Showing posts with label Wall Street. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wall Street. Show all posts

Saturday, August 04, 2012

Slow Investing, Remote Investing


Remote is not so remote. You can get real time, deep coverage, in text, photo and video formats, from any corner of the world. There is real time cheap to free communication.

The so called First World collapsed a few years back because it did not invest its surplus trillions into Third World infrastructure that give guaranteed 10% annualized returns.

Instead those surplus trillions were used to torpedo the basic financial infrastructure in the First World. Shady real estate investments that collapsed like a house of cards.

Real estate is thought of as a safe investment. The house is still there no matter what happens. That is the thinking. What if the house is there but it lost 80% of its value? Is the house still there? If you think it is still there, I call it gold standard thinking. Getting rid of the gold standard was a good thing. Not all people, including some people in Congress, agree.

Bypassing Wall Street

How can Wall Street do the damage it has done and still not be taken over by a whole new generation of finance startups? It is like if Blogger were to refuse to let you migrate all your content to Wordpress. In a more of a market economy you should be able to move your money from one bank to the next in a flash.

A globalized world does not quite jive with the nation state moat. And damage happens.

There is global infrastructure, and there is global microfinance.


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Thursday, August 02, 2012

Zynga Getting Hammered


Its IPO has not been good for Zynga, nor for Facebook. They have been hammered. Not long back Fred Wilson on the East Coast and John Doerr on the West Coast talked of Zynga as the fastest growing company they ever had in their portfolios. I guess there are ups and downs. Right now happens to be a down time. It is not that Zynga's user base has shrunk dramatically. This is more a case of Wall Street looking at cold, hard cash. If you don't have it, you don't have it.

Just like Facebook Zynga is also struggling with mobile.

Zynga COO Said To Lose Product Oversight As Growth Slows
Pincus embarked on the overhaul in early July, at the close of a quarter marked by slowing sales growth and a drop in demand for virtual goods. Schappert, lured away last year from Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) with a pay package worth $42.8 million, has lost support within the company and taken some of the blame for its underperformance ..... “The place is in utter meltdown mode” .... The stock has dropped 72 percent since the market debut. The decline accelerated last week after Zynga reported sales and profit that missed analysts’ predictions. ..... The reorganization was aimed in part at making mobile- software development more of a priority across Zynga

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Friday, July 27, 2012

Anand Shimpi

12 million unique visitors per month is a lot.

Far from Silicon Valley, tech industry finds an oracle
His website, AnandTech.com ..... At age 30, Shimpi is courted by technology executives and followed by Wall Street analysts keen to hear his well-informed product views. He briefs Intel executives, dines with Asian PC executives and commands a loyal following of tech enthusiasts, with AnandTech.com drawing 12 million unique visitors per month. ...... His workbench at his home in Raleigh is cluttered with high-end storage drives, laptops and recently released tablets, one of them playing a Harry Potter movie in an endless loop. A storage room is filled with hundreds of other products shipped to him over the years, and he says UPS drops more gear off almost every day. ..... benchmark reviews, focusing strictly on performance data ..... Shimpi's data, painstakingly collected using proprietary tests he has developed over the years. .... "We have known Anand for a long time," Jonney Shih, chairman of the big Taiwanese computer-maker Asus .... the chips, touch screens and batteries in the latest tablets and smarpthones ...... a large, specialized audience of cutting edge techies ...... The Harry Potter movie playing over and over on a Google Nexus 7 tablet was part of a test to document its battery life. ..... carries out measurements several times for each device, with the results feeding spreadsheets with thousands of data points ..... Chip executives .. ship them samples of their new products, often ahead of their release ...... frequent travels .... standard tests established over a decade ago .... Soon after his start in high school building PCs for students and faculty at Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh, where his father taught computer science, Shimpi created a website and started writing about components. He quickly gained a following with a rapidly growing niche of PC enthusiasts. .... deliberately maintains a distance between his personal life and the tech world, even if that means frequent, long flights to Silicon Valley to visit chip execs. .... He takes phone calls from investors who pay him for his advice and spends more and more time hunkered down with design engineers. But Shimpi says his main focus will remain AnandTech's readers - the sort of tech fans who spend hours reading up on new products before deciding which to buy.


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Facebook At $25: This Is Not A Glitch

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
Despite hitting its earning projections, Facebook stock falls to a new low at $25
UPDATE: Currently, the stock sits at $24.43, down 9% in after hours trading.
LinkedIn's earnings have doubled every quarter since it went IPO, and so its lofty valuation has held ground. Facebook's IPO was a nosedive, and part of it was blamed on some kind of a technical glitch, but that could not have been the full story.

For the size of its user base Facebook has lukewarm revenues, and there are no plans/signs of robust growth there. The revenue trajectory feels like a plateau, and hence the hammering.

This is what I said on May 23.

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Thursday, July 26, 2012

Facebook's Money Problem

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
Facebook's Earnings Report Underscores Its Challenges
the decelerating growth of its advertising business, which accounted for 85 percent of its $3.7 billion in revenue ..... in the last quarter, Facebook got $1.28 in revenue from each of its users, which is barely changed from the same time last year. .... the average revenue per user in the U.S. and Canada jumped to $3.20 from $2.84 a year ago
There is no relationship at Facebook between user growth and revenue growth. And that seems to be the problem. Long term I am not worried. There are several ways to monetize Facebook. Facebook has to figure out Facebook-unique ways to make money.
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