Long or Short Capital

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.

In response to a question about having to comply with China’s censoring mandate for Internet companies:

I’ll tell you this, it’s not more hard than dealing with Sarbanes and Oxley.

-Xin Ye, a founding executive of Sohu.com (SOHU)

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

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

The upshot is that the points where defensive or aggressive investment positions are most effective are also typically the points where one will, at least briefly, look like an idiot for taking them.

–Hostile Trends, John P. Hussman, Ph.D.

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Crack reporting from the WSJ undercovers an industry previously unknown to me: Beer Diplomacy. The increasingly multinational nature of business will only increase the demand for beer diplomats and consumer products diplomats in general. We are actively seeking ways to increase our exposure to this sector and will advise readers appropriately.

From the WSJ.
Anheuser-Busch has been a sponsor of the World Cup since 1986. And it didn’t expect to find itself in this bind when it paid an estimated $80 million in 1998 for exclusive alcohol rights to the 2002 and 2006 World Cup tournaments…German newspapers were reporting that beer fans were furious about the prospect of drinking the American brew at the tournament…If Anheuser-Busch insisted on enforcing its exclusivity, it was clear it would annoy some Germans who wanted to drink German beer and generate bad publicity for the company.
So Anheuser officials undertook an unprecedented act of beer diplomacy. Tony Ponturo, Anheuser-Busch vice president of global media and sports marketing and the executive who signed the World Cup sponsorship deal…He proposed letting Bitburger [a chief competitor] sell its beer along with Bud at the stadiums and at some promotional events. In return, the American company would gain the right to use the name Bud, instead of just Anheuser-Busch, on billboards along the fields — and visible to viewers watching on TV at home.

Dedicated to providing our readers with the bloody edge of globally diverse venture opportunities, our recent research has revealed that multiple opportunities in the “Death Squad Start Up” business exist. This research supersedes our recent recommendations in the armed piracy sector.

Start up costs are extraordinarily small, given the strength of the U.S. Dollar in the region and the low cost of critical hardware (RPGs, AK-47 models, etc.) many of which are obtainable via salvage efforts at local weapons caches and abandoned armories. Triple digit IRRs with high liquidity are easily obtainable. (Our model shows a 355% IRR in Year 2).

A sample P&L for a typical venture is attached.

References: Build your own Iraqi Police Squad for a Little Cash
Recommendation: Long Death Squad Startups; think Piratery but with more murder and less rum.

Movie theater chain AMC has talked a lot about the potential causes of box office decline. This slide, filed with the SEC, shows that box office receipts have decline in tandem with the number of rotten tomatoes per movie. Quite frankly, I do not understand why movie audiences enjoy watching movies in theaters with rancid fruit but it begs the question: Why haven’t the movie theaters increased their tomatoes per theater allocation?

Recommendation: Domestic theater attendance may be trending 3-4% positive YTD, but until we see evidence that this is due to higher rotten tomato/screen ratios, we cannot recommend a long position in any of the publically traded theater companies such as Regal Entertainment (RGC) or Carmike Cinemas (CKEC).

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:

1. To leverage yourself to the rising tide of Turkey as it joins the EU and narrows the economic gap to Europe.
2. Turkish real estate also offers a natural hedge to…the rest of your portfolio. (Note: We don’t actually know what “natural hedge” means)
3. Gargamel has reached a cash settlement to stop his campaign of smurf terror.
4. Smurfette will go all the smurf with you; if you liqueur her up with a thimble full of wine cooler, she may even do it smurfy-style. YMMV.
5. For the smurf of it.

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.

This now confounds us and we need it solved. Mail an email to misterjuggles@gmail.com and tell us why Google Talk makes the text “BP” blue in messages. We will paypal $50 to the best* answer as of a week from now. The criteria are both subjective and objective as determined by our advanced DCF Correctness Model. We reserve the right to republish the theories which are especially awesome, with attribution of course.

The UK is a land of fear. Everything is geared to frightening the populace into a frenzied state. The free daily papers consist almost entirely of fear mongering journalism about violence in schools, poisons in foods, death by cellphone radiation, minicab rape, murders of Britons on Holiday, genetically altered crops. All of this is complemented by a steady torrent of T&A, usually on the same page. Mind the gap, mind the taxi, mind the man with the gun, mind the man about to violently rape you, mind the totty, mind the CCTV, mind the et cetera. Big Brother will never stop reminding you to mind while you are in the UK. Even the escalators have stop buttons positioned every few feet, as if escalator rides are a high risk endeavour.

This context will not help you when faced with the Creepy V.

No, this is not an educational ad warning about the dangers of “vagina” to young men (which are plentiful) nor is it an ad for outsourcing child molestation to letters of the alphabet. The Creepy V is the avatar used to market Virgin’s new Cancer Cover product which “can give you a cash lump sum to help you financially if you’re diagnosed with cancer in the future.” I’m not a big believer in insurance other than health and dental, but setting aside the dubious value of the product itself, the marketing is exactly the blend of creepy, offputting and cartoony that really doesn’t resonate with….anyone.

Not only that, but on the Virgin Cancer Cover page they let you watch their TV commercial (bottom left) which gets its fact completely wrong. It depicts Cancer as an entity which will do the following: pull the tablecloth out from your dinner table, steal your newspaper, take away your lawnmower and break down your door. As far as I know, these are not medical symptoms of getting cancer.

Recommendation: Virgin Group may be seeking to be the brand to rule all other brands, but when your advertising takes on an alphabetical theme similar to the Jedi Knights of Overstock (OSTK) and is creepy to boot, it may be time for you to be glad you aren’t public and Long or Short can’t back its truck up to a mountain of your stock’s put options.