Monday, October 29, 2012

$P Pandora longs, if markets were open now this hunk of junk goes down $MSFT offers a product losing $$ for 1 yr free?

$P Pandora longs, if markets were open now this hunk of junk goes down $MSFT offers a product losing $$ for 1 yr free?  http://goo.gl/is7nS

Hurricane Sandy, the Atlantic’s largest-ever tropical storm

Hurricane Sandy, the Atlantic’s largest-ever tropical storm, will strike the East Coast today or early tomorrow with a life-threatening surge, emptying the streets of the nation’s largest cities and lashing a region of 60 million with gales, rain and even snow

#Skeptical #You'reTellingMe You will buy water because it's going to rain too much?

#Skeptical #You'reTellingMe You will buy water because it's going to rain too much?

#Funny Here is the MOST GULLIBLE Person on Facebook

#Funny Here is the MOST GULLIBLE Person on Facebook

Thursday, October 25, 2012

$DV Looks like a short target still

$DV pre-earnings Looks like a short target still

$DDD Earnings Guidance #frothy ?

$DDD Earnings Guidance

87.29M in revenue, 343m for a 2 billion market cap seems frothy!

3D Systems Co. (DDD) updated its FY12 earnings guidance on Thursday. The company provided earnings per share (EPS) guidance of $1.20-1.30 for the period.

3D Systems last released its earnings data on Thursday, October 25th. The company reported $0.32 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the analysts’ consensus estimate of $0.27 by $0.05. 3D Systems’s revenue was up 57.4% compared to the same quarter last year.

Traders Get Bullish on Shares of MGIC Investment $MTG

Traders Get Bullish on Shares of MGIC Investment $MTG

Library: Parents and Kids

Library: Parents and Kids

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Romney Invests In Voting Machine Company With Big Issues In Ohio

Romney Invests In Voting Machine Company With Big Issues In Ohio

Techie guy by day, rocker guy by night - McNamee seems to have it all: Book, fun gadgets, band

Techie guy by day, rocker guy by night McNamee seems to have it all: Book, fun gadgets, band 



 
MENLO PARK, Calif. -- Something about Roger McNamee hardly seems fair. How can one guy live such a baby boomer fantasy?
In his day job, McNamee, 48, is the consummate Silicon Valley player. He knows everyone. Has his fingers in everything. Is sought by entrepreneurs the way pilgrims seek a mystic on a mountain top. Got rich investing early in tech stars such as Electronic Arts and helping rescue established companies such as Seagate Technologies.
"He's an amazing guy," says Gordon Eubanks, CEO of software company Oblix. "He thinks big and bets big but doesn't act big."
Now, McNamee is raising money for his new private equity firm, Elevation Partners -- and one of the partners is U2's Bono.
At night, McNamee plays in a rock band with other, real rock stars, such as Pete Sears, who used to be in Jefferson Starship. He's friends with the Grateful Dead and took guitar lessons from rock legend Jorma Kaukonen.
McNamee wrote his first book, The New Normal, released late last year, about how technology and globalization change life and business. It recently hovered at an impressive 3,000 on Amazon's sales ranking.
And he carries nearly as many communication gadgets as a Circuit City store, sometimes wearing six or seven clipped to his belt. "At airport security, I'm like a clown car," McNamee says.
On top of all that, "People like him," says Mark Wong-Van Haren, a partner at venture-capital firm Charles River Ventures. "That's not as trifling as it sounds. Likability increases trust and connections, and those things are valuable."
Maybe that's the secret behind this long-haired dealmaker. Or maybe it's this:
"As a kid, I wasn't particularly good at anything -- sports, school," McNamee says. "I was OK. But I was tenacious. Everything I do, I have thought: 'I might not be great at it, but there's a way to get great at it.' "
Others bring different insights into the quintessence of McNamee. Marc Andreessen first met him around 1994, when Andreessen and Jim Clark were co-founding Netscape Communications. Netscape was funded by venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. McNamee ran an equity firm, Integral Capital Partners, that worked closely with Kleiner Perkins.
McNamee "used to have this LBJ-like thing he'd do where he'd corner you in a hallway at a conference," Andreessen says. "He had these huge windshield-size glasses, and he'd push right up against you, in your face, and talk at you extremely urgently for like five minutes, get you nodding yes and pressing yourself further and further back into the wall, his face like 2 inches away from yours.
"You'd be looking into those huge square glasses, and then all at once he'd just stop and stare at you and let the silence hang, and if you weren't extremely careful, it was at that point where you'd just spill your guts and tell him everything he wanted to know," Andreessen says. "It's no surprise he always knows whatever's going on."
Fortunate events
McNamee's career has been a series of fortunate events. In the 1970s, he left Yale after his sophomore year, moved to San Francisco with a girlfriend and sold ads for a biweekly French-language newspaper there. He later returned to Yale, got an MBA at Dartmouth and landed at financial firm T. Rowe Price in 1982.
The firm needed a tech analyst. McNamee knew nothing about tech. But in the early '80s, tech was a dog on the stock market, so the rookie got it.
Around 1990, he wanted to make a venture investment in a financial software start-up called Intuit, but he lost the deal to Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr.
"I said, 'I'm on the wrong team,' " McNamee says. By 1991, he'd started Integral -- an unusual hybrid that invested in stocks and venture deals. Integral partnered so tightly with Kleiner that the two firms' offices in Silicon Valley connected.
In 1997, sensing insanity in Silicon Valley's emerging bubble, McNamee left Integral to help start another firm, Silver Lake Partners. The plan was to make equity investments in tech stalwarts that were in trouble but had great promise.
Silver Lake made huge amounts of money during the tech bust by betting on companies such as disk-drive maker Seagate and tech services company Flextronics.
Through the years, McNamee met tech's elite and its hottest up-and-comers. They have typically been impressed by McNamee's knowledge of the industry, boundless energy and willingness to help even if he doesn't have money in the deal.
"Roger has been an excellent sounding board for me," says Kim Polese, who turned to McNamee when she was CEO of Marimba and more recently as she started software company SpikeSource. "I can always count on him for a laser-sharp insight and a frank opinion, often accompanied by an especially pertinent anecdote."
And he's still the guy to see. On a recent evening at his office, who should drop in but Blake Ross, the spark plug behind the Firefox browser. The sizzlingest whiz kid in Silicon Valley had come to pick McNamee's brain about what he might do next.
An ear for music
McNamee has played music most of his life. He and his brother, Giles, formed a duo that played at happy hours. They called themselves The Other Brothers. McNamee's wife, Ann, is a music theory Ph.D. (They have no children.)
At tech conferences, McNamee would organize jam sessions. By the late 1990s, an extended version of The Other Brothers was playing benefits, once opening for The Temptations. Because Giles, who lived on the East Coast, had to fly in for shows, the band became the Flying Other Brothers -- the band's name today.
The FOBs started getting more serious -- writing songs, playing paid gigs, getting lessons from Kaukonen, working with the likes of G.E. Smith and T-Bone Burnett. Sears joined the band. So did guitarist Barry Sless and drummer Jimmy Sanchez. Both had played with some of the biggest names in rock history.
The band was McNamee's doorway to the music world. He started spending one day a week advising the Grateful Dead on business and technology. "I got to know the music business very well," he says.
While investigating an idea for the Dead, he met with U2. McNamee was taken by U2's business savvy. The group had, for instance, cut a rare deal with its record company, so U2 owns all its music rights.
In 2003, McNamee's cellphone rang, and Bono was on the other end. He wanted to discuss an investment idea. McNamee and another partner at Silver Lake, Marc Bodnick, talked over the idea with John Riccitiello, then-president of video game giant Electronic Arts. That same day, Fred Anderson -- a McNamee buddy -- said he was retiring as Apple Computer's CFO. He was pulled into the conversation.
The conversation led to others about opportunities investing in media. Late last year, McNamee, Bono, Bodnick, Riccitiello, Anderson and another friend, Bret Pearlman, formed Elevation.
A quiet period
That's what is public about Elevation. McNamee won't talk about anything else because the firm is raising a fund and is in a quiet period, according to Securities and Exchange Commission rules.
Here's what people familiar with the fund say: It will make equity investments in intellectual property in media and entertainment -- most likely music, video games and online content. The firm will use the Silver Lake model of investing in older entities that might be able to do something with new technology to spur growth.
Elevation will actively advise management where it invests but won't get as involved as venture capitalists do in start-ups. Elevation will finish raising its fund in April or May.
Bono is apparently more than an attention-getting hood ornament. He joins meetings by conference call, has an office at Elevation and keeps in touch with the partners via BlackBerry wireless e-mail.
Which is why McNamee has two BlackBerrys holstered on his belt. One is for Elevation e-mail; the other, for Silver Lake, where he's still involved. McNamee's belt also holds two cellphones: a Motorola StarTac and a Motorola Razr -- the latter because it's cool, he says.
Most of the time, McNamee adds a Danger wireless Web device to his belt and a Photo iPod. And because he likes to test the latest stuff, he's been carrying Sony's new PlayStation Portable, too.
By contrast, over on McNamee's office shelf sits his book in all its low-tech splendor. It is McNamee's philosophy and guidance bound in paper. Of all that he's done, the book seems to surprise him the most.
"I look at that thing and say, 'Holy s - - -, I wrote a book!' " McNamee says, as if that were the icing on the fantasy.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Let Detroit Go Bankrupt, By Mitt Willard Romney (NYT 2008)

Let Detroit Go Bankrupt, By Mitt Willard Romney

IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.
Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.
I love cars, American cars. I was born in Detroit, the son of an auto chief executive. In 1954, my dad, George Romney, was tapped to run American Motors when its president suddenly died. The company itself was on life support — banks were threatening to deal it a death blow. The stock collapsed. I watched Dad work to turn the company around — and years later at business school, they were still talking about it. From the lessons of that turnaround, and from my own experiences, I have several prescriptions for Detroit’s automakers.
First, their huge disadvantage in costs relative to foreign brands must be eliminated. That means new labor agreements to align pay and benefits to match those of workers at competitors like BMW, Honda, Nissan and Toyota. Furthermore, retiree benefits must be reduced so that the total burden per auto for domestic makers is not higher than that of foreign producers.
That extra burden is estimated to be more than $2,000 per car. Think what that means: Ford, for example, needs to cut $2,000 worth of features and quality out of its Taurus to compete with Toyota’s Avalon. Of course the Avalon feels like a better product — it has $2,000 more put into it. Considering this disadvantage, Detroit has done a remarkable job of designing and engineering its cars. But if this cost penalty persists, any bailout will only delay the inevitable.
Second, management as is must go. New faces should be recruited from unrelated industries — from companies widely respected for excellence in marketing, innovation, creativity and labor relations.
The new management must work with labor leaders to see that the enmity between labor and management comes to an end. This division is a holdover from the early years of the last century, when unions brought workers job security and better wages and benefits. But as Walter Reuther, the former head of the United Automobile Workers, said to my father, “Getting more and more pay for less and less work is a dead-end street.”
You don’t have to look far for industries with unions that went down that road. Companies in the 21st century cannot perpetuate the destructive labor relations of the 20th. This will mean a new direction for the U.A.W., profit sharing or stock grants to all employees and a change in Big Three management culture.
The need for collaboration will mean accepting sanity in salaries and perks. At American Motors, my dad cut his pay and that of his executive team, he bought stock in the company, and he went out to factories to talk to workers directly. Get rid of the planes, the executive dining rooms — all the symbols that breed resentment among the hundreds of thousands who will also be sacrificing to keep the companies afloat.
Investments must be made for the future. No more focus on quarterly earnings or the kind of short-term stock appreciation that means quick riches for executives with options. Manage with an eye on cash flow, balance sheets and long-term appreciation. Invest in truly competitive products and innovative technologies — especially fuel-saving designs — that may not arrive for years. Starving research and development is like eating the seed corn.
Just as important to the future of American carmakers is the sales force. When sales are down, you don’t want to lose the only people who can get them to grow. So don’t fire the best dealers, and don’t crush them with new financial or performance demands they can’t meet.
It is not wrong to ask for government help, but the automakers should come up with a win-win proposition. I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others. I believe Washington should raise energy research spending to $20 billion a year, from the $4 billion that is spent today. The research could be done at universities, at research labs and even through public-private collaboration. The federal government should also rectify the imbedded tax penalties that favor foreign carmakers.
But don’t ask Washington to give shareholders and bondholders a free pass — they bet on management and they lost.
The American auto industry is vital to our national interest as an employer and as a hub for manufacturing. A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs. It would permit the companies to shed excess labor, pension and real estate costs. The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk.
In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check.
Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, was a candidate for this year’s Republican presidential nomination.




Arby's worker fired by climbing out of the drive-thru window during holdup attempt.

An Arby's employee of 23 years was unceremoniously terminated last week from her job as assistant manager of a store in Fairborn, Ohio, less than a day after she managed to flee an armed robbery by climbing out of the drive-thru window.

Italian scientists get 6 years for L'Aquila earthquake statements #odd #dictatorship

Italian scientists get 6 years for L'Aquila earthquake statements

BALCO founder estimates '50 percent' of #UFC #MMA fighters use performance-enhancing drugs

BALCO founder estimates '50 percent' of #UFC #MMA fighters use performance-enhancing drugs

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Lindsay Lohan supports Mitt Romney, and Honey Boo Boo supports Barack Obama. How am I supposed to choose now?

"Lindsay Lohan supports Mitt Romney, and Honey Boo Boo supports Barack Obama. How am I supposed to choose now?"

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

GOP Blocked $AONE Deal From Happening: Shorts Got Reward?

GOP Blocked $AONE Deal From Happening: Shorts Got Reward?

Under the current insider trading law can Congress members short it knowing they would prevent a deal from happening?

Why Now's Not the Time to Bottom-Fish in These Stocks

Why Now's Not the Time to Bottom-Fish in These Stocks

As the end of the year approaches, investors who own stocks that have fallen dramatically during 2012 are faced with the usual dilemma: Should they take their lumps and sell their shares at a loss, or should they hang on, hoping for a rebound? Ordinarily, the reward you get from tax-loss selling creates an extra downward push in November and December for beaten-down shares, offering an interesting buying opportunity for those who believe their long-term prospects are better than most of their peers think.
But thanks to an unusual situation this year, the tax-loss selling phenomenon may not take shape in the same way it usually does. As a result, with selling potentially deferred into 2013, you may not want to count on losing stocks bottoming out before the end of the year.

Friday, October 12, 2012

Reverse Merger Most Famous Example: Warren Buffet

Reverse Merger Most Famous Example: Warren Buffet

Ted Turner took his billboard company public in 1970 when he merged into publicly traded, failed TV company Rice Broadcasting, changed the name of the new public entity to Turner Broadcasting, and took over the company.
Or Muriel Siebert, who took over the public furniture company, J. Michaels, in 1996, renamed it Siebert Financial (SIEB:Nasdaq), and the public company is now a financial services company. Other companies that have used the reverse merger vehicle to go public and then went on to fame and fortune include Waste Management (WMI:NYSE – commentary – research) and Blockbuster Video (BBI:NYSE), before it was acquired by Viacom (VIA.B:NYSE).
Arguably the most famous reverse merger is Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A:NYSE), the old-school Maine textile manufacturer that was taken overby Warren Buffett when he bought the controlling interest in the company and then merged his insurance empire into it. The only thing he didn’t do was change the name.
To be fair, probably 90%-plus of reverse merged companies fail. But this is not because the process is bad but because, like with IPOs, or any area of life that touches the investing (read: gullible) public, there are those who abuse and take advantage of the system; I’ve written about some of these situations in prior columns in this space.
Like anything in investing — good, profitable, growing companies will eventually shine. The beauty of the reverse merger process is that diligent work can uncover these gems before the investing public is told about them by the larger banks.
Recent examples of successful reverse mergers include RAE Systems (RAE:Amex), which did a reverse merger in 2002 at approximately 20 cents a share and is now cruising between $2 and $3 after reaching a high of $9.50. And Intermix (MIX:Amex), which merged into Motorcyle Centers of America, a business with no operations, in 1999, went through several years of pain and below-$1 prices before emerging as a successful e-commerce player that currently trades at $5.70. Global Sources (GSOL:Nasdaq), a China-focused business-to-business play, reverse-merged with asset less shell Fairchild and now has a market cap of $250 million, $50 million in cash, no debt and $22 million in EBITDA.
Another recent example is CKX (CKXE:Nasdaq), formerly Sports Entertainment, which traded under the symbol of SPEA.ob. On Feb. 7, SPEA, a stock trading at the 5-10 cent level, announced a reverse merger with Elvis Presley Enterprises, which controlled all the rights to Elvis Presley’s estate. Since then they also announced a deal with the producers of American Idol. Now the stock is trading at $26.64 and has a $2 billion market cap.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Democrats better for Wall Street than Republicans, research shows

Democrats better for Wall Street than Republicans, research shows

Analysis of stock market returns under every president since 1900 shows Democrats do almost twice as well as Republicans