Long or Short Capital

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.

Martins: Have you ever seen any of your victims?

Harry Lime: You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.

-From the movie version of Graham Greene’s The Third Man

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

My GF: How do I make it so I’m invisible on Google messenger?
Me: But I’m the only person on your Google Talk buddy list…
My GF: So how do I do that?

Recommendation: Market underweight me.

A tale of dinosaurs in the age of robots.

“For the customer, who doesn’t enjoy high levels of service and has no respect for their money, Financial Management Account, by Smith Barney”

JD: I have a brokerage account with you. A relative used to work there and having a live broker helps for things like buying producers of Japanese toilets or Russian Petroleum on their native exchanges rather than illiquid domestic ADR’s.

Smith Barney: Yes, I am a well-known, venerable brokerage house, built upon the philosophy that customers should be rich, have low expectations and a deep self-hatred.

JD: You are a remarkably mediocre brokerage. You are more expensive than my pal Ameritrade, yet you make everything more difficult and less convenient. You are never galling but consistently incalcitrant. Would a customer like to receive their documents by email? They should expect to receive a link to their document by email, and have it not even work half the time. Does a customer want to have one account number? They ought expect to have Smith Barney CHANGE the final digit on you due to some unannounced internal transfer causing the customer to run around not being able to log in. For you, Smith Barney, it is a privilege for me to be able to look at my account online, like it’s 1997 and real time observation of my portfolio is a gift.

Smith Barney: Smith Barney Access has been named the #1 overall website among Full Service Brokerage firms for the sixth consecutive time, by the semi-annual Watchfire GomezPro Scorecard, for fourth quarter 2005. Watchfire GomezPro Scorecards measure the quality of online financial services offerings, with predominant focus on ease-of-use, customer confidence, onsite resources, and relationship services. Unfortunately, it appears as Smith Barney Access has been named the #Crap overall website by Johnny Debacle of Long or Short Capital.

JD: Let me tell you a story, Smith Barney. Last week, I decided to buy Quicken to tidy up my personal finances. Smith Barney, you don’t have any downloadable Quicken or MS Money files or anything at all, outside of PDF’s. I searched and searched and found that the only way I could get access to Quicken ready account statements, with their QIF’s and OFX’s and what not, was by upgrading to a Financial Management Account.

Smith Barney: The cornerstone of your investment relationship with Smith Barney, the Financial Management Account (FMA®) allows you to consolidate, manage, monitor and access your cash and other assets, simply and conveniently.*

JD: …And it costs $100 per year (on top of already expensive fees which I pay) and offers nothing that Ameritrade doesn’t provide gratis. Smith Barney, why would I want this? Why would I want an extended business relationship with you, who has demonstrably shown to me that everything you do is convoluted, user unfriendly, and limited? I’m a twentysomething living in the digital age and I don’t want to have worry about things that should be taken for granted. You make money off the trading I do with my money. $100 means nothing compared to the unduly non-monetary transaction costs you apply to everything. How do you not see that it’s in YOUR interests, not mine, to make it as easy as possible for me to trade and to manage my trades?

Smith Barney: Plastics.

Fin.

*Except when compared to every other brokerage.

McDonald’s (MCD) is known for supplying products so good that they’re dangerous, whether they be steaming hot coffee or obesity causing french fries. But they should be known more for getting it. Yesterday, McD’s announced that they will be selling exercise DVD’s along with their fast food. They get ’em coming and going. Seriously, there is probably some management consultant who read this news release and subsequently had their head explode Scanners-style as they jubilated “SYNERGIES.”

Recommendation: Long the Hamburgliest company on the planet.

Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow – that is patience.

-Leo Tolstoy

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

My position is so short, it may actually go negative short, which would be a long and would be terrible for all. Just like this horrendous disgusting concoction from Hades. Coke with double the caffeine, half the carbs and infinitely more “rich coffee essence.”

Just as a service to the Coca-Cola Company (KO) here are some other combinations which, if you care about your shareholders even a little, we recommend you should never combine.

• Mayonnaise, beer and walnuts.
• Corriander and Bette Middler.
• Chocolate and plutonium.
• Bubble gum, strawberry and post-modern feudalism.
• The phrase “lack of internal controls” and my money.

Recommendation: Short Coca-Cola for producing the first product that could be accurately described as “swill.” Long red wine & coke and a double huzzah for green tea & whiskey.

Returning from a recent trip to Tokyo and enamored with Japanese technology in general — and bathroom-related technology in particular — I recommended that an acquaintaince of mine pick up a few shares of Toto. Two weeks later, I find out that he has invested in a comeback attempt by Toto, the multi-platinum, Grammy-winning band responsible for the hit, Africa.

I suppose I should have been more specific, especially since US investors are typically skeptical that a toilet maker can sustain a $3.6bn market cap and a 37x P/E. To clarify and rectify my mistake, I hereby formally recommend a long position in Japanese toilet technology plays. Our extensive field testing indicates that the new features such as the Cyclone Flushing System and the integrated rear warm water washing in products like the Neorest 600 will allow Toto to increase market share and deliver solid returns, as well as encourage me to stay regular.

Everyone post your insider information in the comments section of this post. There is no way the SEC will find out about us this time! Make sure your comments follow our specific Direktanlage Trader checklist as outlined below.

Comments must:

• Contain insider information that will let us reap fraudulent (and likely abstract) profits.
• Be highly illegal.
• Be sourced from a Croatian, German, Russian or someone of evil descent.
• Give guidance on alleged inside-trader Monika Vujovic, who we have conveniently marked with our insider trading lasso: I would share way more than 50% of the “fraudulent proceeds” with her; further analysis is pending.

Readers are always emailing me, asking me to explain exactly how I maintain such an enviable track record. So here’s a step-by-step case example of how to make money on a startup.

Step 1: Find a hot sector
Investors often talk about the “rising tide” law of investing: better to own a mediocre company in a great sector than a great company in a terrible industry. When a sector gets hot, the crap often rises as fast (or faster) than the cream.
No sector is hotter right now than “CleanTech.” How hot? Big name venture capitalists are now raising cleantech-only funds. Bush discusses clean energy in every address he makes. And solar power — solar! have I gone back to the future? — stocks like Evergreen Solar (ESLR) and SunPower (SPWR) are doubles coming out of their IPOs.

Step 2: Create a pure play
Investors love pure plays. When a sector is hot, they want as much exposure as possible. Take online advertising. Sure, News Corp (NWS-A) owns MySpace — the fastest growing web site and community — but you have to buy a whole bunch of newspaper, cable, and satellite TV assets too. The performance of those assets will drown out any positive developments at MySpace. Instead, investors clamor for stocks like Yahoo (YHOO) and Google (GOOG) …they’re pure plays.

So for cleantech, I will start a company from scratch to ensure it’s a pure play.

Step 3: Find a great name
Now that we’ve found a hot sector and, we need to find a name that will inspire the masses. SunPower works well, conveying a sense of action and virility. Fortunately, the stars have truly aligned in this case as Pure Play connotes both a provider of cleanliness as well as a streamlined stock. Perfect!
A star is born: CleanTechPurePlay.com

Step 4: Find a strong management team
I, Mr Juggles will run this company. Done and done.

Step 5: Profit

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 job of a Russian man is to plant:
His house in the ground (sic).
His seed in a woman.
His neighbour in jail.

-From Ruminations on Russia

Today, a recurring Dealbreaker feature involving Dick Grasso has spurred our analysts to break another aspect of the scandal involving David Delainey and Mark Davison, first exposed by Long or Short and threatening to engulf Wall Street: Star Trek Celebrity Imposters on Wall Street.

The Dick Grasso article clued in one of our staff who, on further investigation, has revealed that Mr. Grasso is also involved in the imposter scandal. Mr. Grasso has reportedly been taking fees for appearances at various Star Trek functions as “Arturus,” a guest character on Star Trek Voyager played by Ray Wise, reknowned for his role as Leland Palmer on Twin Peaks, and more lately, as the Vice President of the United States on 24.

Alien Imposter Dick Grasso?

Recommendation: Short Dick Grasso, Star Trek in all forms. Underweight “Alien Nation”.  As always, accumulate the Wookie.

From a very earnest, deep-voiced P&G (PG) advertising executive on a recent conference call:

“When a girl starts menstruating, we want to be there…on the radio, in print, and on the web sites with relevant advertising.”

From a very earnest, eager McKinsey consultant:

“Now we’re focused on figuring out what it is about Metamucil that makes it so attractive.”