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Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing 08-02-2009

Carp Diem…Roman term, it means, yknow, live for the now…Fish they live a very limited lifespan so by nature they *must* live for the now. It’s basically the basis for the entire expression.
-Sean Garrity on Rescue Me

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing


This Week in Tweets for 2009-08-01

  • Congratulations are in order. For *US* #
  • Although we were given celebratory coal as @LCDnews surpassed us in followers. We'll find a way to crush that bot futurely #
  • Man blogspot was really crappy http://longorshort.blogspot.com #
  • Also fedex's logo may have an arrow in it, but it points the opposite way, I just wanted to point that out #
  • What would be the market price of the avg investment banker's soul? One share of citi seems about right #
  • @crampell same with "cry". You can "cry havok" & you can "cry foul" & sometimes "cry freedom". That's it. One should be able to "cry banana" in reply to crampell #
  • Appropos for today's post http://bit.ly/TtVDJ. Also became a fan of it on Facebook. #
  • @jodiecongirl The best way to make things difficult is to involve other people. in reply to jodiecongirl #
  • classic: http://bit.ly/RHFdq #

Four Years of Greatness: Turning Four is Like Turning Japanese

Four years and zero score ago, we conceived ourselves, writing ourselves out of the blogspottian tubes and into the internet with this first post.

Over that time we put out 1000ish posts, we turned thousands into billions and billions into thousands, we shorted human beings and went long Zimbawenomics. We uncovered the value of boobs, legs, and female assets more broadly. We issued our own investing commandments. We warned the world of the coming conquering cephalopods, while never neglecting to incite generational warfare against elderly and newborn alike. We were the first dividend paying blog and we deliberately priced them to ensure that most people wouldn’t bother. We were later the first dividend paying blog to rescind those dividends due to certain aggressive SAAP related measures we employed in our cooked books.

We mocked Alan Greenspan, Ken Lay, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, the ratings agencies, Elliot Spitzer, Barney Frank, most people in unions or who are employed by the Government, lawyers, IT workers, HR women, and consultants. We disparaged 70% of the population of the world by country or regional affiliation. We also took to task most everyone in any way involved with finance.

We did our part. And we made a lot of money for our readers (and ourselves (mostly ourselves)) while doing it.

None of this would be possible without the help of you guys and you girl, so we’d like to thank you all. Thank you all. And now you can thank us, in advance, for four more years of greatness.


Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing 07-26-2009

Eat what the monkey eats, then eat the monkey.
-U.S. Navy survival guidance

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing


This Week in Tweets for 2009-07-25

  • Good stuff has been readied for the week, hopefully there is not a last mile failure. #
  • Dominant RT @TheStalwart : "There are some wines you can drink straight out of the bottle, and some you decant." #
  • still way ahead of that @lcdnews, suck it auerbach #
  • glad that today is not Twitteruesday, it kills a lot of braincells to kill so many reader braincells #
  • amazing from HAM in the comments to this post http://bit.ly/a4ZTL, he left this link the peekaru http://bit.ly/yggSI #
  • @TheStalwart "Fabuless Semi" sounds like something that happens in a gay club. I'm not sure if that would be a pro or a con for naming a co in reply to TheStalwart #
  • Agreed:http://www.scribd.com/doc/17588181/Sprott-Comment-July-2009 #

Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing 07-19-2009

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.
-Jonathan Swift in “A Modest Proposal”

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing


This Week in Tweets for 2009-07-18

  • @jodiecongirl Like to think that the ugly boyfriend from that story is Daniel Hemermesh himself. http://bit.ly/6Ehud poster size plz thx in reply to jodiecongirl #
  • Twitter created the post that is about to come #
  • @TheStalwart Adoration isn't very helpful unless you want to start a cult or get laid. But you guys ARE detestable, while BR is a populist. in reply to TheStalwart #
  • the saddest twitter feed ever? http://twitter.com/LCDNews maybe just pity follow it so it doesnt look so sad #
  • Actually can't be that sad if @eorlins follows it. I mean she was on two different Survivors, so she is legit #
  • AND THEN TWITTERUESDAY HAPPENED
  • By all the relevant metrics, twitteruesday was a complete and total success, we have progressed the medium to the next level. You're welcome #
  • At some point, do unintended consequences become intended anti-consequences? http://bit.ly/ohxBr #
  • I hear you Ezra. Sometimes I have chicken mcnuggets just so I can tell people I went to McDonalds…and loved it! http://bit.ly/AlJrf #
  • @Jakewk grow a pair, you old fogey, just giving you crap and thought it was funny, we like ppl who we disagree with #
  • @kyle_s #pirates is only trending because of some crap facebook game, #squid is for real yo #
  • @eorlins makes sense, it just was random given they just started yesterday and u were one of 60 followers the rest high yield or workout ppl #
  • Fyi just discovered all these messages that had been hidden under Get Replies in twitterberry, hence my tardass entrance into Reply City #
  • Watch better off ted abc 900, good stuff especially the veridian dynamics commercials #
  • Twitterednesday to commence soon #
  • We kid we kid #
  • @pkedrosky Kids are stupid. Not as stupid as babies, but up there. in reply to pkedrosky #
  • @anal_yst watched Man V Cartoon, would definitely short it, tedious and staged. I wanted more science less drawing out #
  • @Anal_yst we're rich now, filthy squid lucre rt : Don't tell @longorshort about the squid attack, they've been predicting this forever! in reply to Anal_yst #

Twitteruesday Digest

  • We started almost 4 years ago with almost the same approach to blogspot and it was a rousing success, rousing I tell you #
  • No idea how to measure whether this is successful today. Maybe if we end the day with more Followers than @LCDnews or save someone's life #
  • Going to the bathroom *BRB* Listening to the Clash's White Man in Hammersmith Palais and eating a Hot Pocket. #
  • Was looking for drafts in our WordPress console, there is one with no date that just says "Cow Bicep 70%". That's it. No hook, nothing. #
  • Almost want to write it. Like a challenge. Write something satirical and financial about Cow Bicep 70%. Next tweet'lll do it in 140 chars #
  • Searched GOOG for "cow bicep" + 70% and got no results. But cow bicep is strong. It should be in the results. Short GOOG. #
  • That was awful. I'm going to go take down a cow bicep Hot Pocket to recover brb #
  • What is it called when you simultaneously are jealous of and look down upon everyone around you during your commute? Adulthood? #
  • Horse race update: Of those we follow, passed @crampell in followers. How do you like me now NYT's Economix? still well ahead of @LCDnews #
  • http://flickchart.com might be the best way to destroy time since Strategic Craps http://bit.ly/10ClF9s. #
  • Tough choice, Blade Runner vs Sin City. Like which of your children do you want to be killed? Online Sophie's Choice. Sorry Sin City #
  • I wonder how many lawyers are billing $500+ while choosing between Jaws and Platoon. A tough choice btw, I gave the the shark the nod #
  • Trying to decide whether I'd hit Meredith Whitney. My main concern is that she is husky enough to hit me. Plus her roided wrestelr hubby #
  • Rookie mistake would be to bother with headshots, you need a view of the whole valley.
    http://bit.ly/OlBIL vs http://bit.ly/Uynjq #
  • The latter would be a no (that outfit scares my penis) but the former is certainly intriguing. Zebra pelt drapery + come hither = Go-Team #
  • About to conduct science experiment: I'm gonna take an online IQ test, then read Sarah Palin's op-ed http://bit.ly/75QM2, then retake test #
  • After reading the IQ test then reading Sarah Palin's Op-Ed, I lost 4 IQ points based on tests at IqTests.com. Science is about knowing #
  • Btw don't ever take IQ tests online. That site was ok but I did one where I had to click through 15 pages and uncheck 100 boxes #
  • Horse race update: @LCDnews now has 131 followers, and is rising fast. @longorshort now suicidal as 176 is looking very vulnerable. #
  • Yesterday, Jack Welch said women had to choose between kids and becoming CEO. Today, he's hospitalized. Coincidence or foul play? #
  • FYI, there are 3 of us posting, so if it gets less coherent, we'll just twitter through to the other side. Check source to follow a thread #
  • I hope you guys and gals brought your tissues and/or monogrammed hankerchiefs… #
  • "Michael, I think you and I need to have a talk…about your…performance. And the future. How is 2pm in my office? Be seeing you." #
  • "Sarah, I'm concerned that something may happen to me. What if I lose the job? How will we afford the mortgage? What about — #
  • — the baby? I want the baby to have the opportunities we never did, the picket fence, the 1.5 siblings and loving happy parents." #
  • "Mom, it's me Sare-bear. Yes, I shouldn't be sleeping with him, but Harry might be the *ONE*. When he touches me, it's like… #
  • "…it's like I'm spaghetti & he's tomato sauce. Michael's hamburger helper & I'm a pan. Mom, I'm really bad at analogies, I have to go." #
  • "Sarah, will you tell him the baby's mine? I can't believe this's happening,I thought I was YOUR ONE? Can we ever make US work after this?" #
  • "Ma, she told me it wasn't mine. She has been hiding this from me, the baby daddy is actually… #
  • "…her husband Michael. Yes I can't believe it either, she's been lying to me too. — " #
  • — We have been having an affair for over two years, I thought I could trust her. I'm alone like the sun in the morning sky." #
  • "Michael, great to see you. Mr. Stolapopalous is waiting to see you in his office. Do you want some coffee?" #
  • "Tyler, I have a difficult choice to make. Do I keep it or not? I know how it goes against what I believe but…" #
  • " …a career advancement opportunity like this doesn't come around very often. It's a huge bump in money, enough that the baby — " #
  • "– and Sarah would be set. It's just I'd be traveling so much I'd be an absentee father with no family just like Dad. Plus ca change SIGH." #
  • "I'm sorry about everything, the cheating, the lying. I just want…I want to start over Michael. I want to erase the past and act like — #
  • " — this is the very first day of our relationship. I'll make you a big romantic dinner — " #
  • "– How does spaghetti sound?" ~FIN~ #
  • The definition of "FTW" –> http://imgur.com/mCUfG.jpg #
  • Pleb:"Plz, make it stop.reading those tweets is making me more stupid,hard though that is to believe.like watching liveblogging paddleball" #
  • A lot of #cephalopod chatter, #squid invasion could be sooner than my model thought…. #
  • Response to Pleb: "That is the beauty of it. Twitteruesday — it will make you a full-on tard." #
  • Horse race update: @LCDnews now has 150 followers, I think we are safe by market close but could be in jeopardy after hours. #
  • Just worked out a great idea for Dangerous Fund II with Kaiser. This fund is even more dangerous than the first. #
  • #CIT is named after someone who's not yet qualified to be a camp counselor & school w ugliest girls in the world. Its failure is no surprise #
  • #zimbabwenomics is a top 10 source of Search engine traffic. "walruses are efficient" is top 20. #
  • Looking through email,Juggles slams on cold e-mails have worked to dissuade ppl from e-mailing us. That or the publishing industry is dead. #
  • Paleofish: "I have lost 30 IQ points thanks to Twitteruesday" #
  • To the Paleofish: Go read the Sarah #Palin op-ed, you'll lose 30 more like I did http://bit.ly/13hyi9 and http://bit.ly/1925r3 #
  • From @Anal_yst to JD: "How’s your love affair with Smith Barney going these days? Er MSSB or whatever its called?" #
  • @Anal_yst my love affair has been ended for awhile. I stopped bothering, their fees were highway robbery and no value add #
  • Smith Barney was blogged about here many moons ago http://bit.ly/jE4rM #
  • Going to test TwitterBerry from the bathroom. BRB. But also sorta not BRB because Im gonna update you while Im away. #
  • I successfully tweeted on the toilet! …uh that didn't come out right … so to speak #
  • I wonder what % of tweets happen in bathrooms. 10% would be my guess #
  • Incidentally, that is also the number of business deals closed in the bathroom. #
  • I just completed a divestiture to a strategic buyer #
  • Marketing cultist/CFA (yeah i dont get it) frm @normative comment thread just followed us, @Jakewk. Maybe he wants to sell us a Haque Bubble #
  • seriously, this is still FTW http://imgur.com/mCUfG.jpg,dominating reversal on the comeback, a comecomeback. #
  • Comecomeback probably shouldn't be said aloud. #
  • Going to check facebook and eat a snack. Thinking about what a #palin presidency would look like. What was the seuss book, the Lorax? #
  • We almost made it, will be interesting to see if our plugin will work right and post a digest post at 6pm as planned, I'd take the under #
  • Brb hot pockets #

Twitteruesday

We’ll be honest. We have no idea what to do with Twitter. We can’t figure it out. The 140 character limit is restrictive, following “discussions” on it is completely incoherent, it doesn’t make money for the owners and never will. It’s unclear why it exists just as it’s unclear why people use it.

But we have found in our long lives that the best thing to do when you have no idea what to do with something is to just simply to do a lot of it. And that is precisely what we intend to do. We are going to Twitter the shit out of you today, Tuesday July 14th. We will be tweeting a minimum of 6 times per hour and a maximum of perf times infinity divided by unicorn.

You can either follow our tweets on this site in our sidebar or on Long or Short’s twitter feed itself. Where will you find the Tweets on our sidebar? Try and pick up on visual cues that might be pointing to their location.


Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing 07-05-2009

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously overcompensates a secret doubt.
-Aldous Huxley

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing


Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing 06-28-2009

Sometimes in life you have to realize a poor investment and cut your losses. Write that down.
-Van Wilder Sr.

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing


Anti-Business: Huntsman

Huntsman (NYSE: HUN) is in the business of making chemicals of some kind. Or rather it was in the business of making chemicals of some kind. Now Huntsman is in the anti-business business wherein they agree to mergers that are so disagreeable, so toxic and so unprofitable that the other side of the merger pays them to go away. The latest anti-business deal Huntsman consummated is one in which Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse are paying Huntsman cash and providing token cheap financing. This anti-business came about because DB and CS aided and abetted Apollo in weaseling its way out of merging Hexion with Huntsman as agreed in June 2007 which in turn helped DB and CS avoid being forced to provide $15 billion of cheap financing.

By the cold calculations of Wall Street, the settlement was an economic success for the banks. Had they originally provided the $15.4 billion of debt originally committed to the deal, they would have faced billions of dollars in loan losses. Now the direct cost to each bank is just over $300 million, a far more palatable figure.

Recommendation: Huntsman’s cash settlements from their anti-business segment (received from Apollo, DB and CS) in the last twelve months are about as much as their entire current market cap. This doesn’t even factor in the additional value received in these transactions from below market rate financing of convertible and unsecured debt. We like the stock in equal measure to the extent they are able to find new anti-business partners that will allow them to grow their nascent and extremely profitable anti-business segment.


Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing 06-21-2009

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
-H.L. Mencken

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing


More Short Cold E-Mails, Longer Vitriol

An email sent to me on Wednesday

from: Connie Perry < [redacted]@monteiroandco.com>
to: [mrjugglesemail]
subject: ” To Err is Human, To Really Screw Up, You Need a Computer” Popular Campus T-Shirt, CA 1980

Hello,

We are working with [Author], Director of the [Something Fancy Sounding at Some Place], Haas Fellow in Finance, and author and speaker. We are excited to be working on his new book [Book Title] ([Book details, including ISBN and price, redacted]).

I’ve included a brief description of its content below:

[Author’s] [Book] is a serious yet funny book about how technology, markets, and machines rose to prominence and how the geeks came to rule and still rule the Street. In it he explains the role of technology in the crisis of 2008 as well as ways we can avoid such calamaties in the future. The book is peppered with quirky historical facts and witty comments to balance out how hard it is to see the difference between financial markets and computer networks. There are also some great visuals. [Author’s] conversational style and good humor gives us a better sense of how technology shapes today’s markets. He also takes a serious and insightful look at how Wall Street should participate in the future of electronic finance.

Please let me know if you have any questions, or would like more information.

Thank you and cheers,
Connie Perry
Monteiro and Company
[redacted ph#]
www.[redacted].com

Below are a few of [Author’s] favorite quotes:
“Life would be so much easier if we only had the source code.”
—Hacker Proverb

“A computer does not substitute for judgment anymore than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage.”
—Robert McNamara

“Progress may have been all right once, but it’s gone on far too long.”
—Ogden Nash
PS: Here is a link to David in the late 1990’s presenting introductory material from [His Book]: [Youtube link]

Note that not only did she misspell “calamities”, but the emails included a black border on the left, the kind that happens when text is sloppily cut and pasted, or forwarded. My reply:

Connie, do you see that line on the left side of your email? That means you forwarded it, I believe. Not only that, but you in no way sent this to me, a person, with feelings, a heart and my own identity, because you don’t reference my feelings, my heart or my own identity in any way. You blasted this to a group of random people and the result for this poor chap [Author] is that I will never read his book. In fact, if someone asks me about [Book name], I will tell them that it is bllody [sic] awful, and that you are better off buggering a tree than attempting to read its hackneyed prose and its overly wrought conclusions.

Think about this fact the next time you lazily blast a bunch of strangers in a coldly worded spam email.

On an unrelated note, do you want to grab a drink or maybe just cut right to making out a little bit in the back of a town car? Call me.

Her reply came back within a few hours:

Well, well I take a mild offense at “lazy” and “random blast.” With my superior intellect I researched various bloggers whom I believe have feelings, heart and identities that may relate to and with a writer who is covering a very relatable topic. So sorry not to have addressed you as Mr. Juggles, sir in my hello. I guess I’m in a hurry to promote a good book. What a mess I am, doing my job.

Now on an unrelated note, I’d rather read than swap spit with you today. Please don’t call.

And my final reply:

Actually, your note which you marked as “unrelated” was actually “related.” And it’s funny that you indicated that you’d rather read than have to deal with my advances. You and your ilk, the cold-emailers of the world, do exactly the same thing to me, except in an unsolicited fashion. You probe my email account when I’d rather be doing just about anything else. It doesn’t work. Stop doing it. Try developing a relationship with a site, or a person, like by making out in the back of a town car. That is how you serve your clients’ interests.


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