Ralph F

Lessons from the Toyota Prius for Alt Energy Stocks

The marketshare numbers for the Prius are amazing. I wonder how long Toyota can keep that up for.

Off-Target Reporting on TGT Credit-Card Portfolio

Excellent article -- I'd read the WSJ story and had assumed that this was great news for the other credit card stocks. Your article now clarifies that this isn't the case.

Perhaps the key remaining positive for the credit card stocks is that the Target deal went through at all.

Unintended Consequences of a Delta/Northwest Merger

Given that airlines often have a lot of debt, I'd have thought that you'd have to use enterprise value instead of market cap.

Mr. Market Trips on Mark to Market, Gives REITs Away

Lisa, "mREITs" is Mortgage REITs.

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

It's amazing how almost homogeneously bad the news is. Not sure what to make of that:

- keep well short
- news flow and sentiment are about as negative as they'll get, time to go long

Thoughts anyone?

Fed Rate Cuts May Have Been Counter-Productive

"Government sponsored inflation ultimately affects all prices, including stocks."

This is a smart article. Interestingly, inflation is good for companies with debt, bad for companies sitting on loads of cash. The value of their cash gets eroded by inflation, and the interest they receive on it plummets as the Fed cuts rates.

Value investors watch out!

Interactive Q&A: Joe Cross, President and CEO of Nanophase Technologies

A quick follow up question, if I may. On one of the message boards, someone posted the following comment:

"Nanosolar, a privately held company, is apparently the worlds lowest cost solar panal producer by far. See nanosolar.com. A key to its product's low cost is nanotechnology. Might it need some of NANX's intellectual property rights to produce its product? That would certainly produce a huge upside potential for NANX."

Is there any basis to that speculation?

Interactive Q&A: Joe Cross, President and CEO of Nanophase Technologies

Thanks for taking questions, Joe.

My question is this:

Basic materials companies don't trade at very large multiples. Do you think investors should be viewing you as a basic materials stock or a technology stock? If the latter, can you elaborate and justify that in term of potential revenue growth and/or margins going forward?

Why iPhone Unlocking is Growing Every Day

Look at the articles from early January when AAPL was at $200 per share. Some headlines from then:

Jim Cramer's 10 Predictions for 2008
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"Apple (AAPL), he predicts, will reach $300."

The Apple of Our Eye (Sramana Mitra)
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"Conceivably, the stock price will spend a lot more time in the above $200 zone this year, especially after the holiday quarter results are out."

Needham Starts Coverage of Apple with $235 Target (Eric Savitz)
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Apple's Target and Estimates Upped by Goldman (Eric Savitz)
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Some thoughts on this:

1. Why didn't the apple faithful complain about those articles -- they encouraged people to buy the stock when it was at it's 52 week high, just before it collapsed.

2. On the sentiment issue now, while the comments are still massively pro-apple, most articles are now bearish on the stock. That suggests to me that the stock might have bottomed.

TheStreet.com Q4 2007 Earnings Call Transcript

I think he really fudged the question on the page view issue. Sure, page views are less important as you have more ajax and javascript. But the page view metrics were lousy before the new site launched.

Also, if you look carefully at the new site, you see that there's auto refresh on almost every page. That's a sneaky way of boosting page views that might alienate advertisers, and suggests they might be scrambling for page views.

Time To Sell Russian ETFs and Stocks

Volatility for Russia is low because the market is dominated by large cap natural resource and energy companies, as you point out. And natural resources and energy have been strong, with low volatility. But the problem with equating risk with volatiliy is that political risk is binary: either everything is fine, or the situation totally blows up. In which case historical volatility isn't a good measure of risk.

That's why I agree with your article.

I'm a Buyer of Apple On This Selloff

Apple's a momentum stock. You don't buy momentum stocks that lower their guidance.

In Euros We Trust

Cheaper and better than FXE: iPath EUR/USD Exchange Rate ETN (ERO)

There's a full list of currency ETFs here:
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Bill Miller On Timing Buys In Housing Stocks

Bill Miller is a very, very smart guy with astonishingly good long term performance. So "aren't you dumb" doesn't seem a very meaningful response to this excerpt from his letter to shareholders.

Instead, I'd be interested to know if the last sentence means that he's now re-evaluating his earlier analysis, and what data that analysis was based on.

Dollar Index To Hit 66?

Do you think the dollar at this level also implies a global recession? The answer to that has a big impact on where you invest, no?