I get a laugh of all the coverage of Warren Buffett and his investing style. While he’s certainly a leader in investing thought, he’s also a staple in the ideas of value investing and many look toward Buffett as confirmation of their investing objective.
Insanity! As Libya continues to riot for freedom, a barrel of oil is rising quickly toward the psychologically important $100 a barrel mark. In fact, just today the price rose beyond $100 per barrel before sellers were confident enough to take short term profits.
The hottest thing since sliced bread may soon be coming to a stock market near you: Groupon. The company, which is attributed with the title of the fastest-growing company in history, may be due for an IPO. As for how to value a future Groupon IPO, no one really knows.
It doesn’t come to much surprise to learn that states are finally starting to crack down on sales tax collection for online purchases. For some states, it comes as an easy method for attracting more revenue and is generally politically popular.
That isn’t the case in one state. Read more…
Mergers are a good thing, they help find a company’s true value to a company, not an investor, and help make the markets more rational. They also allow some businesses to lower input and output costs on a per unit basis, taking advantage of economies of scale.
But at what point do we worry that the mergers in the finance space, especially the mergers between stock markets, are a bad thing? Should we have one company running every major stock exchange across the world? Read more…
Have you noticed lately that real estate investments aren’t being discussed as investment vehicles for the highly-leveraged; in fact, I think I’ve read more data about unleveraged real estate investments in the past two weeks than I have my whole life.
The brokers are starting to look like a great, albeit temporary and speculative investment. In particular, I’m looking at ETFC, AMTD, and FXCM. That’s Etrade, Ameritrade, and FXCM (a forex broker).
JP Morgan announced on Tuesday that it would accept gold as collateral against loans made on brokerage and investment accounts. Before that key announcement only Treasuries, equities, and some other corporate paper/debt securities could be used as collateral. Gold is now positive carry.
Wall Street is hopping mad! For seven straight days the domestic markets have rallied, bond yields have steepened and it appears that we’re all ready to go straight back to Dow 14,000. But what’s in the way? What is coming the months ahead, and is inflation as serious as we thought it was?
LinkedIn has filed for an IPO. That attracted some interest, obviously, but it was only due to the fact that it is a social network.
LinkedIn will be the pre-Facebook IPO, something to watch to get an idea for Facebook’s IPO at a later date, just like investors watched Mastercard after it followed Visa into an IPO. While that makes sense, I don’t think it is even worth following by itself.
News Corporation’s (NASDAQ: NWSA) CEO Rupert Murdoch may be old, but he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. Just launched, News Corp’s new flagship digital product, I believe, will be a killer hit in the online/tablet news segment. Read more…
Amazon took a beating in the latter part of the week after earnings missed estimates. Amazon (AMZN) investors are worried about how the company will keep up its ROE with sizeable investments into low-yielding assets. Read more…
