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....................................... The good people at USA Today almost caught the exact bottom of the bear market with this article, Bear drags stocks deeply into den, published September 30, 2002.
.......... OK, I listened to TheStreet.com's third quarter FY 2003 earnings conference call today, and learned that the subscriber base stands at 66,500, with average annual revenue of $298 per subscriber. The subscription renewal rates are 92% on a monthly basis and 69% on an annual basis. .......... LondonTown.com is the best website I've found to know what's going on around London. ..........
"Stick me some place else and I could say I know how to allocate capital and value business. But they'd say, so what?"
Speaking of Buffett, here's a wonderful, casual, poorly-transcribed interview with the man. I especially like the bit where they write "statuettes" when Buffett said "statutes." Buffett says something interesting here, something that strikes me as totally weird given how he has made his fortune:
"I don't want to see either the buyer or the seller profit off each other in our stock. I look at it as a partnership.
If the outgoing partner is leaving, I want them to get a fare price when they leave. And when someone is coming in as a
partner, I want them to pay a fair price coming in."
But he got rich by buying only rock-bottom, screaming bargains, right? He later says "we just pay an intelligent price for the business." Notice he doesn't say a fair price, but an intelligent one. .......... An emailer asks who are the investors over 70 whom I respect (in response to my post on David Dreman below). Oh, the usual suspects: Buffett, Templeton, Phil Fisher, Leon Levy, Walter Schloss, William J. Ruane. (A couple of those guys have died I'm afraid, but they're still over 70.) .......... Online Chinese Character Dictionary. Neat!
 -- via languagehat -- .......... An interesting report from IBM's Collaborative User Experience Research Group.
"Most documents are the product of continual evolution. An essay may undergo dozens of revisions; source code for a computer
program may undergo thousands. And as online collaboration becomes increasingly common, we see more and more ever-evolving
group-authored texts. This site is a preliminary report on a simple visual technique, history flow, that provides a clear
view of complex records of contributions and collaboration."
 -- via Joi Ito -- .......... The Chairman explains a trade in a stock he likes to call Credence Clearwater Systems in today's Trading for Dummies lesson. Back in '95 when I was trading semiconductor stocks actively, the pet names we used in addition to Credence Clearwater Systems were "Moo Cow" for Micron (MU) and "Idiot" for Integrated Device Technology (IDTI). "Idiot" caused some confusion since it led to exchanges like this: "Did you exit idiot?" "Who you callin' an idiot?" "No, you idiot, I mean idiot!" etc. etc. .......... 'Rangers' and 'Pioneers' raised $49.5 million in the third quarter for Bush's reelection campaign. I'm reserving my $2,000 check for the other guy. .......... Sales of this gizmo from Apple are apparently very strong. The 10GB model costs $299 which seems steep to me (but I'm a cheap bastard). Must have one hell of a profit margin.
.......... Bloomberg reports that the New York Stock Exchange plans to fine five specialist firms:
"the firms [allegedly] traded for their own account to the disadvantage of customers ... unnecessarily traded as a dealer with orders on one
side of the market and then immediately traded on the opposite side to make a profit ... [engaged in] 'one-sided trading,' in which the
specialist traded unnecessarily on one side of the market only at a price where one or more DOT orders could have traded instead."
I'm shocked, shocked by these allegations! ;-) .......... A short article on David Dreman, one of the handful of investors under age 70 (Dreman is 67) whom I respect. (He buys stocks with low price-earnings ratios, low price-to-book-value ratios, low price-to-cash-flow ratios and higher-than-average yield. He has said: "Psychology is probably the most important factor in the market -- and the one that is least understood," and he is right.)
"Dreman was first turned on to contrarian investing by his father, who spent much of his life working as a commodities trader in
Winnipeg before his death at the age of 90.
'He would buy good stocks when no one else wanted them, and that worked well,' Dreman said. 'Having seen this from a very early age, I was interested in contrarian kinds of theories.'" -- via Fiend Bear -- .......... Dow Jones reports that WSJ.com had 686,000 subscribers at the end of the third quarter. The last time I looked at TheStreet.com's numbers I think they had around 63,000 subscribers, so they're about 1/10th the size of WSJ.com. -- via PaidContent -- Previous Entry >>> Random Thoughts -- October 15 |
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