Jeopardy

Will the Real Mr. Buffett Please Stand Up?

good article, Buffett is known to give out recommendations after he already established his positions.

AMB Property Poised to Weather Downturn

BART? BART is no use to DBI. How about the nearby SFO and I280 / US 101.

California's budget crisis could turn into a national one.

"In case you wondered, California’s sales tax is high, too. Most places in California, the combined city and state sales tax rate is more than 8 percent. "

After the recent tax hike, the floor is 8.25%, and most places have 9% or above.

40,000 Jobs Lost as GM Becomes Biggest Ever U.S. Company Failure

most of the 40,000 jobs will be bought out, many by as high as $100K, not just lost.

With more employers adopting a 'last one in, first one out' policy, the recession is making reverse age discrimination a growing problem.

More evidence our country is adopting socialism.

A Fitting Denouement for Sun's Assets with Upside for Oracle Shareholders

PeopleSoft and Hyperion have nothing in particular to do with the unix computing platform. They are applications (except Essbase), way on the top of the enterprise software stack. BTW, why PeopleSoft and Hyperion? Why not some other pieces Oracle acquired that are actually further down the stack and are more "platform"?

Friday Outlook: Commodities, Global Markets

that's just a snapshot at the moment of your chosen, look at the same stat now.

Issues NYSE Nasdaq Alternext
Advances 2,289 1,811 311
Declines 703 828 157
Unchanged 110 121 61
Issues at
New Highs 10 13 5
New Lows 1 7 0
Share Volume
Total 999,425,954 1,728,210,877 11,362,282
Advancing 753,526,074 1,401,875,889 6,630,172
Declining 196,462,310 317,084,614 3,283,300

The Bull Case for Simon Property Group

I will be very interested to see some data on the weighted average acquisition date on their real estate holdings.

The Bull Case for Simon Property Group

Yeap, many people don't seem to understand how assets on their book are valued.

On Apr 03 01:09 PM REITBull wrote:

> You make a good point about the depreciation of CRE. However, I have
> a tough time believing that values will drop below the cost of acquisition
> for properties acquired or built in the 1990's or before.

Ballmer Confirms Yahoo Brand Will Live On - MSN's the Likely Casualty

Live can compete with Google Apps, while Yahoo is consumer-facing. I think there might be an advantage to distinguish the two.

Decision Time For Yahoo

Well, MSN is a much smaller brand. I think it will be more like Yahoo-Live team, where the Live is responsible for the Web Apps.

John Hussman: Long-Term Investors Should Be Disturbed by This Market's Rich Valuations

It's only meaningful to compare HSGFX with SPY over a full market cycle.

John Hussman: What Happens When No One Is Left to Hold the Bag?

"never mind that these earnings are also on record profit margins, so that the market is also implicitly pricing in permanently high expectations for these margins -- on normalized margins the P/E would be above 25"

I think this is a valid argument. If we are seeing the peak earning, then P cannot go up much w/o E further expanding.

BTW, he is running a long/short fund with an important goal of reducing volatility.

Salesforce Taking On Bloomberg: Merrill's The First Catch

Dell and Cisco are the hardware suppliers and they have both recently bought unusually large chunk of extra seats from CRM. Hm, somehow this smells like a "barter deal".

Will Cisco Be Salesforce's "Largest On-Demand CRM Customer Ever"?

Please read the conf. call script, then you will have a clue.

"Next Tuesday in New York City, we will announce our largest deal ever; a major customer expanding to 25,000 subscribers, 19,000 which are net new subscribers in the fourth quarter."