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 …

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 wanted to provide a counterpoint to some recent articles posted on Investorgeeks that have suggested commodities are not a good place to invest. More specifically, that the commodities boom is a high risk area of investing and potentially a giant bubble.

I have a different opinion. I personally feel that investing in commodities is the only way to ensure in the coming years that your portfolio is not decimated by hyper inflation.

The Present State of the US Economy

Before we discuss this further, we need to do a quick summary of the present state of the US (world) economy:

Google will miss expected earnings numbers tomorrow (IMO). There are two recent “shoot your own foot” actions from Google that may affect their short term performance. Overall, I agree with the changes, but I wouldn’t be swinging into earnings tomorrow.

(1) Google changed the “hit area” of their AdSense ads. Before the entire ad area was clickable. Now just the heading and url are.

There are mixed reports on whether or not this is affecting overall click through rates (CTR) and earnings. On InvestorGeeks, our CTR went from 2-2.25% in September and October to 1.25-1.5% in December and January. Our overall earnings are down 40%.

Most of Google’s revenue comes from their own search page which likely had smaller drops (if at all). But if other sites have had slowdowns like we have, this would eat into Googles earnings growth.

In the long run I think this is a good move, as it will cut down on fraud… eventually leading to more advertisers and higher ad rates. In the shot term, however, folks are taking a hit.

(read on for reason #2)

With China’s GDP growth rate reaching over 8% over the past 5 years, China still may be in it for another year. China looks good for the long run, but their short run bubble may be a risky investment. With the Olympics coming and FDI in 2007 reaching 67.3 billion dollars, the highest in the world, China may have risk of a slow down. Problems include their 1.5 trillion USD forex reserve and their appreciating currency which are at the forefront of news.

Expectations have been rising faster then…

Here is an email exchange I had with my step father. Note: my mother works as a Bed Bath and Beyond store manager.

Original email back in November:

BBBY is down to 29.5 your thoughts?
-Kevin (11/26/2007)

And then my response:

As we all know there has recently been pressure on China to appreciate their currency because of the trade imbalances seen in Europe and America. As well, other East Asian countries are running into problems with their markets because China’s currency is doing so much better then theirs. Here is a quick run down of the problems, which can help you to analyze the situation.

The biggest problem is that China’s currency is undervalued by as much as what some people think is up to 35%…