Category: Business
Alcoa earnings call points to weakness in China and Europe
Our macro takeaway from the call is that Europe is rolling over. No normal September bounce from the seasonally slow August. The company also notes what they see as a temporary slowdown in China. Alcoa missed and the stock got hammered in AH trading
Netflix does an about-face on DVD rentals
If you are a shareholder, should you be heartened by this about-face or alarmed? At Hewlett Packard for instance, when the board of directors fired Leo Apotheker, markets were not excited by seeing Meg Whitman in his seat even though the board was acknowledging mistakes and taking corrective action
China Notes from the Yum! Brands Earnings Call
Today’s Yum! Brands’ earnings conference call was dominated by China. Management talked a lot about commodity inflation running around 8 percent and 20% labor inflation, which they do not yet see abating. This doesn’t square with the August official inflation rate of 6.2 percent. A China hard landing scenario is now on traders’ radar and needs to be closely monitored. The stock closed down 2.7 percent
Apple: Can it stop the Amazon menace?
For Amazon, they are always willing to introduce loss leaders to build volume. I anticipate they will be successful here yet again. That is a wonderful story for their Kindle book sales, music sales, video sales and for their App store sales as well
Workers of the world, good night!
Rick Bookstaber argues that the rise of the super-elite is not a product of educational differences, but rather a result of the new capitalism which creates bigger winners, and does so much more quickly than in the capital-intensive capitalist era. Less capital is needed, it is applied for a shorter period before the results are realized, and because less capital is required, the entrepreneur captures more of the value of the enterprise. The result is an accentuation in the very wealthy
Scoble: Problems at Twitter and Facebook give Google+ opening
Influential tech blogger Robert Scoble talked to Bloomberg earlier in the week about the social media scene. The main message I took away is that he believes Google+ is a successful product for Google which could spell trouble for Facebook and Twitter
Google Plus Growth
Remember when I said that Google would get to scale “much,much faster than Facebook? Well this chart shows you this quite vividly. Wow!
Video: Larry Summers has the Winklevoss Twins’ number
I like how Summers’ prefaces it, noting his own notoriety for having a lot of swagger and then saying “Rarely, have I encountered such swagger, and I tried to respond in kind.”
Does LinkedIn take advantage of weak links?
Rick Bookstaber asks whether LinkedIn anything more than a resume warehouse? Is it simply a web-based Rolodex to make it easier to stay up with your business contacts? He doesn’t know the business model for the company, and doesn’t have any basis to comment on its long-term prospects, but in a somewhat stream-of-consciousness mode, he hears the “linked” in LinkedIn, and it starts him thinking about network theory, and the place LinkedIn most naturally fills in that space, which is to establish weak links
Wadhwa, Kedrosky On Technology ‘Bubble’
Technology guru Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University and Paul Kedrosky, a noted investor and analyst in the tech and finance space debated whether there is a bubble in technology shares on Friday. The interview is very good, so I am posting it here