I still own a few shares of GOOG. It’s felt overpriced recently, but I’m holding onto a minimal amount at all times and trying to add more over time. So I’m hoping the price drops a bunch so I can pick up more cheaply.
Do a search here for GOOG for my previous thoughts (years old), but I basically think that the world will continue to be drowned in data. Google’s goal to organize the world’s information and their expertise at scaling Internet apps puts them in a great position to …

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I’ve been reading Paul Krugman’s blog at NYTimes.com daily. Paul won a Nobel Prize for economics, so obviously a smart guy. He’s very thoughtful and always bases his opinions on research and current economic thought.
I basically defer to this guy on all economic issues like finance reform, the Greek Economy, the Euro, and the economics of Health Care Reform.
Make sure you also check out his larger “columns” which are featured elsewhere on the site. There is usually a list of current/popular ones in …

I am currently reading The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life in bits and pieces. It’s very entertaining.
This is not the type of book I would normally purchase or maybe even pick up at the library. I’m as interested in Warren Buffet as anybody, but this thing is pretty thick and daunting. Lucky for me, publishers send me books to review all the time. (And there just hoping for a link like the one above and maybe an Amazon review. I should give them that more often.) So …

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)

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 …

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.

Here’s my latest post about AMD.
Here’s an excerpt from a Frobes article:

“Intel’s latest desktop processors have faster clocks speeds and use
smaller transistors–45 nanometers as opposed to 65 nanometers–that
allow them to do more work with less power, _all else being equal_.
“We think that Intel is consolidating its performance lead in
desktops,” Wachovia analyst David Wong wrote in a note to investors
Monday.”
!! “All else being equalt.” All else is not equal. Sure, Intel can
brute force faster speeds with the working capital that they have, but
AMD is going to finesse it’s way …

Question: are we in a bull market or bear market? What if there was a third option? In Active Value Investing, Vitaliy Katsenelson makes a case that the current market is actual a "range-bound market" and then gives you the tools to take full advantage of the fact.

What is a Range Bound Market?
Range-bound markets are characterized by their roller-coaster-like volatility and the fact that despite this volatility, money invested in the beginning of the cycle will have close to 0% gains by the end of the cycle. In fact, range-bound markets are more common than bear markets. Katsenelson says:

"…if you look at the U.S. stock market during the entire twentieth century, most of the prolonged (greater than five years) markets were actually bull or range-bound markets. Prolonged bear (declining) markets happened in the past only when high market valuation was coupled with significant economic deterioration, similar to what was going on in Japan from the late 1980s through 2003 or so."

This chart from the book shows the past 107 years bull, bear, and range-bound markets as labeled by Kevin A. Turtle.

Kristin Friedersdorf, from WallSt.net, has posted her interview with me. Goto her Financial Blog Watch page over there to hear me talk about the history of InvestorGeeks and my lessons learned in trying to start a blog network.
I had a great (if brief) time on the phone with Kristin. Her other podcasts are worth a listen, so be sure to check them out too.

Sorry folks for not blogging sooner. I have some insights to the market, but right now I am recovering from a vicious bout of food poisoning. In the past six years I have had four food poisoning’s and three times it was from sandwiches that I bought while driving. You would think it is a problem specific to a store or country. Nope, not at all, I bought bad sandwich’s in Canada, Austria, and Germany. What was common between them all? It was the meat that went bad. (Go vegans …