logicalthought

Congratulations to Apple's Steve Jobs, Fortune's CEO of the Decade

Steve Jobs is a brilliant guy and Apple makes fabulously creative products (and this is not a short-term call because I don't follow the company at all), but based on the "Sports Illustrated cover jinx principle", it's probably time to sell the stock. For those who've never heard of this, the rationale is simple: It's an extremely competitive world out there, and once you're universally recognized as being on top of it, there's nowhere to go but down.

The Facts Indicate We're Not in a Depression or Bubble

>>One final point is that Warren Buffett's favorite indicator is very bullish right now.<<

You're referring to the "market cap to GDP" ratio, which I would say is an extremely misleading metric these days due to the now-massive "public debt-to-GDP" ratio. As an aside, I guess Warren must have a lot of "favorite indicators", because the one I recently heard him cite was related to "rail freight", which has been God-awful lately. Of course, both of these latter two "indicators" ("excessive public debt" and "rail freight") have extremely negative connotations for Warren's ABSOLUTELY favorite "indicator"... "Profits".

Piper Jaffray: Teen Retail Spending Shows Slight Rebound

Yeah, seeing as the kids can't find jobs, they may as well go shopping!

Blackberry’s 26 Advantages over iPhone

>>Most Blackberries have keyboards, so you can actually type fast and with no errors. Helps while driving...<<

LOL... Yes, it's much safer that way!

Smartphone Apps Score: Pandora 4, Sirius XM 0

Pandora is so damn good (and will soon be so damn popular) that I doubt that the music companies will continue to provide them with content at prices cheap enough for the service to stay free.

Are We at the Beginning of a Bull Market?

>>You will always have tons of stocks that will perform greatly over 5-10yrs even if during this period a tough recession happened.<<

No, not "tons" but, rather, a tiny minority of stocks, akin to finding a handful of needles in a haystack. Remember, "relative performance" doesn't pay the bills, and a really ugly market brings multiple compression on ALL stocks, even the "good ones". It isn't easy to find stocks that go up (rather than just down less than the others) in a really bad macro environment. Proof positive of this is that the companies that you specifically mention (Apple, Google, Potash and Intuitive Surgical) are WAY off their highs of 2007/2008. According to your theory, they still should have gone up. The only stocks to get long in an ongoing recession are those with specific near-term inflection points that have absolutely nothing to do with the overall economy. On the risky side, those would be small-cap biotechs that don't need money and have pivotal data or pending FDA drug approvals. On the less risky side, it would be a smaller company with a decent balance sheet introducing a VERY hot new product of some sort without too many slow-selling (because of the economy) legacy products. It would NOT be any kind of mega-cap company (no matter how cool its products are) that can't outgrow the "multiple compression" that takes place in a bad market.

Are We at the Beginning of a Bull Market?

>>Now, if the regulators fail to control naked shorts and reinstate a strong uptick rule (not a fake new rule that would have no power), we could put the March low in real danger.<<

Yes, the problem with the markets isn't the lack of earnings; it's the shorts... The credibility of this author is zero

Can Two Rich Guys Humanize Microsoft?

The new ad is funny, but a complete waste of money, and it won't sell a single additional Windows operating system. What they need to do is tell me WHY I should buy a Windows machine (or, at the very least, tell me why I should be ANY new computer, on the assumption that 90% or so of those sales will go to Windows, anyway). In other words, they need to tell me what a new Windows computer will do to improve my life. But, whatever... It's Bill's money, and he can certainly afford to waste it.