The folks behind the new documentary Stock Shock: The Short Selling of the American Dream asked me to share the trailer with our readers. This would be an interesting movie for any of you who at some point owned shares in Sirius (SIRI) or XM (XMSR) Satalite Radio.

(trailer and more after the fold)

We received an email from Melissa Minkalis of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC). They are offering a Free DVD about avoiding foreclosure.

I did not order the DVD or know much more about it. I did quickly verify that the NFCC is a legit organization and doesn’t seem to be simply harvesting contact info, etc.

(more info from the email we received after the fold)

This is a paid review…
I haven’t been doing many paid reviews lately, but have a couple extra minutes and could use the $15 (or so?) for InvestorGeeks and this site looks pretty cool anway.

Wall Street Survivor is a free fantasy stock market game. You’ve probably seen many of these around. CNBC does a pretty popular one. Like the CNBC one, this game comes along with prizes you can win. Currently there is a contest to win $100k.
Now, these contests I imagine are extremely hard to win. And you basically …

Daily Kos is a left-wing political blog, but they have a pretty good writeup of what is happening with these “credit swaps” and AIG, etc.
It reminded me of reading about mortgage-backed securities about this time last year, just as the shit was hitting the fan in the mortgage market. Now I’m learning about credit default swaps and credit-linked notes.
My questions is: what obscure trading vehicle am I going to be reading about next year? What are the other iffy, confusing, opaque, speculative trades that are going on out there?

At $35, Google Finance puts the Garmin PE at ~8.5. That’s just too low for a company with 25% annual growth.

I made some money riding this stock from about $45 to $80. I kicked myself for not holding it to $120. I bought some up there and was quickly stopped out for a small loss. And now I’m glad I haven’t owned it for a while and have a chance to back up the truck.

Before I do so, I wonder if anyone out there can tell me what I’m missing. Here are some reasons for the low GRMN price I’m reading on message boards and blogs:

On March 23, Mike from UglyChart.com announced that he had “Absolute proof that the Efficient Market Hypothesis is incorrect, that Technical Analysis works, and that I wasted too much time on inspectd.com“.

Here’s a bit of a time line before and since:

March 20, 2008: Inspectd.com is listed in the “links for” post at UglyChart.com.

March 21, 2008: TechCrunch posts an article about a new “Time Waster” called Inspectd.com, and the rest of us notice this site that “has been around for a while”.

March 22, 2008: Ugly posts How to turn $100,000 into $6 Billion+ on inspectd.com, including this video:

[video after the break]

I originally posted this on the Google Finance discussion boards and then though I’d fix it up a bit before posting… but well anyway…

I was bearish on Google before the last earnings call.

I felt that Google would miss some numbers due to recent changes
they’ve made in the “clickable area” of their ads and their PageRank
formula. Both changes were good long term (since they’ll help combat
click fraud and spammy publishers - and generally increase the quality
of the ads). But the changes came with some immediate cost to the
bottom line in the short term.

I am now bullish on Google for the same reasons. Or really because (1)
it wasn’t that bad and (2) the long term is already here.

I’m speaking on a panel that will hopefully help some Bryn Mawr and Haverford students get jobs after college. You can see me 7pm EST on 3/18/2008 at this link:
http://www.haverford.edu/cdo/opportunities/events/

The PPI report came out today. While we are doing better than Zimbabwe, things are still a little scary.

I was having dinner with Chris last weekend, and I expressed concern over US inflation. He asked me what the numbers were, and I didn’t have them handy. Here are the numbers from a MarketWatch article on the January 2008 PPI report.

First, the most concerning number of all:

Year over year, the PPI is up 7.4% — the fastest pace since 1981. Also on an annualized basis, the core PPI is up 2.3%.

And here are some more details found at the end of the article: (after the jump)

That clever dude Ugly is at it again. With the Zimbabwean dollar reaching a record exchange rate of around $20 Million Zimbabwe Dollars per $1 US Dollar, Ugly has decided to repurpose a web classic by launching the Million Zimbabwean Dollar Homepage. I used it to launch an ad for my newly created MoneyShui.