Mechanical

2008: The Year eBay Lost Its Mojo

I don't use Ebay much so I didn't know about how bad their site has gotten. I do own some Ebay in one of my accounts.

From an investment perspective, I knew that Ebay.com was growing into maturity. In other words, they're not seeing much growth in terms of sales, traffic, etc.

BUT, the reason that I was interested in it is because they own Paypal and Skype, which I feel are two dominators in their respective, blossoming niches. Paypal is a bit more mature (and what I heard about the hacking thing unnerves me a bit since I have cash in there!) but still growing nicely. Skype is just getting started.

Here in the office that I work with, we have been adopting the use of Skype both internally and also recommending that our clients use it.

Thanks for writing this article. It's going to cause me to go back and evaluate my thesis to make sure it is still intact.

Google and YouTube: Dynamic Duo Dominates Search

Nice article and I (and any other person that owns a website) can absolutely attest to this.

Google--between it's core search, YouTube, Google Images, and international Google searches--accounts for the VAST majority of my traffic.

It's funny because my traffic correlates very closely to the numbers outlined in this article. But two things you didn't mention about Google is Google Images and their international search engines.

I think that search engines like Google present a good buying opportunity right now. I would be interested in Baidu since it's so much cheaper now than it was before, but I've always been a bit nervous investing in ADRs.

Full Disclosure: Author is long Google.

Profit from Visa - the Biggest IPO in U.S. History

This was a pretty well-written article compared to a lot of other ones I've seen. I don't know why there seems to be a shortage of good coverage on the Visa IPO. A lot of the articles found here on SeekingAlpha were of much lower quality than I'm used to.

My feelings on the Visa IPO opportunity is similar to Retrace's. I want to sit on the sidelines for a couple weeks and watch what happens. I expect it'll pop-up 10-20%, then consolidate, before moving upward again.