Long or Short Capital

The market to provide slot machines is surprisingly innovative. Since the one-armed bandits went digital, the machine makers — spurred by the casinos’ incredible drive towards efficiency and profitability — have added numerous features (graphics, sounds, videos, machines linked across casinos in order to increase payouts, frequent player clubs, ticket-in-ticket-out etc.) to their machines. They are much more reliable, profitable, and fun for the consumer than the average slot machine even two or three years ago.

Contrast that situation with the ATM. The functionality offered by the average ATM is not significantly greater than that offered two to three years ago. They are not faster or easier to use and they have always been fairly reliable. Meanwhile, the cost to the consumer has been increasing rather than decreasing (although, in fairness, this is probably not the fault of the actual machine manufacturers). Some ATMs used to offer stamps for purchase but that effort now appears dead. The ATM industry needs innovation.

Therefore, I propose the combination ATM/Slot Machine or the SLOTATM. In states where slots are legal, this machine will offer the ultimate in gaming entertainment and cash withdrawal services. It will have a number of new and innovative features including:

1. Consumers will be able to choose whether to withdraw the exact specified amount of money and pay a $2 ATM fee or they can instead elect to withdraw a randomly chosen amount between $95 and $125 and no ATM fee will be charged. Most consumers will get back ~$96-98 while a few winners will get more. Net net, the revenue generated by the machine will be greater than in a strict fee scenario but consumer satisfaction will increase because they will have paid for a gaming experience rather than ATM usage. [Note that traditional bells and whistles will go off as the random payout amount is being determined.]
2. Bank of America has over 16,000 ATMs and all of them are already linked. Any large bank could offer huge payouts by spreading the jackpot nationally across their network, Powerball-style.
3. Bank loyalty will increase and customer defections will decrease as consumers will not want to lose their frequent player points.
4. Consumers will receive more money withdrawal options. For instance, they will be able to specify “big bills” or “little bills” rather than having to accept whatever bills the machine happens to spit out. Is there anything worse than withdrawing $200 and receiving all $10 bills?
5. Long lines at convenience stores will be reduced as scratch ticket gambling addicts will instead line up to repeatedly withdraw money from ATM’s.
6. Possible feature would be to have extreme outlier type events, say 1 out of 10,000 withdrawals gets twice as much money and 1 out of 10,000 gets zero. The zero payout outcome would be well known as “The Whammy” and all ATM’s would hear the echoing cries of “No Whammy, No Whammy, No Whammy, No Whammy!”

It makes so much sense is there any reason that Alliance Gaming (AGI) and Diebold (DBD) can’t get together and get this done?

Update: All culled posts are deleted as of 1/4/06.

We recently learned about how the Japanese make up the history in their textbooks so that little Japanese schoolgirls never have to learn things like that the Japanese wantonly murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese in the Nanking massacre or that being able to buy used panties from a vending machine is pretty weird to human beings on planet Earth. Applied to the business of creating business humor online, we think this technique could help keep our own “Japanese schoolgirls” (our readers) from ever knowing the dozens of horrors we have created in failed posts.

Here is a list of Six Posts I’m deleting on Wednesday and specific reasons why they were failures.

Underground Toy Market Is Really a Front for Drugs — No story there. No real business connection, no humor, little truth. Deep, you sucked on that one Bro.

Outsourcing My Thoughts On Outsourcing: Pt 2 — Great concept but in practice worthless, as some readers pointed out (cruelly you cruel bastards). $40 poorly, even if interestingly, spent. Part 1 will remain, but part 2 is to be culled.

Internet Shadow Advertising Market — More like Rotatebad.com. An idea is useless without support and execution.

Charity Pie Revenue Maximization — Who gives a crap about pies? Or charities for that matter? To think, I spent time reading that that could have been spent managing the immigrants who wax my yacht. Next.

Will you replace BloggerSwap.com with the Choo-Choo’s? — I would rather raze the internet and salt the Earth with BloggerSwap’s corpse than leave any mention of that hideous traffic scam existant on the Web.

The Difference Between Looting and Finding — This came from a third party provider.

We just want our subscriberholders to know that Long or Short Capital acknowledges failure; then we destroy it.

Most fancy restaurants and hotels offer steel-cut oatmeal. But, last time I checked, steel is not that hard a substance. On the absolute hardness scale, it rates an 80 or 90 as compared to 1600 for a diamond. Until I can feel diamond dust in my bowels, there’s good money to be made in oatmeal.

JD has asked me to respond to his claim that Russia is not a good place to invest because they are “jockeying to try and do the only thing they ever try to do: nuke the USA and rule the world.”

Well I disagree.

Thanks for your time.

Continuing with our earlier analysis of a potential pillow pair trade, our staff has recently upgraded our position on exotic plush pillow makers from “Do Not Buy” to “Maybe Buy.” Reasons for the upgrade include strong YOY growth in plush pillow sales volume, especially in the very competitive food facsimile space, despite tough comps as well as the broadening demand as people recognize the excellence of novelty plush. It doesn’t hurt that Kaiser sleeps on this every night.

Hamburger Pillow:

This is the biggest Cheeseburger ever! With this big Cheeseburger pillow, whether you are watching TV or taking a rest, it will provide you with the best comfort! It is very soft and cuddle! There are cheese, lettuce, and beef inside.

Recommendation: We maintain our “Long” rating for pillow makers with emerging market focus, and our “Short” rating for domestic pillow makers, while upgrading Exotic Plush Pillows to a “Maybe Buy.”

The CFO of Burger King is named Cedric Burgher. Link BK CFO. This incredibly true truth is even more incredible when you come to grips with the fact that the suffix for Burger King employee emails is @whopper.com.

The founder and CEO of McDonald’s is not the Hamburgler as some people mistakenly presume. Although, it is true that he did attempt to “hamburgle” McD’s in a failed early 1980’s LBO.

Really, creationists and Intelligent Design advocates are the same thing, just like a clown and a clown carrying an umbrella are really the same thing.
–Abstract Factory

1) Order cheese pizza from your finest local supplier.
2) Put it in a bowl.
3) Eat with spoons.

Serves 2.

How does one play Monopoly with real money and a functioning capital market with an interest rate based on the “Trip Around the Board” unit of time all the while maintaining the quirky board specific events?

This is our project.

Long or Short Capital has established these preliminary rules following our initial diligence.

1. The game should use some set a ratio as an exchange rate of dollars to monopoly dollars as an initial buy-in. Players should not be able to exchange money in or out of the game until the game is finished.
2. Players would have to start with very little money forcing them to have to raise capital for anything but the most marginal investments.
3. All asset transactions as well as mergers are permitted, with the stipulation that terms under which all transactions occur are upheld and honored.
4. There should be at least 6 players, 2 of which will be bankers (see below).
5. The game would definitely need one permanent banker, perhas two to prevent monopolistic banking practices. The bankers would have to be judged by the same scale as the players –profits generated through savvy banking. The wrinkle is that you would probably have to judge one banker’s profit making against the others.
6. Game Duration: Time delimited or turn delimited or until one player has a made amount of money or until only one non-banker player is left standing?

Comments from Original Post

Long or Short Capital will continue to revise the game by thinking “Big Thoughts” and by listening to input from both readers and the illiterate, until a proper Capital Market Monopoly Board Game (CMMBG) has been resolved. Then we we will host a game. Possibly online and to a flurry of lawsuits.

Say Forever I Do with an uncut bag o’ diamonds “mixed with the natural elements they are found.” Perhaps the missing link from diamonds to the Idiot Demographic.

This will be a point/counterpoint analysis. Kaiser, unbeknownst to him until now and fresh off a trip to Germany, will supply the counterpoint.

A common investing theme is that Russia is the place to put your money. Why?

Burgeoning middle class!!
Favorable demographics!!
Heavily educated human capital base from which to draw!!
More oil than T. Boone Pickens!!
Business friendly, and otherwise unfriendly, Dictator Tsar General-Secretary President Putin!!
Tradition of outlining and executing 3-5 year plans!!
Tradition of strongly protected property rights, economic openness and political stability!!
Literature with greats like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn!!
And for the kids…GULAGS!!

Well sorry to be the turd in the blinchiki but Russia is jockeying to try and do the only thing they know to try and do: nuke the USA and rule the world. They don’t care about economic openness. They don’t care about working hard and they don’t believe in capitalism. They want three things, in no specific order.

Vodka.
World Domination.
To do evil.

It is an entire nation which channels the ethos of lazy ammoral kleptocracy. When I was there 11 years ago, my main takeaway is that if there is one redeeming quality about Russia it is the null set. When I have studied Russia, it has seemed like a good place to be unhappy, or to be purged, or to be evil, or to die from nuclear fallout, or to have your loans defaulted on and your money swindled.

And Russia is not a place to invest money for these very same reasons. They don’t have ethics. They refuse to live without corruption which would make a Chinese Judge blush. They are both willing and able to expropriate any foreign direct investment. And don’t think they aren’t still cooking up ways to drop Cuban paratroopes into small unsuspecting Coloradan towns.

Russia is a place to FEAR. Avoid buying stocks, bonds, derivatives and any other security or financial interest which are dependent upon Russian assets….Unless you look forward to waking up a year or two for now and opening your personal portfolio account and wondering “Hey where did my Gazprom go!” as you look at a ‘Thank you Comrade’ note signed “Sincerely, V Putin.”

Recommendation: Ask your financial advisor about low cost index funds which track the Moscow Stock exchange. Then, “do not buy” them.

Thanks to an old post on a new paradigm for blogging start-ups (Sexy Chinese Female Bloggers), Long or Short Capital is no.1 in Connecting Arabian Men with Sexy Chinese Women via search engines.

Pirates.

Piracy used to be an important industry providing raping and pillaging services for emerging market economies and sovereign states. Fine countries such as Trinidad and Tobago were built on the pirate economy. Can you imagine England if pirates hadn’t been around? It would now be the United Kingdom of Mexico and London would be New Seville, had it not been for an enterprising fleet of bucaneers.

Pirate Opportunities

Over the past couple decades, shipping companies, luxury cruiselines and international boating have all seen large increases in net profits. However, there has not been a commensurate rise in piratery.

Piratery provides a compelling ROI for the entrepeneurial seaman. For an investment of $20-30k in a boat, some deckhands and rental cutlasses, a pirate captain can realize a 50-60% ROI in one year. Of course, this only holds true given the proper locale. For example, the coast of Somalia is a competitive, if fragmented, market. Investing there is a bad risk reward proposition for a variety of reasons. See Somali Pirates Out of Control or Somali Pirates Free Ship After Month of Captivity or Pirates Attack Cruisership or the free daily paper’s headline from yesterday simply titled “ARGH!” for more details.

But setting up a lair in a place like Isla Margarita, located off the northern coast of Venenzuela, would be an environment with relatively low piratery penetration but proximity to major cruiseline and OPEC oil routes. An added bonus, Isla Margarita is where non-pirate berserker Lope de Aguirre reached his crescendo.

You need to strike while the iron is hot and not be heedin any naysayers or scallywags. Piratery is your path to financial freedom. You’ll be flying the skull & crossbones over a Jupiter, FL mansion in no time.

Recommendation: Depending on your investing horizon, commence pirate raids on commercial trading routes immediately or ask your financial advisor about low cost index funds which track the piratery index. Swig a few shots of Mount Gay, if need be.

Long or Short Capital has completed extensive fundmental analysis of the pillow market. After surveys, studies, and focus groups a few conclusions have become obvious:

Pillows are most often used by consumers for sleep-assistance purposes although they can sometimes be used for back support and/or playful fights in sorority houses

The optimal Full Pillow Equivalent (FPE) to Human Head ratio is approximately 1.0x

Pillow pricing is directly proportional to the average number of frills per pillow as well as the number of fabric colors per pillow. Pricing is generally inversely correlated to the utility and comfort of a pillow.

Some of these conclusions are surprising given the current state of the pillow market. For instance, in the US, FPEs per Human Head are running at almost 3.4x vs. the 1.0x optimal level. Note that this estimate includes almost 6 decorative pillows per household (or 1.2 FPEs). Meanwhile, FPEs per Human Head are approximately 0.1x in developing economies such as Malaysia and Zimbabwe and around 0.6x in China, the world’s most populous country.

We feel strongly that these trends will converge in the long term with the US (and Europe, to a lesser extent) reducing their consumption of frilly, non-functional pillows and developing countries upgrading from rocks to pillows for head support. Our surveys of starving third world citizens find that pillows run fifth on desired items following only clean water, freedom, blond hair and Pampers for the kids. This presents an attractive investment opportunity.

Recommendation:
We are recommending a pair trade: Go long pillow makers with emerging market focus and short domestic pillow makers.