Rokjok777

The Oil Casino: SEC Heading for Monte Carlo, Part III

Where to begin? First, this is an amazing article, thank you for taking the time to assemble this. One suggestion: for a site like this, perhaps an executive summary at the beginning with specific recommendations or opinions. (New SEC rules mean investors will no longer know what proven reserves exist; PBR much riskier than other petro investment options, etc.)
Monte Carlo simulations were widely touted in funds management by quants as a way to model risk, but now are quite discredited. Interesting that we see them heading into the petro-investing world now. So the value of oil majors will become as opaque as the TBTF bank balance sheets....oh great.

Two Takes on the Financial Crisis: 'Too Big to Fail' by Andrew Ross Sorkin and 'How Markets Fail' by John Cassidy

I bought "TBTF" for a flight I took yesterday from Seattle to Sydney and read the entire thing (c. 500 pages). It is a great read, the author had unprecedented cooperation by real insiders to get the chain of events and meetings in great detail. Never boring.
I was prepared to learn about how a secret Goldman plot somehow informed what happened, in the end though this was not really the case. The problem was quite simple: too much risk-taking, no regulatory oversight (the portrayal of Christopher Cox at SEC is hilarious), and BODs asleep at the switch.
We seem to have learned absolutely nothing and so will repeat, like Groundhog Day. Kind of like Vietnam and Afghanistan...

Obama's Fears of a Double Dip Recession Are Nonsense

MHFT, you are one sarcastic and astute MF. I agree with every single word you said. If you're ever in Sydney or Shanghai or Seattle, I'll buy you a snifter of Martell...


On Nov 19 09:32 AM Mad Hedge Fund Trader wrote:

> cde I know what keeps Obama awake at night. Let’s say we spend our
> $2 trillion in stimulus and get a couple of quarters of weak growth.
> Then once the effects of the stimulus wear off, we slip back into
> a deep recession, setting up a classic “W.” Unemployment never does
> stop climbing. This happened to Roosevelt in the thirties. So congress
> passes another $2 trillion reflationary budget. Everybody gets wonderful
> new mass transit upgrades, alternative energy infrastructure, and
> bridges to nowhere. But with $4 trillion in spending packed into
> two years, inflation really takes off. The bond market collapses,
> the dollar tanks big time, gold goes ballistic to $5,000, and silver
> explodes to $50. Ben Bernanke has no choice but to engineer an interest
> rate spike, taking the Fed funds rate up to a Volkeresque 18%. Housing,
> having never recovered, drops by half again. This all happens in
> the 2012 election year. Obama is burned in effigy, a Mormon is elected
> president, and the Republicans, reinvigorated by new leadership,
> retake both houses of congress. We invade Iran. Crude hits $500.
> This is not exactly a low probability scenario. Remember Jimmy Carter?
> This is why junk bond yields are still stubbornly high at 12.5%,
> and credit default swaps live at lofty levels. Are the equity markets
> pricing in this possibility? No chance. The risk of Armageddon is
> still out there. Personally, I give it a one in three chance. Pass
> the Xanax.

Google: The Not-So-Gentle Giant Steps into Mobile Apps

GOOG the value destroyer

oooh "don't be evil..."

Just keep track of where everyone goes on the internet...and soon phones too with GPS.

If that's not Orwellian, I don't know what is

IBM Gets Cozy on the Sidelines as Oracle / Sun Deal Languishes

Forrester said that "any enterprise software vendor that bases their offering on Java will need to rethink their strategy"
That has seismic significance for IBM Websphere and several others. Once Attila Ellison gets a hold of Java...the long knives will come out.

Australia: What Recession?

Excellent comments about the 4 pillars policy and how it kept Australian banks from the suicidal policies in the US and UK. Regulation of banks is kind of like a sailboat race. You win a sailboat race by not losing. Avoiding as many errors as possible. In the long run, that wins the race.


On Nov 17 01:14 PM Go Lakers wrote:

> Well written articile. I'm an Australian who lives in the US and
> next to no one here knows this story. For what is supposedly the
> most savvy investing nation in the world, it's quite amazing that
> Americans are, for the most part, oblivious to an investing success
> story right under their noses.
>
> The 4 Pillars bank policy was a saviour for the Australian economy.
> Without it, and the essential ban on those 4 banks being taken over
> by a foreign bank (thank you the FIRB), our banks would have almost
> certainly been players in the sub-prime asset debacle, they would
> have chased higher returns, they would have been bigger players in
> the US and European markets, they would have fed Australian households
> the cheap and, more importantly, easy money that the Poms, the Spanish
> and the Yanks got.
>
> For all its faults, the 4 Pillars policy works in times of stress
> and granted that isn't anywhere near the majority of the time, so
> it arguably contraints growth and innovation. But isn't a time of
> stress exactly when you need it to work the most?

Ten Most Prominent Underperformers in Corporate America

Cannot believe you did not include Microsoft. I don't see consumers lined up waiting to buy their new operating system when it goes on sale. What? It's already on sale?

Micropayments Data Point of the Day

Put $5 on top of the cost of the ticket and people will all do it. Email them an access code. Geez these people are real Einstein's....

Two More Myths About Business in China

I think the most interesting fact from this article is the fact that Anna is a marketing analyst, probably a pretty good one, and she earns $700 per month.
Wake up folks, the global standard of living is leveling out, rising in the developing world, and ________________ in the developed world (fill in the blank).

Weekly Recap: Is the U.S. Going Bankrupt?

I have really enjoyed your comments here on SA but it seems recently that you are feeling quite dark...almost biblical. Surely things cannot look that bad, cheer up my friend. As my late mother used to say "it's only money..."


On Nov 13 11:44 AM User 353732 wrote:

> The interesting question is not whether the US is bankrupt; it is.
> That is what negative net worth means.
>
> The 3 interesting, presently, unanswerable questions are:
>
> 1. What mechanism or mechanisms will the US Regime use to manifest
> the default?
> 2.How will the world and what is left of the American Middle Class
> respond?
> 3. Post response, will the USA as we know it exist as a legal, sovereign
> entity?
>
> No flourish of trumpets will announce the defaults and its cascading
> consequences. The night before, it will be business as usual for
> the US Regime; the next dawn will be a dawn like no other in American
> history.
>
> The night is far spent. There is a last day for economic wickedness
> and financial depravity. Reality and truth do prevail and will prevail.

Ten Reasons to Invest in Malaysia

I'm a bit sceptical as well, I travel to do business in Malaysia frequently and while it has promise and yes there was less reckless lending, it still has quite a few structural problems before it becomes anywhere near as vibrant as Vietnam or Singapore or China. Corrupt business practices are still widespread, mostly they just cause delay. It seems you always need to "hire" a "bid manager" if you're competing for a large contract, usually that's a relative of a top official somewhere. He (she) skims a few percent off the top. Next, the "bid manager" hires a partner company, his crony, who also takes a few percent. Often there even a third company between seller and buyer. Not only is this corrupt and non-transparent, it also injects lots and lots of delay as paper bags (or the equivalent) full of cash are transferred.
Tourism is probably a pretty good industry but stories of girls receiving 20 lashes for the crime of drinking a beer at a resort don't help much. See William Pesek's recent article on Bloomberg for additional views...they recently cancelled Beyonce's show but that's the least of their worries.
Overall 6 out of 10, IMO.

U.S. Handling of Financial Crisis - A Less Optimistic View

I was a hardened Dem from California so I was in favor of Obama over McCain/Palin. But Obama's inexperience is showing. He trusts "experts": how to fix Wall St? Ask Summers & Geithner! What to do about Afghanistan? Ask the generals! Well, of course they're gonna say "yeah just give us thousands of more troops and plenty of more bombs and billions of dollars, it'll all be great!"
As I say, I used to be a hardened Dem from California, now I'm a sunburned Aussie from Sydney...

The Unspoken Threat Facing Telecoms

Major threat to telcos is the exploding demand for cellular internet. iPhone 3G data traffic is causing cells to fail with predictable results for voice calls dropping and very unhappy customers. There are few/no good solutions for this with any of the cellular technologies. Should be good for WiMax.

Knocking on Norwegian Wood

Excellent comprehensive article, thank you.

Plenty of Upside Remaining for Microsoft

Take a look at the BOD sometime: it's a bunch of "yes" men and women (from places like Harvey Mudd College). They've been bullied by Ballmer for years (when they should have fired him years ago for drastic underperformance, the stock closed at $35 bucks ten years ago fer chrissakes, now it's $27). Now that Gates is gone, they've brought in Ray Ozzie to be the startegy guy, and his head is in the cloud (maybe rightly so). So there IS no strategy, it's all tactics. And tactics are driven by Ballmer and Kevin Turner, who came from WalMart. What he learned at WalMart was how to take cost out, turn the box sideways and you can fit three more on the shelf. And that's what they're doing, just taking cost out, firing people, paying at the 66% percentile so they don't get the best and brightest anyhow. No, my friends, this company is not like Google....it's more like GM.