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Though she doesn’t tell me that, I can sense that my wife thinks I have a crush on Susan Boyle. I really don’t, seriously, I don’t. I just see the parallel between her experience on Britain’s Got Talent and value investing – low expectations (high margin of safety) and high performance lead to incredible returns. Of course, I am not sure how a nervous breakdown fits into this analogy, but oh well.
Rising Stock Market Lifts the Economy (Well, Kind of)
We often talk about how developments in the economy will impact the stock market, but we rarely discuss the other side of the relationship: how the market impacts the real economy.
It does, and the current run-up in stocks is very positive for the economy. Here's why:
Since banks use leverage, equity funds will allow banks to generate new loans in the multiple of 15-20 times of issued equity. Of course, banks have to be willing to lend and consumers/corporations will need to be willing to borrow, but that is a different story.
The stock market has great influence on their decisions. The recent stock market rise made them question how much downsizing they really want to do. In other words, in the absence of the stock market's positive influence, management possibly would have been laying off more people that they’ll be actually laying off.
Of course, some corporate managers simply realized the impact that the stock market has on decisions of other managers and adjusted their behavior accordingly.
These employed consumers are feeling better about their future and may actually start spending money. (Those who are unemployed are unlikely to change their behavior, as the job market is very tough.) I don’t think we should expect a repeat of the 2000-2007 spending spree, but maybe they’ll start putting butter on the popcorn when they watch DVDs at home.
George Soros has a name for what I described above; he calls it reflexivity. To me it just sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy – stocks go up because the economy is expected to do better, the economy does better because stocks went up. Of course, everything I said works the other direction, too.
Microsoft – What a Week
Call it the wishful thinking of the guy who owns Microsoft (MSFT) stock, but the news flow from the company this week was excellent:
“A motion sensing device that allows you to control video games and Xbox 360 menus with your body instead of a peripheral controller. Natal gives you voice and full-body motion control over your on-screen avatar using an RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone, and custom processor running proprietary software.” --PC World
Take a look at this incredible video.
Finally, in my article I said “it is believed by many that creativity retired with Bill Gates”. In response to that I received a lot of emails saying that Microsoft never had any creativity as it never had an original product. It just copied products created by someone else and then improved and marketed the hell out of them. It is very true, even the original DOS, the one that MSFT sold to IBM (IBM) was originally created by someone else. But copying requires creativity too, otherwise why would anybody buy your product instead of the competition. Think about WordPerfect for example. It was a dominant product at the time. MSFT created Word which is a replica of WordPerfect, but a much superior replica.
Payday loans
Many find the payday loan biz immoral, I believe there is nothing wrong with it. This cartoon explains it well.
Vitaliy Katsenelson
contrarianedge.com
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- Microsoft attached itself to the coat tails of IBM and has been a drag ever since; they survive on sheer size and inertia.. Without them there would be room for a better company to evolve.
- Wordperfect was a far superior wordprocessor to Word; Word only won out because of the above.
- Wordperfect survived for a long time since many people had to produce material and do things that IBM obsessed corporate bureaucrats were blind to; in my case it was mathematics.