Whatever happens, there are always things you could have done better. You score two goals and you usually feel you could have done better. You score two goals and you usually feel you could have scored a third. That’s perfectionism. That’s what makes you progress in life.
-Eric Cantona
Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing
We are reiterating our buy recommendation for Google (GOOG), following their release of Google Lucy (beta). Google Lucy (beta) is the latest in real time girlfriend simulation technology and is run by proprietary algorithms from a single server in Palo Alto. This latest offering is a disruptive technology aimed squarely at displacing women from the heterosexual romantic market.
Features:
Further due diligence will occur after we are accepted into the invite only beta.
Recommendation: We are raising our GOOG price target from “Infinity-1” to “Infinity+Pi” on the grounds that this merger will be moistly secretive.
Source: Dealbreaker.com.
On Net Neutrality:
To me it boils down to this:
The best employees at Yahoo, eBay, Google, and other major content providers are engineers.
The best employees at Comcast, Cox, SBC and other access providers are lobbyists.
For both of these types of companies, everyone else they hire is just good enough to support and monetize the work of their best employees.
Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing
This report is gratis, Microsoft (MSFT) .
I was eating in a pizzeria the other day, run by a family of Greeks, when I spotted my opportunity.
The people who don’t understand private equity think it’s just a matter of finding and buying X Corp*, levering up X Corp, doing a recapitalization to take a dividend 6 months later, underperforming, doing another dividend recap 6 months later, canceling your sponsor fees while doing a third dividend recap, then taking X Corp public while paying for Czech models to be taught how to count your money in French. But it’s about that and so much more. It’s about VALUE, and looking for value everywhere.
I perused the menu and listed the normal core competencies of a towny Greek pizzeria. Large Cheese pizza $9.95. Pepperoni pizza $10.95. Baklava $3.95. But then it struck me, buried under layers of sub-offerings, their calzones were horribly underpriced at $4.50. The basic cheese calzone was not dissimilar in caloric content, cheese density or sauce metrics from a small cheese pizza, yet it was priced at a 20% discount and placed in a non-strategic location on the menu. The spinach and cheese calzone was a higher margin product with tangible value-add to the end consumer through its superior health content.
I could see that it would be a slam dunk to realize value if I could get Nikos to spin off his non-core calzone assets; I would only have to properly structure the deal and wait. Unfortunately, I could also tell from the look in his eye that he wanted me to take on his spanikopita assets as well. This was obviously a dicey proposition. Spanikopita were difficult to market and historically a more labor intensive product that had little pricing power. But they were, in fact, tasty.
I decided I could take on the spanikopita assets, but only if he offered me an exclusive negotiating window. I was not going to let another investor swoop in and eat my pie after I had gotten this far, both in terms of my time and due diligence. Nikos consulted Constantin and had no problem granting this. I started putting out feeler offers of 4.5-5x EBITDA, and could sense that these Greeks were not financially savvy enough to understand fully how to extract value from their calzone assets and how much smarter I was than they were. A quick call to Bank of America and I had already gotten backing for 2.5 turns of senior secured leverage, and 2 turns of subordinated debt; I could practically smell triple digit levels of IRR. They accepted on the spot.
Another succesful day in the delicious life of private equity.
*X can be any noun, verb, conjunction, article or random combination of letters that may or may not be an entity which produces anything or even exists. It just doesn’t matter.
6’7″ English footballer Peter Crouch is heavily oversold by English fans who discount his fantastic nambly-pambly running style, his stork like touch and his dance moves. We expect that his contributions to England’s World Cup 2006 cause will put pressures on the shorts and launch Crouch to new highs on the strength of the broad-based global appeal of his classic dance moves, which have not been matched since John Roberts’ son busted a move at the White House (Click for related report, I’m Long Supreme Justice Dance Parties).
Due Diligence:
Watch the first video from slightly before the halfway mark, then follow with the second video.
Recommendation: Peter Crouch embodies long, and we recommend accumulating as much of him as possible. Concurrently, we recommend placing a trailing stop on your position, due to potential intermediate term volatility.
I have read two articles today, which is my daily limit.
Linked from Going Private was this article on hedge fund and private equity shops investing in big budget movies. The second article I found while Googling a rationale for the existence of the catastophe bond .
The articles contained these excerpts respectively. 1st excerpt:
For its part, companies such as Virtual see Hollywood as a potentially lucrative place to diversify investment portfolios. And Virtual is pursing that strategy in a significant way, investing in Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Blood Diamond,” Brad Pitt’s “The Assassination of Jesse James,” and George Clooney’s “The Good German.”
……
As a result, Virtual covered about $125 million, or half of the $250 million it should cost to make and market “Poseidon” around the world. At the current rate of ticket sales, Virtual could end up with $75 million or so from “Poseidon” — meaning it could lose more than $50 million on the movie, said two people familiar with the film’s finances. A Stark executive disputed that worst-case scenario and also said its Hollywood investments should not be judged on the domestic box office of one movie.
2nd excerpt:
Advantages of [catastrophe] bonds are that they are not closely linked with the stock market or economic conditions and offer significant attractions to investors. For example, for the same level of risk, investors can usually obtain a higher yield with CAT bonds relative to alternative investments. Another benefit is that the insurance risk securitization of CATs shows no correlation with equities or corporate bonds, meaning they’d provide a good diversification of risks.
I can provide some other investments that would provide attractive diversification for these companies — the roulette wheel. Some secondary thoughts: If you have a proprietary algorithm that picks Poseidon as a likely hit, it’s time to get a a new algorithm. Libor+230 is an insanely low risk premium for the chance of losing all your money if Mexico has an Earthquake in the next three years; to compare the market pricing for secured near investment grade debt is L+220. If a Mexican offered me that deal, I’d build a fence around him on the spot.
I use the word “Hyperbole” and its most awesome derivatives all the time, but I have never in my life used the word “meiosis,” which is to hyperbole as understatement is to overstatement. I see this as clearly shoddy marketing, a pure failure to resonate with the average word user. It’s time for a rebranding — meiosis should become minibole.
Minibole offers an improved logical relationship to the word’s natural counterparty, Hyperbole. It is also cheaper to produce as s’s have been in short supply due to instability in both the Sudan and South America; the cost of b’s have seen some recent escalation due to Bolivia’s threats to nationalize different sections of the alphabet, but we think this will abate as more b capacity comes online in 2008.
I have already used minibole 6 times today, indicating its improving traction in the word market and it will only get better as the word gets out. And that statement is not hyperbole.
Dear Mr. Harry Otaku,
Based on recent events, it looks like you need a new personal assistant and I am writing this letter to make you aware of my availability in every sense of the word.
For a situation such as this:
Otaka allegedly committed all the sins – he sent Kobayashi flowers, gave her jewellery, repeatedly invited her to intimate lunches and walks in Central Park and boasted to her about his affairs.
One of the money shots came on a business strip to Washington where Otaka allegedly summoned Kobayashi to his room, asked for sex and went the big grope.
According to Kobayashi, Otaka was told the complaint against him had come not from her, but her husband. This was apparently done to protect Otaka’s masculine sensibilities and, on Kobayashi’s account at least, it seemed to work.
..
Otaka allegedly criticised Kobayashi for failing to give proper thanks for the gifts he had sent.
…you should know that I love walks in the Central Park with 62 year old men. And what guy doesn’t love when his boss sends his a thoughtful bouquet, or gives him a nice pat on the butt with an accompanying oral message “Great job, JD.” I type maybe 20 words per minute, appreciate jewelry, make a crappy cup of coffee and come at the bargain basement price of $100mm. I also will never say “No.” Please consider me for the position.
Toyyyyy O-TA!,
Johnny Debacle
First there was Urville, fictionally located in France. Now there is the City of Galvez. The year to date year over year (YTD YOY) increase in fictional cities is infinite, a frightening fictious growth rate. This is a sure sign of the mania that has taken a grip on the real estate market as individuals are being forced to live in figments of their own imagination rather than figments of Bay Area, California.
Note the famous floating cupolas of Galvez in the right side of the picture.
Recommendation: Rent don’t own!
This contest wasn’t even close. The winner was Ethan Furtek with this entry as to “Why does Google Talk make the letters of “BP” blue in Google Talk?“. No description could do justice to Ethan’s epic meditation on numerology
Modern cinema has, from time to time, exhibited unnatural prognosticative capabilities. For example, in Back to the Future II, Michael J. Fox scoffs at the idea of ‘Miami winning the World Series in 1997’. As it turned out, Florida was granted a baseball team in 1993 and did in fact take home the championship in 1997.
Similarly, when James Cameron released The Terminator in 1984, he unknowingly predicted the demise of mankind. Skynet, the computer program responsible for the downfall of the human race, was installed and operated by the military. In reality, however, the US government is far too careful to make such an oversight. The computer virus that eventually cripples the planet would need a more innocuous introduction: say, through an Internet search engine.
Google is Skynet, and the proof is in Google Talk’s highlighting of ‘BP’. In The Terminator, the apocalypse arrives when Skynet goes live on August 29, 1997, or 8/29/1997. Adding 8 + 29 + 1997 gives 2,034. Google filed its S-1 rescission offer (the final documentation necessary to go public, or in this case, ‘live’) on August 4, 2004, or 8/4/2004, and similar addition yields 2,016. The difference between these two numbers is 18, the same sum given when applying a number to each letter of the alphabet (A=1, B=2, etc.), and adding B + P. As you can see, Google has already become self-aware, and is dropping hints as to the arrival of Judgment Day. Someone call Schwarzenegger.
We also learned the real reason BP is made blue in Google Talk from my girlfriend.
BP is blue because it is a smiley with sunglasses sticking his tongue out.
Excuse me while i go make myself invisible to you on gtalk.
Love, GF
What would you say if I said that you could live like a smurf? Would you say was I acting a little smurfy? Or that I was positively smurftastic? If the latter, then we have a great investment opportunity which will allow you to take advantage of the Turkish real estate boom.
Smurf Village located in Akbuk Bay, Turkey, within 500 meters of the Aegean Sea.
There are five discreet reasons to invest in a vacation home within Smurf village:
Recommendation: Although not as attractive as the opportunity we saw in 2004’s Cypriot real estate market, the Smurf village has some really smurfy-smurf things that we feel smurf about. Definitely worth doing more smurf dilligence on at mushroomhomes.com. This prototype home looks pretty smurfy.
Has Columbia moved up in the ranks of B-Schools? Or will they get trumped when they have to tag HBS in?
Our research has uncovered conclusive video evidence that Glenn Hubbard’s impersonator and business school hanger-ons look incredibly silly when dancing in suits. I eagerely await Dance 360: Business School Edition, which I’m sure will air right after The Apprentice: Dance 360 Edition on the CW.
In the past, we have talked about the huge underunderstood markets for Financial Mudpies and Emerging Market Pillows. We believe a similar contagion could break out in the underundertsood Advertising in Finance market.
It’s all about eyeballs and disposable income, so why not place your advert in the areas where both are most concentrated?
The financial profession and its customers have more money than they know to do with, which is leading to private equity firms throwing billions to acquire asbtract financial humor suppliers at Perf multiples. So why don’t advertisers use this opportunity to get there products in front of the people who have all the money and who are demonstrably fiscally irresponsible?
Fact: Wealthy financial professionals do not watch NASCAR but they religiously inspect the outfits of their clients, customers and colleagues.
Get your brand out their and associate it with the success of a really good investment shop. Dorito’s Hussman Funds or Goldman Sachs Capital brought to you by Smirnoff Ice or even Fidelity Funds sponsored by Fidelity Funds. The last example outlines the exponential brand equity increase offered by leveraging one’s own brand as a platform for advertising one’s own brand.
This allows a banker who is closing a deal to sell a wind farm to GS Capital to think, “Yeah, a Smirnoff Ice WOULD be refreshing, why don’t I buy 10,000 of them?” Or “Dorito’s sound delicious; but 40 million Dorito’s sounds like an awesome ego trip.”
Recommendation: Own the finance people’s eyeballs and your product can rule the world.
