Traderhood

Apple’s iterative approach to FRAND abuse is not for the faint of heart, but there’s no better alternative

Nicu — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:15:34 +0000

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We are flying through an area of turbulence. Please return to your seats and fasten your seatbelts.”

That’s what Captain Cook (Tim Cook, not James) could tell Apple’s stakeholders (employees, shareholders, customers, partners) in light of what happened in Germany on Friday and might reoccur soon: the temporary removal of products (or, in the future, product and service features) as a result of patent assertions by Android device makers in retaliation for Apple’s IP enforcement. He probably won’t make a statement like that, at least not until the going gets rougher and demands for explanations get louder.

…

Temporary sales bans appear more spectacular than they are impactful. Apple can always amend its proposals, and the latest one it made may already be sufficient under Orange-Book-Standard. If it’s not, we’ll see how far Apple will go — and the more concessions Apple makes, the more MMI has to watch out for antitrust blowback.

SOURCE:
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/02/apples-iterative-approach-to-frand.html

Was Google’s Disastrous January A Passing Storm Or Sign Of Things To Come?

Nicu — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:32:55 +0000

“Larry Page and Sergey Brin haven’t turned into Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis or anything, but Google just endured the worst month in the company’s history and nothing will get easier as rivals and the government take aim at what used to be such a delightful fuzzy little tech success story.”

SOURCE:
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-was-googles-disastrous-january-a-passing-storm-or-sign-of-things-to-com/

U.S. unemployment rate drops to 8.3% fro…

conshmillo — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:33:07 +0000

U.S. unemployment rate drops to 8.3% from 8.5%

To Gold Bugs…

conshmillo — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 04:59:26 +0000

Gold has make believe value. There is nothing inherently valuable about gold. It is decent conductor of electricity. That’s about it. Oil at the present time is probably more valuable than gold. But that will not last either. Only reason gold is considered valuable is because certain amount of people said so. That’s it. It used to have value in medevial times, because it was rare and hard to obrain. There a many other more valuable things in today’s society than gold. Things that have real value as opposed to perceived value. Real estate was considered at one point safe investment that will hold value. Tell it to people that bought properties in US 15 years ago. Gold has only Mickey Mouse value.

Facebook: 425 Million Mobile Users … And No Money?

Birra — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:14:59 +0000

This IPO seems like a bad bet. Perhaps they will follow Google and Amazon and create a hardware offering. Smart companies stick to their core competency.

“We currently do not show ads or directly generate any meaningful revenue from users accessing Facebook through our mobile products, but we believe that we may have potential future monetization opportunities such as the inclusion of sponsored stories in users’ mobile News Feeds.”

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399728,00.asp

“Think Profit.”

Nicu — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:53:44 +0000

“Amazon’s problem is that the “printers” they’re selling have crappy margins and the “ink” they’re selling has crappy margins. It’s starting to sound a little nuts.”

Btw, it seems AMZN’s $1 in earnings worths 10 times more than AAPL’s $1 in earnings (P/E 130.72 vs. 12.99). Guess what? Only one of them is growing.

SOURCE:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/is-this-nuts/

Contrarians vs. Trend Traders

conshmillo — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 03:35:28 +0000

We had an unbelievable bull run in last month and half. What was intersting about it is that it defied all the daily oscillators such as Stochastic and MACD. All of the signals that contrarians use were breached over and over. Stochastic oscillators just refused to come down after a six, seven bearish crossovers. And it still didn’t come down yet. I am talking mostly about market indicators such as DJIA and S&P500 futures. Previously the very same thing was happening with euro in opposite direction. Euro breached dozens of bullish stochastic crossovers and broke lower and lower and lower.
Contrarian technical traders is a breed of traders that just took old investing mantra buy low – sell high and increased the frequency of their trading. Instead of using 2 years/weekly charts they watch their oscillations on 3 months/daily, or for contrarian day traders intraday 15 or 5 min time frames.
Technical Trend Traders (turtles) do not pay so much attention to oscillators and crossovers. What they watch for most part is the price part of chart. They don’t base their entries on reversals as contrarians do, but rather on breakouts and continuation of trends. Where contrarian is usually placing his exit orders from long position, trend trader may be placing his buy orders combined with tight stops. Their trading philosophies just could’t be more different.
My feeling is that partial reason for longer bull runs and longer bear runs in a recent past is that there is an increasing number of trend traders participating in the markets. Because these trend traders tend to keep their positions open through the smaller counter trends their money are not leaving the market until something really earth shattering stops the trend.
I am not favoring either style as I believe both of them can be exploited successfully. Just being aware of the other clan can be beneficial to one’s preferred trading style. I am always more in favor of integral solutions where best is not black OR white but black AND white.

Amazon earnings down 57%!

conshmillo — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:37:32 +0000

Amazon earnings down 57%!

Apple added about $17 per share in cash …

Nicu — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:03:30 +0000

Apple added about $17 per share in cash last quarter and it’s trading only $14 higher than a week ago before earnings report and about $19 higher than Oct. high before earnings (+ $25.6 / share since then).

I can see the P/E (including cash) touching 10 by July earnings, oh my!

Dividend chatter starts……

GotWake — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 03:23:18 +0000

With close to $100 billion in the bank, it looks like everyone has started to beat the dividend/buyback drum. I think I would rather see a stock buyback than a dividend. It will be interesting how things will change without Steve.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/322266-what-an-apple-dividend-may-look-like