Archive for October, 2006

Aleksey Vayner Responds to the Online Personal Ad of Lucy Gao

W4M Details and instructions into Lucy’s Party (In Lucy’s Pants)

Dear Potential Lover,

I am excited by the opportunity our future potential sexual relationship may present us. Please read ALL the following to ensure your entry into my pants.

We meet for a light dinner at the Ritz in Mayfair at 8:17 PM. You wear a tailored sports coat, a Pink shirt (a pink Pink shirt is acceptable but not advisable) and smart looking shoes.

Advice 1: It goes without saying that the more upper-class you dress, the less likely you shall be denied entry into my pants.
Advice 2: Photos will be taken between X:00 and X:30 depending on how the date proceeds.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ENTRY INTO MY PARTY (IN MY PANTS):
When you arrive at the Ritz, take the Hotel entry on the opposite side of the Green Park tube station. When asked by the Ritz doorman “how can I help you Sir?”, you reply “I am here for Lucy’s Party (In Her Pants)”, otherwise you may be turned away. You will be escorted to the lounge area, where you will see me. We will proceed to the dinner table and open our menus. Do NOT order salad. That is what I am having and were you to have it too, it may introduce an element of awkwardness into our dinner. Order either the foie gras or the faux foie gras as an appetizer. After we finish a 150ml cup of cappucino for desert, we must immediately stop talking at which point you are to exit through the front entrance. You are to begin your voyage home.

If you have been chosen for further activies of the night, you will receive a call from my P.A. Ms Gill informing you of such.

Those activities may include:
10:17pm-11:34pm Dancing at the Rock Garden
11:35pm-11:58pm Taxicab drive back to my apt in Notting Hill
11:58pm-12:02pm Entering my apartment
12:03pm-12:09pm Foreplay
12:10pm-12:11pm Entering my pants hehehehe
12:12pm-02:49am Dry Humping

ARRIVAL DATES:
Oct 19th: Andy
Oct 20th: Sanjay, Yves (Late timeslot)
Oct 21st: JingJing
Oct 22nd: [You]
Oct 23rd: Gharzi
Oct 24th: Chase

Here is what I look like upside down:

Please respond with a little bit about yourself, a faceshot and your qualifications for the party in my pants.

P.S. No fatties.

Lucy Gao
Citigroup Real Estate Equity Research
4th Floor, Citigroup Centre (CGC1)
25 Canada Square, London E14 5LB
Direct Line: +44 207 986 4116
Fax: +44 207 986 4341
Mobile: +44 778 220 5450
Email: lucy.gao@citigroup.com

Dear Lucy,

There have been many claimants to the crown “The Greatest.”

  • There was Muhammad Ali, a boxer who stood up to the impossible force of the Vietnam war and knocked it out.
  • There was Martin Luther King Jr, who shouted down the impossible oppressive power of culturally ingrained racism and had an impossible dream about red clay hills.
  • There was Gordon Gekko who used his intelligence, worth ethic and lack of ethics to make millions in the 80’s against impossible odds.

But have these men benched pressed 495lbs? No.

Have these men defeated Chuck Norris in mixed martial art combat? Again, the answer is no.

Do these men have the power to move you….with their minds? No.

Lucy Gao, if you were to allow me entrance into the party in your pants, I will fill your body with an enlightened state of being. You will come to know real ultimate power. In my grasp, you will find that your dreams can come true. And you will ask yourself, maybe he was born with it? No I was not born with it. With the power of positive thinking, I have molded myself into a dynamo in the gym, on the courts, in the boardroom and even in your pants.

Before last week, I was basically nothing having only started my own investment fund, won the grand slam of men’s tennis, outdrinken and outskiied Bode Miller in the winter Olympics, won the Nobel peace prize for the charity which I started, held the Street Fighter II machine in my local arcade for 15 straight hours and bedded 5,437 women. This week, I have accomplished so much more and been named the CEO of Vayner Lehman Stern UBS, after I brokered the deal which brought them together in a merger. The key was getting them to focus on my revolutionary “never lose money” investment strategy.

Now that I am somebody, I can with conviction proclaim that if you let me into the party in your pants, I will defeat the impossible. If I am going to be in your pants Lucy, then I am going to be in your pants with PASSION.

The Greatest,
‘Seksey’ Aleksey Vayner
CEO of Vayner Lehman Stern UBS


Short Cursive

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive.
The Handwriting Is on the Wall, Washington Post

I gave up cursive a long time ago and so it’s somewhat embarassing for me to have overlooked such a glaring opportunity for outsized returns on the short side. Cursive writing is clearly in secular decline. The thought of teaching and grading penmanship in an age when everyone types anyway seems downright archaic.

Recommendation: Short Cursive and penmanship graders. For hedging purposes, go long the Signature tranche — people’s tendency to sign documents in cursive should lead to a lower decay right.


Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

-P.J. O’Rourke

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing


Bill Burnham, Must Read for Tech and Internet Followers, is Back

Bill Burnham,former venture capitalist, former Wall Street analyst, current blogger and now founder of a tech fund, took a 6 month hiatus from his blog but now is back. We mention it because back in February his post about Long or Short Capital is what gave us the momentum, both mentally and traffically, to keep this site going when our momentum at its lowest. He highlighted how much he enjoyed different articles on our site and basically spun some lies about how amusing we are.

Here is his current plotted course:

I suspect I my have some commentary on the hedge fund industry from time to time, but given that my new fund will continue to be deeply embedded in the high-tech venture capital space I will continue to write about venture capital and interesting new technology trends.

So if you were a former Bill Burhman reader, flock back to his site, and if you haven’t read him in the past, read him now @ Burnham’s Beat. His commentary on the internet and tech industries is as sharp as occam’s razor.


Financial Entourage

Prompted by this article about how Entourage creator/producer “Entourage” creator-exec producer Doug Ellin is writing a new show, “a mature version of ‘Entourage’ set on Wall Street”, Mr Juggles sent this email to Kaiser and me.

To: Kaiser and JD
From: Mister Juggles
Subject: we should be writing this

BTW, who are his friends who are making $40-50mm a year on Wall St?
Did he grow up with Stevie Cohen?

“Entourage” creator-exec producer Ellin is writing an untitled half-hour he described to Daily Variety as a “mature version of ‘Entourage’ set on Wall Street.” The action revolves around a fortysomething hedge fund trader and his circle of guy pals.

Project is the first to emerge from Ellin’s overall development deal with HBO, which renewed “Entourage” for a fourth season last month.

Ellin will exec produce the pilot with Stephen Levinson. Idea was hatched by the pair after they realized several of their friends from college — “regular, fraternity brother-type guys,” Ellin said — were banking $40 million-$50 million a year on Wall Street.

“They make Vince look like a peasant,” Ellin joked.

I wrote back:

I don’t find it very believable that they have mulitple college friends banking $40-50mm on “Wall Street”. What are they, “Stock brokers” or “business men”? Maybe they are “executives”.

Does anyone even have multiple friends from college who are pulling $10mm per year before 30?? How many people in finance total are pulling $40-50mm per year? Why go this route when they could get actually get some authenticity with the already scripted Murray’s Hill 101 Pilot.


Chartered F***in’ Analyst on the Time Value of Money

Time Value of Money Sample CFA Exam Question

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, is deciding how much to tip at his local Benihana. He comes to the conclusion that the fried rice was so delicious and the onion ring volcano flamethrower so impressive, that he is going to tip with a large interest bearing note. The note will have a future value (FV) pf $9,107,369. The rate of interest on it is 9%, and it compounds monthly until it comes to term 6 years in the future. What is the present value (PV) of the interest bearing note? Bonus what does the number spell out on your calculator when your calculator is vertically inverted?.

A) $5,318,007
B) $5,318,009
C) $5,318,008
D) ¥256

Explanation:

The correct answer is C. The questions gives us this informtion

FV = 9107369; I/Y = 9/ 12 = .75; N = 6 × 12 = 72.

Using your non-HP12C but still CFA approved calculator you should utilize these key strokes to achieve success:

-9107369 [FV] [Enter] .75 [I/Y] [Enter] 72 [N] [Enter] [CPT] [PV]

*Bonus Answer is contained within the comments.


Four Simple Steps to Becoming a Billionaire

From Carter’s Adventure, here is a list of three habits of billionaires:

  1. Exercise daily.
  2. Follow your passion.
  3. Read. A lot. At least two hours a day, but many said they read four or more hours a day.

This type of advice always makes us reflect back on the McSweeney’s piece, 7 Habits of Highly Successful People:

  1. Skiing
  2. Yachting
  3. Snorkeling
  4. Golf
  5. Polo
  6. Dinner parties
  7. Shopping

In our professional opinion, the best way to become obscenely wealthy is still the old fashioned way in 4 simple steps.

Western World Version

  1. Take outrageous risks with extremely high upside.
  2. Be the 1 out of 500 million for whom it pans out. This one is key so focus on it.
  3. Attribute your wealth creation to your own hard work, your own genius and the power of your business plan. Be sure to stress how your wealth was singularly made possible by your unique endowment of elbow grease, street smarts, common sense, all of which your competitors obviously lacked (proven by how poor they are compared to you).
  4. Buy a mega yacht and/or athletic team.

Russian World Version*

  1. Acquire assets illegally either from or with the help of the state. Extra rubles for seizing commodity related assets
  2. Kill all your rivals.
  3. Buy a mega yacht and/or athletic team.
* The Russian version is only 3 steps reflecting certain “efficiencies” in the Russian billionaire market.

The HPQ Twins on 60 Minutes

Last night, the news program 60 Minutes, had the Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) twins, Pattie Dunn and Carly Fiorina, on back-to-back.

Lesson learned? Self delusion is incredibly powerful.

Pattie Dunn thinks she is the bestest. Nobody can take away the fact that she is now a member of the Bay Area Hall of Fame and she wears it in her disposition. Not even the light exposing her pretexting and corporate board spying can stop her internal propaganda machine.

She maintains:

  1. She never did anything illegal or unethical.
  2. She does not deny pretexting or spying on board members (how are these not at the very least unethical). She insists it was all vetted through lawyers and done with the board’s approval (if there was a leak, why would he approve these acts?)
  3. As to the attempts to spy on/pretext board members which grew into spying on and pretexting journalists, Patti Dunn had no knowledge of nor involvement in the latter activity.
  4. This entire affair is just Tom Perkins out to get her. Dunn’s version: After the legal ethical board-approved (according to Dunn) spying and pretexting revealed that George Keyworth was the leak, Pattie let Tom know that she was going to have him removed from the board. Pattie says that then Tom was outraged, and that he thought all along they would just let the leak know they found him out and make him promise to never do it again. Keyworth was a friend of Tom Perkins, and in retaliation of Dunn’s removal of Keyworth from the board, Perkins created a massive PR campaign about the spying/pretexting and brought it to the authorities, spinning it against Dunn just as a big FU. Perkins version: he quit the board as soon as he learned that Dunn had authorized spying and pretexting.
  5. She shrugged her shoulders when asked by Lesley Stahl why it was that HP had to settle with Keyworth, after they removed him from the board. She said she didn’t know why. Certainly not because settling is something you do with someone you don’t want to sue your company for illegally violating their privacy, right Pattie?

Dunn thinks it’s all about her, Perkins is out to get her, spinning it against her. She takes no responsibility for acting in a way which is clearly unethical and likely illegal (even if it was vetted by HP’s legal department). She bears all the hallmarks of a bureaucrat, an executive’s executive who rose not by adding value or by being a leader of men, but by protecting herself, controlling her battlefields and using poltical tactics. She had the same look on her face as one of the people featured on the To Catch a Predator Dateline series, steadfastly sticking to the idea that she had done nothing wrong in the face of explicit contradictory evidence.

After a commercial break, 60 Minutes trotted out Carly Fiorina, who has a fortuitously-timed book coming out on Tuesday. Carly is well known as the CEO who was like the pilot of the Hindenburg, making HPQ stock soar from the the 60’s to below 20 and making accretive acquisitions (e.g. Compaq) go smoothly. She claims she was blindsided by her firing. Given that she did such an incredible job at the helm of HPQ, it was very odd that HPQ stock bumped 10% on the news of her firing and that HPQ has done very well after changing course from her corporate direction.

Carly on her firing:

“There were no improprieties. I can only conclude it was personal in some way.”

Here is an article from the day she was fired titled Fiorina out, HP stock soars
.

“The stock is up a bit on the fact that nobody liked Carly’s leadership all that much,” said Robert Cihra, an analyst with Fulcrum Global Partners. “The Street had lost all faith in her and the market’s hope is that anyone will be better.”

When faced with a resume of illegal and unethical acts, Pattie believed the opposite to be true. When faced with a resume of ineffective leadership, poor stock performance and questionable corporate direction, Carly maintained that the opposite is true. At no point during either interview did either woman give a hint that they were operating a reality based existence. Both women are referred to as “strong” but if you watched them, their strength was their craziness that allowed them to function completely adrift from the the ship of reality.


Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Anyone who even thinks about deserting this mission will be cut up into 198 pieces. Those pieces will be stamped on until what is left can be used only to paint walls. Whoever takes one grain of corn or one drop of water… more than his ration, will be locked up for 155 years. If I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees… then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the wrath of god. The earth I pass will see me and tremble. But whoever follows me and the river, will win untold riches. But whoever deserts…

Don Lope de Aguirre, but also possibly the mission statement for Pirate Capital

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing


Molybdenum, the Sasquatch Metal

Molybdenum has been making the rounds as an alleged additive for making steel alloys and as a catalyst in the production of certain petrochemical products. As a metal with consumable uses, limited substitutes and a limited supply, it tends to have inelastic demand….allegedly.

I allege that much like the sasquatch, molybdenum does not, in fact, even exist.

Points Which Point to the Non-Existence of Molybdenum:

  • Has anyone ever touched molybdenum? Or seen it? I’ve seen or touched platinum, silver, gold and most metals, except uranium which I am willing to take on faith. I’ve never met anyone who had a molybdenum cufflink or a a ring with a molybdenum setting.
  • Molyjhkldjaslkdjaslkd. Not a name you would give to a real substance, much less a metal. It seems like an inside joke about Molly B’s Denim. Who is this Molly B? And where are her denim dungarees?
  • The price has gone up from $2 per pound up to over $40 in just a few years (currently in the mid-20’s). It is clear as to why the market hasn’t corrected itself — it is difficult to bring on formerly uneconomic molybdenum mines or copper mining trailing operations (where molybdenum can allegedly be found) when molybdenum does not actually exist.

The Sasquatch of MetalsThe Molybdenum of Creatures

Recommendation: Per Mr. Juggles Investing Commandment 5b you must verify that that which you think exists in an investment, actually exists. The non-existence of molybdenum could prove a crushing blow to stocks of firms who allegedly mine the possibly fictional metal.


Valuations Increasing on Attractive Farm Assets

Farm animal assets valuations should rise on news of new alternative uses, specifically in the Norwegian and Danish markets:

The Norwegian Food Safety Authority’s section chief for animal welfare, Torunn Knævelsrud, could not rule out that such a bordello could be legal here as well.

“It is difficult to say yes or no,” Knævelsrud told Aftenposten.no.

As long as basics like shelter, feed and care are in place, and injury or suffering to the animal can not be documented, there are no other ways to attack an animal bordello under existing Norwegian law.

A farmer who sells animal sex said he is extremely surprised that foreigners are ready to travel so far for it.

“But the clients tell us that it is much simpler to buy animal sex in Denmark than in their own country,” a horse owner from Nord-Jylland told the newspaper.

We will leave it to you to read the rest of the article. Suffice to say that if you own an attractive animal, you have definitely experienced asset appreciation from the opening of new end markets. This only strengthens our Camels, the Next Big Thing thesis, especially for camels with all the right curves.

Hello sailor


My Privates’ Insurance

So I was thinking over the weekend, what’s most important to me? I decided it’s my private parts. As I thought about these valuable assets I started thinking about how reckless I am with them. I realized I should either be more careful or take out an enormous insurance policy on them. I had heard of this being done before. I had also heard Lloyd’s of London was the place that could help me so I rung them up.

Lloyd’s operator: Hello, Lloyd’s of London how may I direct your call?

Me: Hi, I’d like to insure my privates.

Ll: Excuse me?

Me: My John Thomas. My knob. And my bits too.

Ll: What???

Me: My privates, I’d like to insure them, they are very valuable to me.

Ll: Sir, we can’t insure your privates unless they are income generating. They have to be valuable to someone else for us to insure them.

Me: Why? They’re valuable to my girlfriend.

Ll: It’s because of moral hazard, sir.

Me: Moral hazard? That’s a big word for a switch board operator.

Ll: Two words. We have to prove that you have an incentive not to let the goods be damaged.

Me: I’ll show you my incentive.

Ll: Are you hitting on me?

Me: Maybe. Depends on what you look like. What do you look like? And does Lloyd’s do field apprasials for their policies?

Ll: Cheers.

*CLICK*

I am naked long my privates and am looking to hedge out my exposure in the open market. Any ideas on how to do so would be greatly appreciated.


Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

What happened to [the Amaranth hedge fund] shows that when you’re really right, you always overstay the position and that’s when you get murdered. It’s better not to be right so much.

-Peter Bernstein, author of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing


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