use technical analysis to fathom the intentions of the central banks, governments, and large holders in the short run there is some value to this article. My view on gold (and thus GLD) is driven more by what I see as massive fundamentals:
1. There are billions of people who want to do westerners' jobs for much less pay, and technology, trade agreements, and globalization make that possible; 2. There are billions of people living on $2/day that want a better lifestyle, and pressure on governments to bring peace instead of war; 3. This creates downward pressure on earnings in the west, creating downward pressure on debt; 4. This debt can only be dealt with by a combination of factors that MUST include monetization. Lowered interest rates are a form of monetization. 5. This must lead to currency inflation, although perhaps not price inflation for everything as the cheap labor, technology, and price pressures from 1. above moderate that in many instances; 6. Governments will face the same price pressures, and will thus officially support monetization of debt and currency debasement (walk to the bottom, if you will); 7. As currency is officially debased (I'm not talking hyperinflation, just good old fashioned your dollar won't buy in 10 years what it buys today) gold will continue to increase in price; 8. Add in the uses of gold in electronics, medicine, and jewelry for a burgeoning global lower middle class, and I have a strong sense that it will run as high as 2500 this year. If the author's downside is at 1500 and price today at 1680ish, I like those odds.
OTOH, my b-school finance professor told me the market price for anything on any one day is the equilibrium between guesses of future higher prices. vs. future lower prices from investors without inside information.
4 inches of sea rise this century isn't going to drive major incentives any more. If the economy continues to strengthen (if Bernanke is allowed to keep his foot off the brakes and Obamacare is slightly retooled) then utilities will allow governments to force them to pay higher prices for some energy as part of a green marketing initiative. If the economy sputters again, there could be heavy pushback.
I liked your KNDI call, the quick-change battery architecture and Zipcar model looks like the way to go.
What do you think about EMKR? Great day yesterday, have opto products, solid technology, asian manufacturing base, and some exposure to projects through their Suncore JV (I believe the largest CPV installation in China going online this quarter).
Housing Today Is More Affordable Than At Any Time In History [View article]
As population growth slows and more wealth is created outside the US, the demand for homes will remain tepid for the long term. Interest rates will stay low for a long time as the Fed and other western banks continue to monetize debt. Income inflation will be counteracted by a glut of labor created by technological productivity improvements and low cost entrants into the labor pool.
Throw this into a blender and what does it mean for housing? If we let market demand, price signals, competition, and innovation make sense of it, I believe home prices will firm, rebound slightly, and go back to a 1-2%/year price appreciation, albeit with slightly nicer/bigger houses for the money. If central planning, tax code manipulations, and government protectionism rule the day, the unemployment, incessantly higher taxes, torn down houses, and developer kickbacks will yield us more homelessness and high rents with ownership concentrating amongst the Politburo, uh, I mean well-connected.
Phantom Shareholders At Kandi Technologies And Disclosure Issues At Guanwei - Part II [View article]
If I have to sell a stock at depressed prices during the period when management is taking the high road, I don't count that as a positive. Amazon, Microsoft, Apple have all made statements when innuendo- if not near outright accusations of fraud in SEC filings- threatened their share price. Perhaps not daily ship reports, but enough information for people to understand roughly how well Kindle Fire, Windows 8, and the latest igadget is performing.
SS has an agenda, and I wouldn't be shocked to see there are positions taken, no different than many SA contributors. They need to be careful not to cross certain lines, though, and the companies you mention aren't afraid to dialog about defamation with c&d letters and courtrooms.
Phantom Shareholders At Kandi Technologies And Disclosure Issues At Guanwei - Part II [View article]
I want to thank both SS and Art for entering the ring, the combination of entertainment and vetting in a stock I'm very interested in makes it a worthwhile skim.
The reason non-transparent transactions are of interest to shareholders many years later is that we are afraid that some future non-transparent transaction will rob us of expected future returns. I like KNDI because the QBEX quick change battery technology, for which they reportedly have a patent, looks like a real winner in the EV space, and EV is the future for a third to half the population of the planet. But if the company is willing to make non-transparent deals to benefit insiders and close affiliates, what's to keep it from selling off the patent or other assets for cheap to another entity they control?
Any company that wants to build a strong base from which to raise expansion capital needs to be very concerned with these issues, lest their ability to raise capital be severely damaged. Accountability doesn't mean that there are never any problems, rather, it means being willing and able to give an account for what happened, why, and what is expected to happen going forward.
Again, thanks to all parties who come to SA with facts and explanations instead of just half-baked prognostication.
CenturyLink: Buy This High-Yield Investment On Its Tempting Risk/Reward Profile [View article]
I like this stock because it offers a combination of established business (RLEC, essentially a utility) with an upside technology play (cloud computing and IPTV).
What effect Intel, Apple, Microsoft, et.al. will have on the IPTV market remains to be seen, but if you consider these to be the "gasoline suppliers" for the traffic on CTL's broadband networks (and wireless isn't going to be a major player for home connectivity given the bandwidth requirements of HD video), the stage could be set for more satisfied customers and higher margins- a real win-win. A good job of integrating cloud computing into the mix- higher value enterprise services for small business customers, for example- could really set the stock on fire.
The reality is that the highly developed economies will not have the political will to address deficits created due to global labor rate imbalances (i.e., their people won't work for the wages most of the world will work for) by either massive wage cutting or massive tax and redistribution. The only politically acceptable solution is the hidden tax of inflation via more Fed money creation by buying US Treasuries and ECB money creation by investing in European banks, leading to weakened currency- all while waiting for labor prices in the developing world to go up. Which might take many decades.
All this money printing would be sure to create inflation if it weren't for the massive amount of slack capacity in just about everything (including, increasingly, consumable and historically resource-constrained items like energy and food) created by technology and reduced trade barriers.
So what are we going to run out of that can't be somewhat readily substituted for? Labor? Ha ha. Energy? Ha ha. Food? This seems most likely if only due to some genetic nightmare, in which case having an investment in the means of production could be the worst position of all.
The Problem With The Return Of Manufacturing [View article]
Here's a question- if the riches accumulate in the hands of the robot's owners, isn't that because they took the risk to buy the robots, put them to use, find people to service and load them?
And if these people are smart, wouldn't you trust them to use their riches to benefit their fellow men more than politicians and bureaucrats?
I suppose temptation to "share the wealth" via higher taxes and more central planners is just too tough to pass up, even though the results of the great experiment in the last century- letting wealth accumulate vs. forced sharing- seemed obvious.
The Problem With The Return Of Manufacturing [View article]
Communism, World War, and technology have created massive dislocations, and amidst the chaos the temptation to opt for central planning, protectionism, and welfare over price signals, competition, and charity has been too great, so we've seen misplaced promises of minimum wages and increasing union power that have only hollowed out entry level job creation.
Eventually, what happened to the Soviet Union will happen here unless we recognize that lower wages also yield lower costs- $10/hour can go a lot further than it used to. Since we're starting from such a vastly superior base, it will take decades if not centuries before we're on par with the global middle quartiles.
How Technology Redefines Norms [View article]
Are We Ready To See Gold Heading To $4,990? [View article]
And, and btw, Vietnam and Indonesia are West Virginia.
Why Batteries Are Too Valuable To Waste On Solar Power Integration And Electric Cars [View article]
And don't discount the power of sub-$1/hour labor to make an idea viable. We're looking at a global labor glut for decades.
CenturyLink Shocks The Market With Its Dividend Cut [View article]
That heavy a dividend cut coupled with that large a buyback sent a bad message (thank goodness these guys don't run the Fed), but the underlying business should pull them out of the stink. Other than the scapegoats sacrificed to assuage the angry cabal of shareholders; who's up for retirement?
AT&T And CenturyLink: How Will These Telecommunication Stocks' Dividends Fare Over Time? [View article]
CenturyLink (CTL): Q4 EPS of $0.67 misses by $0.01. Revenue of $4.58B misses by $10M. Expects Q1 revenue of $4.46B-$4.51B and EPS of $0.67-$0.72 vs. consensus of $4.55B and $0.66. Expects 2013 revenue of $18.1B-$18.3B and EPS of $2.50-$2.70 vs. a consensus of $18.2B and $2.64. $2B stock buyback program authorized, dividend lowered to $0.54/share from $0.725/share. Shares -10.7% AH. (PR) [View news story]
GLD: Can The Bulls Catch A Break(Out)? [View article]
1. There are billions of people who want to do westerners' jobs for much less pay, and technology, trade agreements, and globalization make that possible;
2. There are billions of people living on $2/day that want a better lifestyle, and pressure on governments to bring peace instead of war;
3. This creates downward pressure on earnings in the west, creating downward pressure on debt;
4. This debt can only be dealt with by a combination of factors that MUST include monetization. Lowered interest rates are a form of monetization.
5. This must lead to currency inflation, although perhaps not price inflation for everything as the cheap labor, technology, and price pressures from 1. above moderate that in many instances;
6. Governments will face the same price pressures, and will thus officially support monetization of debt and currency debasement (walk to the bottom, if you will);
7. As currency is officially debased (I'm not talking hyperinflation, just good old fashioned your dollar won't buy in 10 years what it buys today) gold will continue to increase in price;
8. Add in the uses of gold in electronics, medicine, and jewelry for a burgeoning global lower middle class, and I have a strong sense that it will run as high as 2500 this year. If the author's downside is at 1500 and price today at 1680ish, I like those odds.
OTOH, my b-school finance professor told me the market price for anything on any one day is the equilibrium between guesses of future higher prices. vs. future lower prices from investors without inside information.
New Ways To Invest In Solar Like Buffett [View article]
http://bit.ly/VRaUY9
4 inches of sea rise this century isn't going to drive major incentives any more. If the economy continues to strengthen (if Bernanke is allowed to keep his foot off the brakes and Obamacare is slightly retooled) then utilities will allow governments to force them to pay higher prices for some energy as part of a green marketing initiative. If the economy sputters again, there could be heavy pushback.
I liked your KNDI call, the quick-change battery architecture and Zipcar model looks like the way to go.
What do you think about EMKR? Great day yesterday, have opto products, solid technology, asian manufacturing base, and some exposure to projects through their Suncore JV (I believe the largest CPV installation in China going online this quarter).
Housing Today Is More Affordable Than At Any Time In History [View article]
Throw this into a blender and what does it mean for housing? If we let market demand, price signals, competition, and innovation make sense of it, I believe home prices will firm, rebound slightly, and go back to a 1-2%/year price appreciation, albeit with slightly nicer/bigger houses for the money. If central planning, tax code manipulations, and government protectionism rule the day, the unemployment, incessantly higher taxes, torn down houses, and developer kickbacks will yield us more homelessness and high rents with ownership concentrating amongst the Politburo, uh, I mean well-connected.
Phantom Shareholders At Kandi Technologies And Disclosure Issues At Guanwei - Part II [View article]
SS has an agenda, and I wouldn't be shocked to see there are positions taken, no different than many SA contributors. They need to be careful not to cross certain lines, though, and the companies you mention aren't afraid to dialog about defamation with c&d letters and courtrooms.
Phantom Shareholders At Kandi Technologies And Disclosure Issues At Guanwei - Part II [View article]
The reason non-transparent transactions are of interest to shareholders many years later is that we are afraid that some future non-transparent transaction will rob us of expected future returns. I like KNDI because the QBEX quick change battery technology, for which they reportedly have a patent, looks like a real winner in the EV space, and EV is the future for a third to half the population of the planet. But if the company is willing to make non-transparent deals to benefit insiders and close affiliates, what's to keep it from selling off the patent or other assets for cheap to another entity they control?
Any company that wants to build a strong base from which to raise expansion capital needs to be very concerned with these issues, lest their ability to raise capital be severely damaged. Accountability doesn't mean that there are never any problems, rather, it means being willing and able to give an account for what happened, why, and what is expected to happen going forward.
Again, thanks to all parties who come to SA with facts and explanations instead of just half-baked prognostication.
CenturyLink: Buy This High-Yield Investment On Its Tempting Risk/Reward Profile [View article]
What effect Intel, Apple, Microsoft, et.al. will have on the IPTV market remains to be seen, but if you consider these to be the "gasoline suppliers" for the traffic on CTL's broadband networks (and wireless isn't going to be a major player for home connectivity given the bandwidth requirements of HD video), the stage could be set for more satisfied customers and higher margins- a real win-win. A good job of integrating cloud computing into the mix- higher value enterprise services for small business customers, for example- could really set the stock on fire.
Whip Inflation Now [View article]
All this money printing would be sure to create inflation if it weren't for the massive amount of slack capacity in just about everything (including, increasingly, consumable and historically resource-constrained items like energy and food) created by technology and reduced trade barriers.
So what are we going to run out of that can't be somewhat readily substituted for? Labor? Ha ha. Energy? Ha ha. Food? This seems most likely if only due to some genetic nightmare, in which case having an investment in the means of production could be the worst position of all.
I don't know for sure, but I'm long gold.
The Problem With The Return Of Manufacturing [View article]
And if these people are smart, wouldn't you trust them to use their riches to benefit their fellow men more than politicians and bureaucrats?
I suppose temptation to "share the wealth" via higher taxes and more central planners is just too tough to pass up, even though the results of the great experiment in the last century- letting wealth accumulate vs. forced sharing- seemed obvious.
The Problem With The Return Of Manufacturing [View article]
Eventually, what happened to the Soviet Union will happen here unless we recognize that lower wages also yield lower costs- $10/hour can go a lot further than it used to. Since we're starting from such a vastly superior base, it will take decades if not centuries before we're on par with the global middle quartiles.