The Dangers Of Shorting Nose-Bleed Valuations [View article]
You look at people running aapl down $300 when it has a p to e in the teens and then you look at lnkd and wonder if you live on the same planet. I'm 1 for 3 on big momo shorts. made money on crm leap puts, lost on amzn and lnkd. csco, aol, msft were once momo stocks and now you can't get them to move to save their lives. But guessing when that transition happens is really, really hard.
TLT: Why This Long-Term Treasury Bond ETF May Be A Good Portfolio Diversifier [View article]
"No financial institution has as deep pockets or as good information as the Fed. It never has to sell. It does not like to lose money." It's not clear to me the Fed can lose money in any meaningful sense. Say interest rates went up a lot and all the bonds (treasuries, mbs) the fed holds dropped by 25%. I agree that would wipe out any private bank. But the Fed has no stock. The Fed can and does print money to pay any counterparty. At the end of the year they do an income statement and remit to the treasury any money they make. I would doubt that this income statement includes mark to market from the balance sheet. So I'm not sure I can see any unfixable bad effect if the fed loses money. And I'm guessing they are going to lose money when interest rates go up.
I have always been curious whether TIPS would surge when there was sudden obvious inflation from a stable state. We may soon get a chance to see that experiment in action.
Decide Whether LinkedIn Makes Sense For You [View article]
"The reason Facebook's net income was so low for 2012 is that it spent $1.4 billion on research and development. This is more than five times as much as LinkedIn spent on development." I find this interesting. Don't accountants make allowances for things like that? If one company spends more than another on r&d, that drops straight to the bottom line? I have worked for companies that capitalize IT (internal computer work) spending. You would think they would capitalize at least some R&D.
Will LinkedIn's International And Job Postings Earnings Growth Support Its Stock Price? [View article]
Tell it like it is baby! It should be 60. In the past earnings announcements the stock has edged down before earnings because people are nervous. But lnkd has been up in the last month. I think it's close to it's all time high. Did Forbes republish this? This seems like what is in Forbes today.
Reality Will Set In For LinkedIn, Reiterated As Sell [View article]
Some good points about the r&d budget of large competitors. Boy this one has been tough, as it seems most tech shorts are. My logic was this got bid up before fb went public because people wanted to get into social media once fb proved it was really big (a billion users) before the fb ipo. Then when the fb ipo flopped I figured, how can lnkd get a higher valuation than fb? But up it goes. I'm not into paranioa but with some mm's with huge holdings and lnkd volume of a million per day (low), you do have to ask if the mm's think its worth their while to intervene when they think they can affect the price at a low cost.
Does anyone know if the federal reserve takes the fact that a lot of other countries are using our dollar as currency (some to a greater extent, some to a lesser extent.) as a conscious policy issue? It seems like the fed would really have to spend some time putting this into their models and know what money supply usage is going to domestic vs. foreign use. I never really hear Greenspan or Bernanke talk about it a lot.
Actually I see, Peter did talk about the "sopping". And lest people doubt his comment that the dollar wave will come washing back this way, look at the history of the Pound Sterling when it stopped being the world's reserve currency. All you have to do is be the adult supervision in the room and benefits accrue to you. It's so sad that the U.S. is giving up this freebee by becoming like Europe.
I feel like Peter feels he has to defend the fact that there is little inflation. Velocity dropped like a brick. MV=PQ. They can print money and prices don't go up when the velocity of money is dropping. Plus as I have pointed out in some of my articles the rest of the world is sopping up dollars, enabling the Treasury to borrow, the Fed to buy Treasuries (print money), and the extra money is going overseas. So at some stage we get inflation but I don't think any monetary hawk has to apologize because we haven't seen big inflation yet.
How Do You Know When An ETF Is Actually A Bargain? [View article]
I agree with skewstorange. I would like to see a good article on etf creation and value of underlying securities they hold to it's price. etf's seem to work great, a lot of people use them, I have some. But that thing of some special market maker watching the demand and then creating more units or destroying units as too many people try to sell an etf is bizarre. It's like two levels of demand. Demand for the utilities that are in the s&p 500 (the contents of xlu) and xlu itself. You never see anyone complaining that an etf is trading at a different price than the sum of the value of their holdings like you see with closed end funds that trade on an exchange some times.
Facebook Social Graph Bad News For LinkedIn [View article]
Although I'm short lnkd and would like to see it go down I'm not sure I agree with this article. I think people mostly want to keep their personal life and professional life separate. Most people would do their social life on fb and their professional life on lnkd. fb needs to find a way to make sure the professional people in a persons life aren't seeing the personal things in a persons life, and as a pretty technical person, that seems pretty hard to do.
It's funny. I remember Dell interviewing people to get into the Service business in the early 2000's. They've been working on what has been described in this article for a long time. But credibility in the IT space takes a long time to build up and just building clients and server hardware isn't credibility. IBM is an amazing company. I remember in the late 80's some people in IBM were still pushing MVS approaches as the way to go. They almost destroyed themselves but they came back. They do everything, basic research, chips, hardware, software, service. Somehow they just keep motoring along. Facebook has built their entire infrastructure on Open Source and commodity priced servers (that was true originally, I am not privy to their architecture now) and yet very proprietary companies like IBM still keep going.
Smartphone And App Downloads In 2012: A Boon For Apple And Microsoft [View article]
As a person who wrote an app (it's a finance app if you're interested, look on my profile page) I guess I would have to say that the app market just followed the way of the web, all software is mostly free. Even the people with the marketing muscle and the resources have a hard time making any money. There used to be articles that said like a top 50 guy in social networking on the apple app store was grossing 7k a year, although I haven't seen any like this recently. Now it seems like most app activity is companies who want to use apps as a vehicle to sell their products which is fine. But pricing pressure to 99 cents and the difficultly of being successful in a niche market (like finance, gardening, and exercise are niche markets) make it really tough for a person with an idea to succeed.
LinkedIn: A Connection To Be Ignored At These Levels [View article]
Mark, last quarter was an interesting data point. They beat their street number. I was short and thought I was doomed. It went up like 8 points in the after hours the day of the announcement. Then the next day a small loss, erasing the after hours move. I had never seen that with a big name momentum stock. Normally an earnings announcement is either a big gain or loss, and this one settled right in on no change. So in my mind they are really going to do something spectacular to move the stock up.
The Dangers Of Shorting Nose-Bleed Valuations [View article]
TLT: Why This Long-Term Treasury Bond ETF May Be A Good Portfolio Diversifier [View article]
When To Worry About Inflation [View article]
Decide Whether LinkedIn Makes Sense For You [View article]
Will LinkedIn's International And Job Postings Earnings Growth Support Its Stock Price? [View article]
Reality Will Set In For LinkedIn, Reiterated As Sell [View article]
Inflation Propaganda Exposed [View article]
Inflation Propaganda Exposed [View article]
Inflation Propaganda Exposed [View article]
Can KLA-Tencor Improve Your Yield? [View article]
How Do You Know When An ETF Is Actually A Bargain? [View article]
Facebook Social Graph Bad News For LinkedIn [View article]
Can Dell Do An IBM? [View article]
Smartphone And App Downloads In 2012: A Boon For Apple And Microsoft [View article]
LinkedIn: A Connection To Be Ignored At These Levels [View article]