California...

Its just home. I can't say it any other way...

On my first full day in CA... my first visit to SD ever... my first day at work... I drove home down the Pacific Coast Highway 101.

I could feel the dense salt-water air in my lungs and see the sun bouncing off the ocean as it set to my right. I thought about everything I had seen and lived through before then and knew I was never going back.

Home Improvements

Two types of homes really. Physical and virtual. First, some changes to the MSpace page. For a while you couldn't message me, or view the photos, etc. Some of that has been fixed so it's a little more YourSpace than just MySpace. However, I wanted to write where ever the hell I wanted to write, so I'm importing my blog instead of keeping it on MSpace. Anyway, let me know what you think. I'll be turning the comments back on soon so...

On the flip side, Morgan and I bought a new couch last week. It's soooo comfy, you melt into it. It's also way bigger than the junker we threw out. I'm still confused as to where the junker went though. We put it in the alley by the dumpster and poof, no more couch. I like it when things work out. So now we have a huge couch to be lazy on and it's great. We even had to move the room around it was so big. The delivery guys even made me sign a damage waiver because they had to swing the sofa over the balcony railing to get it inside. Alas, not a scratch.

Why I love Ford

Yes, that Ford. The same ford that made your daddy's truck The same Ford that broke down on you in college. FORD.

I watched Ford (F) dive all the way to $6.19 a share and thought; it can't go any further! Then I waited just a little bit longer, because its still Ford... Just about that time Bill Ford stepped down from CEO and named Alan Mulally. That meant two things; One, Bill Ford knew when to believe in something greater than him. Two, he named Alan Mulally! The same Alan Mulally that brought the Boeing phoenix from the fire post 9/11. Then I went all in on Ford. I know what you're thinking. Ford?

Sure! Ford has been around for more than 100 years. They're like GE, AT&T and they are definitely not going anywhere. Well, maybe they get bought but I don't think Uncle Sam would let it happen. America would riot in the streets as we realized our inferiority. Since that fateful purchase of America's dying son, the stock has risen 23%. However, there was still another concern. Ford was and is bleeding money and they had to release earnings. Yesterday on October 24, Ford reported a $5.8B loss for the quarter. They LOST $5.8 BILLION in three months! This loss equates to $3.00 a share. Well if your shares are only worth $6-9 it doesn't seem like you have far to fall. Now two days after recording this massive loss, how did the investors react? UP 5%! Welcome to America.

Fun with Numbers – The billions behind immigrant remittances…

I recently read a statistic that both shocked and intrigued me.

“According to the report by the Inter-American Development Bank, called "Sending Home Money: Leveraging the Development Impact of Remittances," 12.6 million Latin American immigrants in the United States will send about $45 billion to their home countries this year.”

Now let’s put that into perspective. $45B is enough to power the Iraq war machine for a solid 8 and half months. However, $45B is still only one sixth of what middle-America spent at Wal-Mart last year. After all, America needs their fix for cheap crap!

Back to the point, there are approximately twelve million illegal immigrants. So imagine for a moment if illegal immigrants were the only group remitting to their families. So now it would seem that the immigrants many politicians resent so much are willing to do more to keep their families on the “other side of the fence” than the US government.

Now in the midst of the “war on the American middle class”, 12.6 million immigrants are packing back $3750 a year to buy businesses and land. In the mean time the average American has been so busy burying themselves in financed debt, $8,562 per American family, many are now choosing between mortgage, medicine, food or gas. So I ask you, how much money did you
save last year?

Time to buy Tech?

Well friends, the rally is here. All those safe investments like property, oil and defensive moves have/are bombing. Even better, the DOW closed at a record high again today.

So what's going on? What's changed since the major downturn in May? Gas, Gas, Gas. I'm sure you felt the heat filling up that Hummer of yours or perhaps you made the Prius move? Well my friend, it was worse than you thought. As oil got driven higher by the speculators and hedge boys the price of everything went up. EVERYTHING, because everything you buy had to be shipped to you, your town, your local five and dime, the factories that made it all. Right down the line every link in supply chain added costs and made you, the consumer, eat the difference.

Then an amazing thing happened, Wall Street look around, realized oil was overvalued and the rest is music to your gas-guzzling ears. Remember those days when every bit of bad news drove oil up? Well this week OPEC got worried they would only make a few trillion and decided to cut oil production. What did Wall Street do? Shrug and drop the price another dollar. Oil is currently hovering around $58 and word on the street says it will make it down to $56. So what are you going to do with your extra cash? The better question is what will the bulls and the bears do with their extra cash. That's right, TECH!

Tech is back hard and gaining momentum. Don't take my word for it though. The NASDAQ is up 16% over three months. Over that same period
Apple (AAPL) up 48%
Cisco (CSCO) up 36%
Microsoft (MSFT) up 27%
Oracle (ORCL) up 33%
Motorola (MOT) up 37%

Do I need to go on? OK, OK, hindsight is always 20-20. So check back in three months after the 4th Quarter earnings reports come out and then let me know how my vision is. In the mean time, I know where my money will be...TECH!!!

Google buys YouTube. Deal or No Deal?

We all thought it was coming, but when? Well...today. Google finally shelled out $1.6B in stock for the lowly video sharing site. So if any of you have an idea for a company that will lose a few hundred thousand dollars a month, give me a call. Maybe we can get something rolling and get bought out for a billion or so.

Most investors and analysts agree that Google is a fairly intelligent and forward thinking company, especially compared to it's peers (Yahoo!, Microsoft). So after today's news many analysts are forced evaluate the wisdom of Google's decisions, even if they don't coincide with their own. Through this evaluation they and we are now seeing a new era of virtual (and viral) acquisitions whereby there is no real product. There's not even a digital product like software. No paid memberships; nothing.

So now you're asking yourself..."What the hell did Google they buy for $1.6B? What did News Corp buy (MySpace) for $580M?"

They bought an opportunity, a demographic, the ability to advertise to 100 million people for about $16 dollars and $5.80 apiece, respectively. Of course with any opportunity there is ample room for success and failure, lemons or lemonade. So if you're Google and you have this great new toy, what do you advertise? Easy, NOTHING and EVERYTHING. You resell. Because if you're Google you have access to one of the largest pools of private advertisers (AdWords) in the world. A single click through AdWords can be worth a few pennies or up to $70 for the most valuable terms. So while consumers continue to tune out the TV and cancel their paper subscriptions and advertisers continue to scratch their heads trying to figure out how to advertise to the online demographics, Google decided to shoot first, ask questions last and buy the whole demographic.

So how well will it work out? Probably pretty good. After all if you're a company worth $100B, what's a couple billion between friends? As of this writing Google's stock rose $8.50 or 2% intraday on the news of the acquisition. For those of you without a calculator handy, that means Google's market cap rose two billion dollars and they netted $400M on the little video sharing site that could. Not bad for a days work.