najdorf

Fear and Loathing in 2009

Nonsense after nonsense. The original post makes no sense: nothing but bearish sentiment followed by sticking to positions that the writer is married to because he's facing huge losses on all of them.

whisperonthewind: Do you know anything about banking? Why would banks pay 4 or 5% for standard deposits that could depart any day when the government is essentially handing out free money? Are you that stupid? Many banks are issuing new mortgages at 5% and below - where do you think their interest margin is going to come from if they start paying equally high rates on deposits?

I should know: You already know that you were wrong once (driven and derided by greed in July - selling WFC for 20? What did you think, that we were never going to have any banks again? You should go into business as a contrarian indicator!). Now you're wrong again. WFC is not the First National Bank of Purple Unicorn-Land. They were in every type of bad lending - interest-only, subprime, Alt-A, HELOC, no-doc, ARM, etc. Maybe they didn't go as far into the joys of negative-am ARMs as Wachovia, but they remedied that mistake by purchasing them. Why would you trust any bank's marks when all of them have had to take further writedowns and loss reserves every quarter for the past year? Of course financial bulls will eventually be right, but it doesn't really matter if you're right about one bank (which you accidentally sold) 10 years from now when your other investments have blown up along the way.

Barnes & Noble's Earnings Call from a Borders Investor's Perspective

I don't pretend to know whether BKS should buy BGP, but your analysis is inadequate.

First of all, you compare a BKS pay membership to the BGP free membership. Of course more people sign up for the free option, but if their Borders turns into a B&N and they get asked to pay a fee, what percentage of BGP customers will keep that membership? You completely ignore this issue. Also, some significant percentage of current Border's Rewards members already hold Barnes & Noble cards, but you don't even attempt to estimate this percentage.

On the online issue: Amazon has already won this contest, so your analysis is moot unless a BGP/BKS combo has some secret plan to topple the market leader (they don't). Furthermore, making up guesses at to how many people shop at Barnesandnoble.com and what they spend doesn't count as analysis. Finally, the Borders site that doesn't yet exist has a value of zero ($0) because it is a

conceptualized website
of a nearly bankrupt company
that has failed to move units online in the past
that gave up and partnered with Amazon

is not a valuable commodity just because the CEO has said "Wouldn't it be nice if we could sell more books online?"

If BGP has any value, it resides in the opportunity for BKS to convert some of their leased store sites into more profitable B&N stores with their superior inventory management, cost control, etc. For instance, Borders has a great location in Concord, NH, where Barnes and Noble has nothing.