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 …

Via blog.xplana.com:

Personally, I think this is a little conservative… though kids and professors on campuses would probably know more about how motivated professors are to switch to digital textbooks. What I do know is that no one likes spending $100 for a textbook and my professors were always empathetic to this.
Obvious investment plays are Apple and Google stock. Both are probably fairly priced now. None of these companies mentioned in the article are public, but there may be more like them. Another plan would be to find a publisher who …

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:

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:

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.

I shorted down a burning ring of fire
I went down down down
And the flames went higher

Hey everyone,

We are seeing a nice bounce in the markets this morning. The S&P500 is at 1485 as I write this(!!!). If you look at the 5 day chart, you will see this could take us back to part way through the crash we saw last week. The market is saved!

To me, this feels like a dead cat bounce - one formed by a pump in liquidity and a jump in premarket futures.

We are told time and time again that you can’t predict the market. And time and time again people try to predict the market. Many model the market using stochastic principles, and use it to predict the market. I find this completely amusing (stochastics is about multiple destinys based on a single context.)
TraderFeed a favorite blog of mine had the following to say (Are We Making a Bottom).
There is both the sense that we could go much lower in a washout (a “Black Monday” scenario) and that we could be seeing …

Well, I was right (see Wednesday’s post). That at least feels good. However, I thought the market would make a decent recovery. I had raised my limit price to $51.20 (from $50.20) yesterday, realising the recovery was probably not going to be as strong as I wished.

However, when I logged on tonight (it’s after midnight in Australia), SDS had already moved up to $53, and as I watched it shot towards $54. I got out the calculator, changed the volume and bought in just as it crossed $54. As I hit refresh now, it is in the mid $54s, heading back down.