A great post by Krugman, on his blog. This picture from Schiller tells pretty much everything you need to know to decide whether or not there is a US housing bubble. There is a bunch more on his blog – and if you get it then you’ll know why I am short EQR (Equity Residential) …
Category Archives: Investing
Is WordPress in play?
PaidContent seems to think so, though the price WordPress reportedly will command ($150-300m) seems cheap for what is the dominant platform for serious bloggers.
Capital One stumbles
Capital One has long had a reputation for employing smart people, and for being the best at segmenting the credit card market – targeting the right products at the right people. Well – not such good news, via the Washington Post: Capital One Financial of McLean posted its first quarterly loss ever, from the expense …
NZ’s Superannuation fund ranks highest
Good news, from the WSJ blog: Ted Truman, a former top Federal Reserve and Treasury staffer now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics think tank in Washington, with a scoreboard that ranks 32 sovereign wealth funds from 28 countries on 25 elements in four categories — structure, governance, transparency and accountability and behavior. His …
NZ is 18th least taxed country in OECD
what a difference a headline can make. Both Stuff and NZHerald went with “NZ is 13th most taxed country in the OECD”. The OECD has 30 members – something that took me – oh – about 15 seconds to find. Or you could look at the handy chart int he NZHerald article.
OSX Leopard: Top 10 reasons to upgrade or switch
The top ten cool new features in OSX Leopard – in ascending order. This is very much biased to my needs, so your mileage may vary. 1: Video Recording Use Photo Booth to make movie clips. Capture those precious moments and send them to your friends in an email message. You can even choose a …
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Xero offline is coming. Later.
Buried (ok not really buried, but towards the end) in a post by Rod Drury -is a hint that perhaps Xero will be available offline next year: Next year we’ll see the introduction of off-line functionality inside the standard browsers, so new scenarios start to open up. ….These clients will access the server based logic …
Where I’m working in Perth: KNR
Wondering where I am working in Perth? here is a site overview KNR GM Brett Swayn gave to analysts last month. The ‘Go for Green’ effort is referred to in the pack. The pack uses publicly available information, so is a bit scarce on details, but it’s the best I can share. Notice the focus …
Yale earns 28% return on endowment
Another stellar year for the Yale University endowment – a 28% return, following the previous year’s 22.9% return. That means the endowment will cover 37% of Yale’s net revenues next this year. Imagine that – Yale is on the path for the endowment one day to be able to cover all the costs for the …
10 ways NZ Government can help NZX
There are more tales of companies leaving the NZX, and the question is asked (via a workshop) whether the Government could step in. I really fail to see what more this Government would materially do to solve for a market that is simply too small. Not that there aren’t any possibilities, just that most would …
News Corp to go carbon neutral by 2010
Rupert Murdoch, via Samefacts Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can’t afford the risk of inaction… Today, I am announcing our intention to be carbon neutral, across all our businesses, by 2010… Our strategy everywhere is the same: first, reduce our use of energy as …
The future is Apple
From the Missouri school of Journalism, via Maurico’s linkblog
How to watch the rugby? with iPods of course
So many rugby games, so little time. So I, err, invested in some Apple products to help me manage my Rugby watching. They also helped to boost my AAPL shareholding value. That’s the new iPod Classic (160GB) on the left and the new iPod nano on the right, along with the not so new but …
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Losing Shirts and Shorts
I’m waiting for the tide to turn. My portfolio is growing very nicely this year – at least in USD terms. But I’ve recently got into options… I still steadily hold a collection of longs (EBAY, AAPL, SNE) and shorts (EQR, MSFT), but I moved to replacing some of those shorts with “just out of …
Air NZ and Telecom
I can’t help comparing Air NZ and Telecom. They face very similar circumstances, and yet are reacting very differently. Both are ex Government owned, now private. Air NZ is quasi-private of course. Both have a public-good role – to provide a network to the population.Both have a profit motive, and both benefit from quasi-monopoly position …
Lance Wiggs 