Monday, February 17.
Markets are closed. I’ll be back tomorrow.
Friday, February 14. Valentine’s Day.
NLY, SGOL and WFM are bouncing back. Good strategy. When they get hit, nibble.
Should I do this short? Or better buy a put option? I am SO tempted to short TWC (Time Warner Cable).
If Comcast and TWC think they can get their merger approved by Washington they’re smoking something. (And I want some, too.)
Why would the government allow it — to join two biggies together to make the biggest, the hugest, a monster?
Why would any customer want it? Comcast service is horrible, even worse than Time Warner’s.
I listened to the executives yesterday on CNBC struggle to justify their merger. Reminded me of the interviews between the AOL and Time Warner executives when they announced that dumb merger. Oh yes, they’re going to get $1.5 billion of immediate savings — by closing call centers and firing people. Employees will love that. And customers will wait even longer for “service.”
+ “The combination of Time Warner Cable and Comcast creates an exciting opportunity for our company, for our customers, and for our shareholders,” said Comcast CEO Brian Roberts.
+ “This combination creates a company that delivers maximum value for our shareholders, enormous opportunities for our employees and a superior experience for our customers,” said Time Warner Cable CEO Robert Marcus.
I wonder where Apple figures in all this. It was negotiating with Time Warner to supply it cable boxes.
Meantime, neither Comcast nor Time Warner cable has been able to deliver the Internet speeds which Verizon FiOS delivers.:
I had a friend test his Time Warner service this morning. It was 15.24 Mbps down and a disgustingly miserable 1.08 Mbps up.
I had another friend test his Time Warner connection. It was slightly better but still miserable compared with FiOS:
Amazon is after world retail domination. It sacrifices earnings for growth. Hence its share price bears no relation to financials, but to “buzz.” Lately it’s lost a little and friends are talking about picking some up at these depressed levels. (I picked up some Whole Foods yesterday — as I suggested in the coulm yesterday– and it’s bounced back a little already.)
Which brings me to a fascinating long New Yorker piece this week on the company. Excerpts:
+ Sargent said that Bezos’s ambition was apparent to him from the beginning—“My God, he drives hard.” But he couldn’t see Bezos’s master plan “for shit.” “He was already going to be the Everything Store,” Sargent said when we met in his trapezoidal office, in the narrow wedge of the Flatiron Building. “I thought he was just a bookstore, stupid me. Books were going to be the way to get the names and the data. Books were his customer-acquisition strategy.” As long as Amazon kept growing like mad, investors would pour in money and Wall Street wouldn’t pay much attention to profits. (The company didn’t have a profitable quarter until 2001, and still struggles to stay in the black.)
+ Amazon executives considered publishing people “antediluvian losers with rotary phones and inventory systems designed in 1968 and warehouses full of crap.” Publishers kept no data on customers, making their bets on books a matter of instinct rather than metrics. They were full of inefficiences, starting with overpriced Manhattan offices. There was “a general feeling that the New York publishing business was just this cloistered, Gilded Age antique just barely getting by in a sort of Colonial Williamsburg of commerce, but when Amazon waded into this they would show publishing how it was done.”
+ The combination of ceaseless innovation and low-wage drudgery makes Amazon the epitome of a successful New Economy company. It’s hiring as fast as it can—nearly thirty thousand employees last year. But its brand of creative destruction might be killing more jobs than it makes. According to a recent study of U.S. Census data by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, in Washington, brick-and-mortar retailers employ forty-seven people for every ten million dollars in revenue earned; Amazon employs fourteen.
Please read the entire New Yorker article on Amazon. It’s fascinating. Click here. I don’t presently own any shares in Amazon.
The Second Time:
+ Don’t buy much the first time. When they deliver, they’ll enclose a 15% coupon and free shipping on your next order.
+ It takes two hours to fix it the first time. Only two minutes the second time.
I hate MR-16s — Part 2. This is an MR-16 light bulb.
It’s a piece of drek. After spending an hour fiddling to get an MR-16 track light fixture working yesterday, I awake this morning to find one of the other MR-16s blown.
Today, up on the ladder. More fiddling. More coaxing. Yuch.
Favorite New Yorker Valentine’s Day cartoons.
A Jewish Valentine. How to wave a towel.
No matter what this husband did in bed; his wife never achieved an orgasm… so they decide to consult their Rabbi.
The Rabbi listens to their story, strokes his beard, and makes the following suggestion: ‘Hire a strapping young man. While the two of you are making love, have the young man wave a towel over you.’
That will help your wife fantasize and should bring on an orgasm.
So they go home and follow the Rabbi’s advice. They hire a handsome young man and he waves a towel over them as they make love. It does not help and the wife is still unsatisfied.
Perplexed, they go back to the Rabbi.
‘Okay,’ he says to the husband, ‘Try it reversed. Have the young man make love to your wife and you wave the towel over them.’
Once again, they follow the Rabbi’s advice. They go home and hire the same strapping young man.
The young man gets into bed with the wife and the husband waves the towel.
The young man gets to work with great enthusiasm and soon the woman has an enormous, room shaking, ear-splitting screaming orgasm.
The husband smiles, looks at the young man and says to him triumphantly,
‘See that, you schmuck? THAT’S how you wave a towel!
Harry Newton is ecstatic. Susan’s cousin been doing extensive research into the family history has discovered that Susan’s grandfather’s grandfather who migrated from Connecticut to Australia was married to a Cherokee Indian woman, named Olive Branch. When I die, Susan will change her name to Sitting Shiva. Look it up on Wikipedia.
The best place to begin your own search for your fun relatives is on Ancestry.com. Maybe Olive Branch will help Eleanor get into the college of her choice? She certainly looks intelligent enough to get into MIT (not Harvard).
Eleanor last weekend photographed and assessed by a totally objective (and smitten) grandfather, using a Nikon D7100 (a gorgeous, but heavy piece of equipment). You must use a DSLR, like the D7100, to shoot babies. Point and shoot cameras (even my beloved Canon G16) have too much shutter lag. A DSLR is typically instantaneous.
Harry-I know you like NLY a lot-
Is it a coincidence two high-level executives and a longtime board member have decided to leave Annaly Capital Management (NYSE: NLY ) or is there something amiss at the nation’s largest mortgage real estate investment trust?
That’s the question shareholders in the high-yielding mREIT are facing after anannouncement on Thursday that Annaly’s chief operating officer James Fortescue and its co-chief investment officer Kristopher Konrad have submitted their resignations.
These notices come less than two weeks after longtime director, John Lambiase, declined to stand for reelection after serving on the board for 17 years. In addition to joining Annaly in its first few years of existence, Lambiase is also the father of Matthew Lambiase, the chief executive officer of Chimera Investment Corporation (NYSE: CIM ) , a publicly traded portfolio company of Annaly that’s had a string of problems over the past few years.
Yuch. Sounds ominous. Does anyone have any background on what’s happening at Annaly?
Avoid Annaly.
Fortunately we are served by COX, here in AZ, from whom I get internet service very successfully…TV service from DishNet is excellent. I am able to use a single DishNet subscription both at our home in AZ and our summer cottage in Nova Scotia…can’t do that with cable!
Cox was recently voted one of the ten most hated companies in the U.S. With good reason. It’s been a nightmare to deal with. Bait & switch pricing options, constant rate increases, subpar service, etc.
“+ Amazon executives considered publishing people “antediluvian losers with rotary phones and inventory systems designed in 1968 and warehouses full of crap.” (Harry Newton excepted) Rolling on the floor laughing in the wisdom of those words. They might have added, “inbred”. Hell, they all work within two blocks of each other, they lunch at adjoining tables, they go to the same cloistered carnival in Germany… they form the worst kind of clique…
Oh, what a tangled web the world wide web will be……..first, Verizon castrates the FCC by prevailing in court and now we have these two highly disliked by their own customers “cable” companies trying to unite their operations and be a bigger pain in every consumer’s butt.
You have to hand it to them for seeing the future clearly but, as is usually the case, innovation will certainly suffer and the so called “net neutrality” will be dead on arrival, if it ever arrives at all. Too bad for great innovators like Netfix, who will certainly feel the pain even more than consumers will.
I guess we all better get ready to pay-to-play because there aren’t a whole of politicians who have the spine to resist the almighty dollar and change their “bought & paid for” status.
Just imagine having to make the decision whether or not you want to pay for content on the internet just like you do on cable…..”This content was brought to you by Harry Newton.”
It appears the possibility of a Comcast & TW hookup is the influence NBC plays. The “central planners” in the White House must see the value of expanding the influence of the left leaning network called NBC, MSNBC, etc. The Obama machine leadership is made up of very clever people!