Jason Kelly

Fixing the Economy by Breaking It Yet Again

From Ron Paul's book, "End The Fed," I offer the following excerpt:

"Artificially low interest rates are achieved by inflating the money supply, and they penalize the thrifty and cheat those who save. They promote consumption and borrowing over saving and investing. Manipulating interest rates is an immoral act. It's economically destructive.

"The Fed encourages irresponsible accumulation of personal debt. People live beyond their means with the help of an expansionist monetary policy. They trade in their futures for the present. They neglect the need to save in order to consume more and more. In this sense, the Fed is the ultimate promoter of consumerism and living for the present. This amounts to a terrible cultural distortion in which short-term thinking wins out over long-term planning."

A Short Take on Oil

Thank you, everybody.

Mad Hedge Fund Trader: I'm reading Rubin's book now, and agree with his long-term premise. To me the basic story for long-term higher oil prices is as simple as it gets: supply is dwindling as demand is exploding.

However, we could have said -- and did say -- the same thing a year ago when the projections were for $200 oil. It dropped into the $30s. The road to the long term is long and winding, and my point in this little article is that oil is due for a short-term pullback even if the long-term will produce higher prices and Rubin's "whole lot smaller" world.

This System Is Not Worth Saving

Thanks, guys. You're quite right: I meant ROBERT Rubin, not Paul. I fixed it at my site, but am not sure whether it will flow through to Seeking Alpha.

How to Know a Bottom When You Don't See One

Thanks, as always, for the feedback.

This article was improperly edited when taken from my site. It was NOT written by me, it was written by Teresa Lo of InVivoAnalytics for my site. See the original at tinyurl.com/c47w2p.

The reason Teresa's chart does not contain all of Mamis's marked points on a bottom pattern is that we haven't traced far enough along yet. The purpose of Teresa's article is to show in real time that a potential bottom formation is taking shape. We are up to point C, now we have to see if the other points of the classic Mamis bottom fall into place.

Finally, don't fall for the low-hanging fruit of criticizing any search for a bottom as a search for THE bottom. First of all, we've done quite well finding trading bottoms and trading tops along the way. Second, spending time formulating an idea for what THE bottom will like in this bear market is time well spent, because it will probably be the lowest stock market of our lifetimes.

Focus on that concept. This current bear market will probably end with the cheapest stock valuations you'll ever see. If you're not preparing for that in some way, you're not an investor.

Crocs: Successful Brand or Victim of Cheap Imitations?

Thank you, everybody. I appreciate your time. Your observations were helpful in conjunction with Crocs CFO Russ Hammer's comments at the Piper Jaffray Europe Conference. I wrote an in-depth report based on this and other material.

With the Crocs core models selling well even as new models grow, international sales taking off, a better handle on inventory management, licensing deals that have exceeded even internal forecasts, and a steady expansion of company stores, I think there's a good chance of a return to a snappy earnings pace and stock lift.

A couple of follow-ups:

"Shoe Man" -- I'm not sure what new models you're seeing priced at $220 to $300, but Russ Hammer made a point of highlighting the low price of the Crocs line and how it's made a lot of retailers happy in the tough consumer environment. I didn't see any models as pricey as the ones you cited.

"To the point" in Israel said that it seems Crocs are on every other pair of feet. Almost, but not quite. One in six Israelis owns a pair.

"Dave in Hackensack" -- The reason you weren't able to find the patent on Croslite for Crocs is that there isn't one. It's just a trade secret. Crocs bought the company that created it, Foam Creations, in June 2004. That gave Crocs the exclusive right to use Croslite. It is NOT patented, but the formula for making Croslite from resin is safeguarded.

From Crocs' May 2006 S-1 SEC filing: "We consider the formulation of croslite used to produce our products to be a valuable trade secret. Prior to our acquisition of Foam Creations in June 2004, Foam Creations developed the formula for croslite, and we believe that they did not publish or otherwise make the formula available to third parties without the protection of confidentiality or similar agreements. Since the acquisition, we continue to protect the formula by using confidentiality agreements with our third party processors and by requiring our employees who have access to the formula to execute confidentiality agreements or to be bound by similar agreements concerning the protection of our confidential information. Neither we nor Foam Creations have attempted to seek patent protection for the formula but we are not aware of any third party that has independently developed the formula or that otherwise has the right to use the formula in their products other than Finproject. Under the terms of our supply agreement with Finproject, Finproject has certain limited rights to use croslite, which were originally negotiated in connection with our purchase of Foam Creations from Finproject's parent company."

Dell Wants to Create "Product Lust"? Get Beyond the Box!

Thank you to everybody, but specifically Dawn and Richard at Dell. I've used the material you provided above in a follow-up article to my subscribers.

Keep at it! While I do complain at times, we are still holding our shares of Dell and are therefore on your side.

Microsoft/Yahoo Drama and Investing in Google

Globalmacro - Actually, the announcement of Microsoft's bid for Yahoo is precisely when I realized Google was the place to put online investment dollars.

We watched for the right entry price, and ended up investing at less than $500 per share. So, the Microsoft/Yahoo saga got us out of Yahoo at a profit and into Google at a bargain price, for which I'm grateful.

Here's my Feb. 4 article about the switch to Google: tinyurl.com/5ajer5

Here's my Apr. 18 article about Google vs. Microsoft in the software as a service battle: tinyurl.com/6xfeb2

Thanks to everybody for the comments.

Google vs. Microsoft: Software as a Service Battle Heats Up

Thanks everybody for commenting.

Michael, that's a good point about having the apps on your notebook. Hard to get more convenient than that. Also, Dennis, I like what you wrote about the generational difference.

It may not just be generational, though. I've had web servers go down and, while I didn't lose any data, the experience was scary enough to get me backing up everything offline just as I've always done with external hard drives off my PC. So, in a way, the more things change, the more they require the same safety measures.

What I've been looking for is a way to keep my business operating even if I'm on the road and my notebook is stolen. To me, that's the worst case scenario. If email is online, work files are online, the ability work on those work files is online, and so on, then I'm relatively undamaged by the theft.

Hence, my interest in this move toward SaaS.

Blogonomics: The Seeking Alpha Model

I've been a contributor to SA for a while now. It works for me because I make my money selling books and newsletters. Under that model, more exposure is better. As people meet me, see my work, follow it, and reach their own conclusions, I can pick up more paid readers who decide that I'm worth the price.

In a way, SA and other aggregation sites give me a free way to provide a trial period. Most newsletters include a cheap or free trial period, but there's work associated with providing it. The subscriber needs to be entered in a database, confirmed, and such. If potential subscribers can test me at SA and other places that show my free content, then by the time they decide to pay for my premium material I will have a greater chance of retaining them as customers. That's valuable.

Now, to the weakness of the SA model and how to reduce it.

Seeking Alpha is becoming Seeking Anybody.

As word gets out on SA and others, the original core group of high quality contributors gets diluted with a rush of less qualified contributors. If hundreds of new contributors are coming onboard SA every month, the signal/noise ratio is doomed to fall simply because:

> Most people in any profession are by definition average.

> Most people writing about finance online are not even in the profession, making them even less likely to be worth the reader's time.

> Material starts to duplicate, anyway, with now a hundred people making the same points about the latest Google headline instead of just the three people you know to be on top of the situation. How many me-too articles does it take to drown? Just the best presentation of each point is enough.

This deluge of contributions is serving to make SA less useful over time, not more. The quality filter needs to be tended to carefully or, as somebody else put it, SA will degenerate into another Yahoo Message board -- utterly useless.

To be clear, I'm not insulting the work of all part-time contributors nor claiming that all pros are great. I'm pointing out that any collection of material from thousands of people needs to be zealously filtered.

One idea is to create an algorithm that judges the accuracy of articles with a simple [buy, sell, hold] over the [short, medium, long] term categorization attached to the investment under discussion, and then track how that investment does against the S&P 500 or other appropriate benchmark during the time frame specified. Over time, a contributor would have an accuracy rating assigned to his or her history that could be viewed in a table like the one at CXO Advisory's Guru Grades:

www.cxoadvisory.com/gu.../

I have a feeling that the vast majority of contributors at SA would object strongly to such a system of accountability due to their accuracy hovering forever around 50%. Few want the world to know that their articles are no more useful than the nearest coin for a flip.

So, an alternative way to rate contributors would be to tally ratings assigned to their work by readers. SA is dipping a toe in this water with the "Did you find this article interesting?" question at the end of each article. That's not very sophisticated, though, and a system like Amazon's 5-star rating where you click on the number of stars that you think the article deserves would work better. I suggest ten stars for a finer scale.

As with DVDs on Netflix, a reader should be able to go back and change his or her rating of an article on SA later. That way, readers could judge whether the article was accurate or not in its forecast. If I write that Apple will hit $300 by Christmas, you don't know until Christmas whether I was right or not. You might rate the quality of my presentation 4 stars now, but want to move that up to 10 stars when Apple hits $300 at Christmas. (This is just an example.)

Similarly, SA should have a rating and categorization of commenters. They have zero accountability and, to be blunt, most commenters are morons. Offline, I've talked with other SA contributors who feel tarnished by the inane comments appended to the bottom of their articles.

If SA could separate the inane from the insightful and then prioritize them appropriately, that would improve the site's quality a lot.

With some further development by SA of rating systems, we can all help to put the best contributors, articles, commenters, and comments on top for easy research.

I hope these ideas help. All in all, I consider SA to be a fine effort and am happy to participate.

Google vs. Microsoft: What's Going on Here?

Thank you, Jeff and Derrick, for the informative discussion.

I responded to some of your comments on my site.