Here is a picture of inflation: two tickets to a lower box seat to see the San Francisco Giants, the first (on the left) from 1985 and the other from 2005.The price of the lower box seat ticket in 1985 is $8.00.The price of the lower box seat ticket in 2005 is $31.00.What changed? Granted, the Giants got a new ballpark, but the seats are not any bigger....
Monday, February 25, 2008
Build your house of bricks
cartoon copyright 2004 by Patrick Hardin. used by permission.We've written before about "deworsification" and included a scholarly graph in a previous post.Here is an all-time classic cartoon which drives the point home perhaps more effectively than any graph you will find in a business-school text.The wolf is advising the pigs against "putting it...
Friday, February 22, 2008
Must-read: Unleashing the Exaflood by Bret Swanson and George Gilder
Today's article, "Unleashing the 'Exaflood'" by Bret Swanson and George Gilder in the Wall Street Journal Opinion page is a must-read.Here is another article this week in the New York Times by someone who does not see what is coming, entitled "Web Movies Show Why DVDs Sell."George Gilder has seen it coming since at least 1990, when he wrote Life After...
Thursday, February 21, 2008
The Intermediary Trap
There is a new Taylor Frigon commentary available which ties together arguments we have made previously about the detrimental effects of the rise of a class of financial intermediaries between the investor and the money manager.In the diagram above, the investor (A) can be an institutional investor or an individual investor. He typically focuses on...
Monday, February 18, 2008
Washington's Birthday (Feb 22, 1732)
Today the markets are closed for the federal holiday marking Washington's Birthday. Since the elimination of a holiday on his actual birthdate in 1971 following congressional action in 1968 to move certain mid-week federal holidays to Mondays, the holiday (now on the third Monday in February) never falls later than February 21st .Although Congress...
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Where is the leadership?
Well, we have a new "stimulus package," signed into law today by President Bush, who called it "a booster shot for our economy."Washington leaders in the White House and in Congress have decided that they needed to do something, and the sooner the better, so they rushed legislation through that would give at least $300 and up to $600 to people who...
Monday, February 11, 2008
A paradigm shift in the way you get information
Here is a link to a story in today's Wall Street Journal by Esther Dyson entitled "The Coming Ad Revolution" which discusses major changes in advertising that have been on their way for years but which few people today even see coming.The article outlines an impending paradigm shift in the way people find information, which will have a tremendous...
Thursday, February 07, 2008
"I think we're actually talking ourselves into this slowdown . . . "
Yesterday's quarterly earnings call from Cisco Systems (CSCO) featured some insightful comments from CEO John Chambers. Most telling, perhaps, was his answer to the final question of the call, from a Bear Stearns analyst, which is contained in the clip above (total run time for that question and the answer is 2 minutes and 32 seconds).The analyst...
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
At least the rats and mice are happy
Here's a link to an incredible story on the recycling mandates imposed by the government on citizens in Sweden. The author (who is from Sweden) is currently studying for his PhD in Economics at the University of Missouri. While we don't know much about his other political and economic beliefs, his description of the exasperating system being forced...
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Don't Panic
Worth a read (perhaps worth two reads) is Brian Wesbury's recent Testimony to the House Budget Committee from one week ago toda...
Monday, February 04, 2008
Still not a recession
While we don't base our investment discipline on making short-term calls about the direction of the economy, we do pay close attention to what is taking place with economic data, and we continue to note an absence of data which would indicate that a current recession has begun or even is imminent.As we stated in blog posts in November (you can see...
Friday, February 01, 2008
So when do you fire a manager?
Our previous post demonstrated that research on institutional managers suggests that the same sort of performance-chasing manager-switching that hurts individual investors also hurts the performance of institutional investors.Based on the conclusion that this switching of managers has led to demonstrably unsatisfactory results, the natural questions...
