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Hey Unions – Get Over Yourselves

The Association of Flight Attendants and Transport Workers Union has this week called for a national boycott of the new Jodie Foster movie, Flightplan. In a press release announcing the boycott the TWU claims that

“The film, which portrays a flight attendant and Federal air marshal as terrorists and the lead villains, also depicts flight attendants as rude, unhelpful and uncaring.”

I couldn’t agree more. Ever since I saw Flight Plan I don’t trust flight attendants further than my oxygen mask will reach. And this isn’t the first time it’s happened to me either. After I saw Boiler Room I hated stock brokers, after Tombstone I hated cowboys as well as cowgirls, and after Aladdin I had a severe distaste for Royal Viziers (ie. Jafar).

After all, movies shouldn’t be about good stories, they should be about positively depicting individuals with important professions, especially unionized professions.

Recommendation: Long Anything, Short Unions.


Shaving: The Future, but Now

Hi. I’m here to tell you the history of shaving. It all began with cavemen, they had long hairy beards and the beards were sweaty and dusty.

Then, in 1904, a company called Gillette invented the “safety razor“. The safety razor was a single-blade razor that made shaving cool and fun and everyone did it. The single-blade safety razor set off a wave of innovation that would last for the next 100 years.

In 1971, after more than 60 years of research, Gillette realized they could double their revenues if they sold a razor that had (get this) TWO blades. That’s right, the dual-blade Gillette Sensor Excel took the shaving industry by storm and it was another 30 years before the inventors at Gillette could improve this model.

At the turn of the millennium, Gillette surprised the world when it rushed to market the Mach 3. This razor had 3 blades and a cool name that made you feel like you were shaving at three times the speed of sound. I was in college at the time and before every dorm dance all the guys would shave with the Mach 3 and then talk about it. However, Gillette did not know this would wake a sleeping giant and the giant’s name was “Schick” and Schick was very tired of losing the race to see how many razor blades you could convince someone to buy at one time.

Schick decided to give Gillette a dose of its own medicine and launched the Schick Quattro. For those of you that don’t already know “quattro” is Slovakian for “four”. The Schick scientists had surprised even themselves by fitting four full size razors onto one apparatus, unbelievable. Unfortunately for Schick, Gillette was already a step ahead of the game . . .

Yesterday, in what could herald the proximity of the millenial time of the six blades , Gillette announced it would begin selling the Fusion. The Fusion has a five-razor “shaving surface” and you won’t believe it until you see it. Ok, ready to believe it? Here you go:

The president of Gillette’s razor division compared shaving with the fusion to “a nuclear reaction in which nuclei combine to create power.” Sounds very comfortable to me. If you’re not pumped about shaving with the fusion yet you should check out these comments from the Gillette CEO and on their investor webcast:

Innovation is, and always has been, the life-blood of the shaving business. As the leader in shaving, Gillette always innovates. We always push technology to the limit. We always seek to provide superior consumer satisfaction, and men are always looking for a better way to shave.

They want superior closeness, superior comfort, superior overall shaving performance and a superior shaving experience, and they want this extraordinary shave on every part of their face. That includes those difficult areas like shaving under the nose, trimming side burns and shaping facial hair. Let me tell you that facial hair is not a concept Gillette usually mentions at an event like this, but today about 50% of men support some form of facial hair, whether it is moustaches, goatees, chin straps or soul patches. And, there is no easy way to shape or trim it. That is until now because our new brand will bring every man a better way to shave.”

You heard it hear first, Gillette has brought to the soul patch market the most sophisticated facial topiary technology available to date. What will they think of next? We don’t know, but we hope it involves more razor blades because we can’t get enough.

If it isn’t obvious by now we are long Gillette and see a soft market for unkempt facial hair. Sorry this post is so long, hopefully your facial hair is short enough to make up for it. Thanks for your time.

Recommendation: Long Gillette. Short unruly facial hair.


I Click Our Adsense Ads and It is Awesome

Actual message conversation between Mr. Juggles and me about our Google Adsense Ads, (which are very clickable, if you are, you know, into that kind of thing):

MisterJuggles: How many clickthroughs have we gotten this week?
Me: I don’t know. It’s difficult to sort out the legitimate hits with the constant and perpetual click fraud I commit on a daily basis.
MisterJuggles: *laughter*

Don’t worry about GOOG and YHOO though, as I’m sure I’m the only who does this.

As an aside, does anyone know where I can get Neil Diamond tickets?

Adsense is eminently clickable


Racialistness

Last week I attended two concerts at Madison Square Garden: Eminem/50 Cent and Neil Diamond. Both were great shows and I fit in well at both in my pin-stripe suit and Hermes tie (my Hermes tie is sweet, seriously).

After attending these shows I’ve decided something important about the difference between Caucasians and African-Americans: White people have respect but no soul. Black people have soul but no respect.

Neil Diamond is a great person and his songs show respect for love (“September Morn”), his country (“We’re coming to America”), and blue jeans (“Forever in Blue Jeans”); but sadly Neil Diamond does not have a soul – and it’s pretty obvious to anyone who was at that show.

Mr. 50 cent, on the other hand, now his singing and dancing are filled with soul but his song titles show pretty obvious disrespect for young ladies (“Surrounded by Hoes”), drug addicts (“High all da time”), and gangsters (“You ain’t no gangsta”).

If anyone has any ideas on how to combine the respectful attitude of Neil Diamond with the rhyming soul of 50 cent please email me at kaiseredamame@gmail.com.


Spam at its Best: Insider Scone Info

I’m not one to buy products from spam, but whatever this guy is selling, I want.

From: Fridirique Citeaux [mailto:Fr�d�rique_Citeaux@mydomain.com]
Sent: Friday, July 22, 2005 2:42 PM
To: kaiseredamame@gmail.com
Subject: Sir Rodney’s Scones

TEST

The mystery, the suspense, I want it. Call me Freddy, pick up the phone and sell me a scone.


Very Long “Sexy Chinese Female Bloggers”

Our position on outsourcing is still in the process of being formulated (I have, in a collaboration with Dr Deep Gupta, in fact, outsourced our position on outsourcing, more to follow on that later). But from our surface analysis of outsourcing, there are clear and undeniable positives.

Cheap sneakers for me to run in. Moneys and profits for Indians. The destruction of the US IT nerd underclass. The opportunity for people to work on a cruise ship, tax free, programming 60 hours a week, 1-3 miles off the shore of California, where the only law is the Sea. These things are incontrovertibly good.

There are almost no negatives to outsourcing, unless you consider alleged “abusive child labor to pad the pockets of the American affluent” a negative. To go against the curremt, I actually see this as one of the sweetest fruits of the globalization tree. Tiny little hands sewing my multinational quilt of opulence.

Which brings you to today’s post. Just now, the sweetest fruit of globalization has announced its intention to enter the market. From Blog Oriented (via MR.com):

We also have one phase of our design that we have not yet mentioned. A few of our investors think that it will be our biggest hit traffic-wise. I will go into it more in later posts but in brief it can be summed up as, “Sexy Chinese female bloggers.”

If we had one investment to make, one position to take, it would be to go long “Sexy Chinese Female Bloggers.” Get in on the IPO. Do whatever it takes. The greatest outsourcing investment opportunity of our lifetimes. Price Target $Perftyperftyeleven.


Visteon

Check out this slide I found in a recent Visteon investor presentation:

Visteon New Ideas

That’s right, believe it or not the hard working employees at Visteon have had 100% year-over-year growth in “ideas”. Now that is something. You might ask, well just how many ideas did they have? And that’s impossible to answer, because there is no scale whatsoever on the graph. For all we know 2003 could have been an extremely easy comp for ideas: Visteon employees could’ve sat around all year long reading books they had already read and, as a result, had almost no new ideas in 2003.

What I’d like to know is who had the idea to make and show this slide? And perhaps more importantly, was the idea for this slide included in the ‘new ideas’ calculation? If not, it’s possible that this slide is actually understating the true new idea growth.

So I just told my 15-year-old brother about this, he said that he thinks for every new idea he has today, he’s likely to have 2 new ideas tomorrow. That’s 100% growth in new ideas PER DAY. Impressive.

So conclusion is Long: My Little Brother, Short: Visteon. The thesis is that my Little Brother’s new idea growth will outpace Visteon’s by roughly 1x(10^109)% per year, roughly.


I’m Long Mudpies

And short Creampies. Especially as baked by Patrick Byrne.

I’m an iconoclast, but a pie-analyst by training. We think the entire financial pie baking industry is inherently cyclical and is positioned to rebound in a big way after a couple of Sarbanes-Oxley induced down years. Mudpies are a strong buy per our recommendation, as we expect them to come back into fashion on a pro-forma basis. Pumpkin pie looks attractive at current prices too.

Creampie

A larger theme in the “Long or Short” newsblogletter is that in any mania, look to the enablers, the proverbial “companies providing the shovels to the gold miners” rather than the “gold miners” themselves. Extending this framework to the frenzied pie market, we are currently recommending a long position in women, bred for their skills in baking. Target price $Unicorn.


I’m Short “Mexican Mole Sauce”

Mexican sauces are a really “hot” segment. Money inflows to new emerging sauce ETF’s have been a beacon announcing the market’s interest. But before you gobble up one of these funds, you need to consider what you are sticking your hard earned dollars into.

Mexican Mole Sauce is a storied chile sauce, flavored with cinnamon, and a bevy of exotic spices. Sell-side analysts adore Mexican mole sauce, using their feather pens to scribe about its “dynamic culinary miscegenation opportunities” and its recent “binomial marketing initiative.” But fundamentally, Mole Sauce looks like dirt and it TASTES like dirt. It takes a lot of tequila and a lot of Mexicans to produce. Altogether it is a costly and lengthy process.

Management has not addressed the risks of competitive sauces sourcing Mexicans from China. In fact, Mexican Mole Sauce has no China strategy whatsoever. And a footnote in the K reveals an even deeper problem. Listed in the ingredient section: “one teaspoon anise seed.” We recommend shorting Mexican Mole Sauce and shorting anise seed as well. Target price 7 pesos.


Perf

Great call on Z, Juggles. You’ve done it again. Apparently Oscar the Grouch (who’s underweight everything) was on cnbc this morning hyping the letter z. It’s up big in the after-market, real big.

Also I’ve been meaning to tell the world about “perf”. It’s a number that I just invented. It’s between 6 and 7, not a decimal, a new integer. It’s on the number line in every place any number would be, the tens spot (perfty), the hundreds spot (perf-hundred), and so on. The numeral of perf is kind of like a capital E, unfortunately there’s no key on the keyboard for it – yet. I’m quite obviously long perf. It’s up perfty-perf percent just since I started writing this. I know, I don’t believe it either, it’s unbelievable.


I’m Short “First Post”

Been overrated for awhile, weak book value, its fundamentals suffer from a cap structure built for speed rather than earnings. The Posting Industry is driven by quality on a primary basis, while timeliness is a secondary or tertiary factor. We have seen the industry move away from the infatuation with “First Post” as the market moving slashdot segment has matured. Our economists expect this trend to continue indefinitely. Target price for “First Post” is $Z.


Grammar

Alright Juggles, that post needed some punctuation – I’m now going long fragments, short run-ons . . . . ok forget that, I just tried to write a fragment and almost died of awkwardness. I’m now short run-ons, long imperatives. (you) Deal with it.

I’m also overweight interjections. BOOYAH!!


I’m Long Science, in size.

Two hydrogen atoms meet.

One says “I’ve lost my electron.”

The other says “Are you sure?”

The first replies “Yes, I’m positive.”


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