Long or Short Capital

The new X-Men comes out this summer and on scanning the cast list, I noticed that Psylocke will be played by Mei Melancon, who has done little other work of merit, except for an appearance on Deadwood. Her exact role:

“Deadwood” – Childish Games (2005) TV Episode (as Meiling Melancon) …. Chinese Slavewhore

If ever there was a disruptive industry, slavewhoring would have to be it. Back in the good old days, being a land (capital) owner meant you would have your labor done by your slaves and your sexual needs satisfied at the local whorehouse. This was just how it was done, and never the two met (except maybe an ancilla or two in the days of ancient Rome).

Slavers and pimps enjoyed high margins and pricing power over their customers. But then in the 19th century, the Chinese, peering out from behind the veil of their opium dens, saw that by combining slavework with whorework, their slave or whores could command a premium on the market as opposed to if they were just single-use assets. This innovation destroyed the market for suppliers who could supply either only slaves or only whores. It is a classic example of disruption utilized in MBA classrooms to this day. Thank you.

The market for hot (or cold) girl-on-girl action is cyclical; when generationally girls are prudish and treat girl-on-girl as verboten, the corresponding value of a girl-on-girl act is astronomical (certain theorists would argue it is incalcuable). Reacting to these high prices causes producers to bring on uneconomical girl-on-girl mines. These are mines where previously the cost of bringing the girl-on-girl out of the Earth guaranteed negative margins, but now can actually generate a stream of free cash flow. As supply increases, girl-on-girl prices begin to go down. Like most commodity markets, new supply which is brought on from marginal girl-on-girl mines eventually outstrips demand and the girl-on-girl cycle starts again.

Ramit Sethi offers this perspective:

[Things I Hate]. Girls who overestimate how hot it is to see them making out with another girl. I cannot count the number of times some girls want something and say something like “Are you surrrrre you don’t want to hang out? Who knows what will happen?” (wink, hugs her female friend). Ok. First of all, stop teasing because I have known you since 2nd grade and nothing is going to happen. Second, KISSING ANOTHER GIRL IS NOT AS HOT AS IT USED TO BE. Thank god the Internet has disintermediated your power. Actually, it’s kind of sad to see the vestiges of something that may have worked 4 years ago (you offering to maybe kissanother girl) still struggling to exert influence.

Recommendation: Short girl-on-girl action; Hold FFM Threesomes. Currently we are in a period of low girl-on-girl prices as trendiness has brought the price down from $Awesome! down to $Still Pretty Cool. We think there is still substantial downside and our current target is $Pleasing. There is an outside chance of a steep correction if there is a backlash of rampant conservatism in the youths of tomorrow, but visibility is pretty good right now, and we see that as an unlikely scenario.

The answer is yes, according to Ahmed Abu Dayya, an independent souvenir shop owner & sometimes Long or Short Capital consultant. He lets his investment in a stock of Danish flags do the speaking:

When entrepreneur Ahmed Abu Dayya first heard that Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad were being reprinted across Europe, he knew exactly what his customers in Gaza would want: flags to burn.

…

He sells his Danish and Norwegian flags for $11 a piece — a price he acknowledged might be dampening sales. Many protesters prefer to save money and make the flags themselves from scraps of fabric, he said.

Abu Dayya sources some of his flags from suppliers in Taiwan, but he buys Israeli flags from a merchant in Israel, even though he sells them to be burnt at anti-Israeli rallies.

Recommendation: This uptick in anti-Danish investing sentiment still has some legs. Technical charting indicate a rare double-swirl-crown-top, which has only been discussed in theory and never seen outside of experiments using Monte Carlo generators. Danish and Israeli flags are rated a strong buy with price targets of $16 and $19 respectively.

This came across the wire yesterday.

Shares of home video rental chain Movie Gallery Inc rose nearly 8 percent on Thursday , two days after a data tracking firm forecast that the U.S. rental industry in 2006 would be “flat but strong.”

Let me translate what “flat but strong” means in this case and in all cases. It means flat. And it’s not surprising that today (the day after yesterday’s move up) shares of both Moviegallery (MOVI) and Blockbuster (BBI) have traded off about 5% each and are swiftly approaching their pre-“flat-but-strong” levels.

Here is an earlier post of Johnny’s on Moviegallery’s Stock Decline.

You may remember the outbreak of Monkey Man attacks in India a few years back. You may have also asked: “Where did the Monkey Man go?” or “Can he manage my 401k even if I’m not an accredited investor?”

The answer is yes. The Monkey Man went on a hushhush capital-raising tour to start his own hedge fund, The Emerging Market Supernatural Terror Special Opportunities Fund. As the name implies, the vehicle will specialize in investing in third world supernatural terror events, not dissimilar from the Monkey Man’s reign of terror on the streets of New Delhi. The fund already purchased a portfolio of spectral-haunting assets in the Congo region and reportedly bid on a soul-eating dragon in Laos.

Recommendation: The very fact that the Monkey Man was able to raise $400mm in capital to start the fund is bullish for the sector. Long cyclical folk terror, short reason.

Really, creationists and Intelligent Design advocates are the same thing, just like a clown and a clown carrying an umbrella are really the same thing.
–Abstract Factory

Thanks to an old post on a new paradigm for blogging start-ups (Sexy Chinese Female Bloggers), Long or Short Capital is no.1 in Connecting Arabian Men with Sexy Chinese Women via search engines.

After a heady Katrina-a-Rita induced rise, hurricanes have plateaued and can only go down from their hyper-inflated levels; expect Wilma to further underwhelm its hype. Earthquakes are the steady unsexy FCF generating natural disaster, the kind that the Berkshire Hathaway of Disasters would look to acquire opportunistically. They kill more people. They do more damage. They release more energy (“A Richter 12 [earthquake) would be the equivalent of a fault half way to the center of the earth or about the same amount of energy as the Earth receives from the sun in a day”). They can cause derivative disasters such as mudslides, rockfalls, tsunamis (last winter a 9.0 earthquake iniated the tsunami) and super volcanoes.

Super Volcanoes? (from here)

Immediately before the eruption, there would be large earthquakes in the Yellowstone region. The ground would swell further with most of Yellowstone being uplifted. One earthquake would finally break the layer of rock that holds the magma in – and all the pressure the Earth can build up in 640,000 years would be unleashed in a cataclysmic event.

Magma would be flung 50 kilometres into the atmosphere. Within a thousand kilometres virtually all life would be killed by falling ash, lava flows and the sheer explosive force of the eruption. Volcanic ash would coat places as far away as Iowa and the Gulf of Mexico. One thousand cubic kilometres of lava would pour out of the volcano, enough to coat the whole of the USA with a layer 5 inches thick. The explosion would have a force 2,500 times that of Mount St. Helens. It would be the loudest noise heard by man for 75,000 years, the time of the last super volcano eruption. Within minutes of the eruption tens of thousands would be dead.

Let’s see the “wind” try and do that.

Recommendation: Long earthquakes; Donate money to the forgotten natural disaster in Pakistan.

We are working on the technical elements of investing in actual websites, but in the meantime, we recommend an Accumulate position on The Stalwart, based on his recurring greatness and on his especially insightful recent post whose analysis synthesized the world of gossip and capital markets to find that celebrity bimbette markets are the most efficient of all. Paris Hilton’s Invisible Hand is ripe with truth.

Recommendation: Long the Stalwart and US Weekly, Short Barron’s

Executives and companies love to obfuscate. Since it’s hard to understand the real meaning of their statements, we have provided a handy translation. Here are the words of automakers Ford and GM run through our propietary translation algorithm.

Corporate Speak:

Employee Discount for Everyone

Translation:

-We give back to you the profits that we weren’t making anyway.
-Step 1 in our five year plan for bankruptcy and continued diminution.
-Step 2 will be new models of even bigger cars which nobody wants to buy.

Corporate Speak:

Ford Family Plan

Translation:

Selling today for much cheaper, that which would have been sold tomorrow.

Corporate Speak:

We will not do business with suppliers who are in bankruptcy.

-GM’s Purchasing Chief Bo Andersson

Translation:

Since most Tier 1 and Tier 2 auto suppliers are either in bankruptcy or on the brink thereof, and since we are a big reason for that situation, we plan to compromise our principles shortly.

It’s midnight my time, thinking about Rita, realizing my tank was close to empty, I hopped in my car and filled my gas with soon to be more expensive gasoline. $2.93 per gallon. Gas station was completely out of regular. At midnight, before Rita has even hit. Good omen? I’m all about hoarding.

Recommendation: Long hoarding and black gold.

Shaken from Katrina, people and stock markets are over-reacting. When everyone assumes the worst, plan for slightly better.

Recommendation: Short Hurricane Rita, Long puns.

Pinnacle Entertainment (ticker:PNK) is a small-cap gaming company whose assets were particularly hard hit by Hurricane Katrina. Here is their Casino Magic Biloxi property.

The company yesterday held a call to talk about the damage they have suffered both in Biloxi and to their Boomtown New Orleans property. It was announced that the Biloxi casino needs to be rebuilt and will be with with the insurance proceeds. But the company faces a double-edged labor issue.

CEO Dan Lee, September 6th, 2005:

One of the ironic things we started looking at it and we are very concerned — what do we do with the 900 employees? We are continuing to pay them now. We can’t continue to pay them forever. No company can afford to pay people forever who are not working.

…

[Also,] how are [we] going to find people to work on rebuilding? Because as I said a minute ago, carpenters are going to be in short supply.

Labor on payroll that doesn’t fit their labor needs. Pinnacle has been handling this situation remarkably well, putting their workers’ first and handling the devastation with calm focus. Their solution to this particular problem is pure genius.

[Our] HR people are fervently trying to search out how to set up courses or classes for our employees that while we are getting organized, we teach dealers how to swing a hammer. And even people who work in housekeeping — there is a lot of people pushing brooms on construction sites.

We applaud PNK’s creativity under tough circumstances, even if we are dubious as to how well it will work in practice. The workers will definitely be incented to try and make the switch but most dealers I’ve seen seem to specialize in three things, namely, being a dealer, being a degenerate gambler on their spare time and ruthlessly crushing my spirit.

Directnic.com is an ICANN accredited domain registrar based in downtown New Orleans. Through hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they have continued to be operational and have continued to nameserve hundreds of thousands of domains, thanks to the miracles of gasoline generators, human ingenuity and the effective provisions of gasoline supplies.

Even more amazing is that they are blogging about it live and supplying a live video feed, which they move around as action warrants. The blog tells tales of survival, provisioning, former special forces training kicking in, cops looting, thugs shooting and even some shots of the blog writer’s model fiancee.

Right now we’re trying to show you all the looting. Guys pushing shopping carts with 40 Nike boxes in them. People breaking into cars. Assaulting ATM machines. It’s hard just to sit by and do nothing. That’s property that belongs to other people and these animals are just taking it.

You know, this crisis is going to end. One day it is going to be over, and people are going to have to live with themselves and the knowledge of how they behaved. The cowards, the thieves, the murderers. We’re getting a guy on cam right now stealing tires from one car and putting them in his car. What a bunch of monkeys. No respect at all for their fellow man. Like I said, one day this is going to be over, and I hope the shame overwhelms these bastards.

This blog is incredible and worthy of linking. And Directnic.com is redefining reliability…assuming they survive and don’t get crushed by a wandering riverboat casino like that Holiday Inn did.

We’re long Directnic.com, because they have corporate intestinal fortitude.