• Sign of a Top?
    Posted by on June 4th, 2007 at 8:32 am

    There’s a shortage of butlers.
    Egad! I’ll have to pour my own sherry. No!

  • News from Last Week
    Posted by on June 4th, 2007 at 8:07 am

    I forgot to mention this last week, but one of our Buy List stocks, Fiserv (FISV), rose nearly 10% in last week’s trading.
    The company agreed to sell its Fiserv Investment Support Services business in two separate transactions. The stock was also upgraded by Cowen & Co. Shares of FISV are up 12.32% this year.
    Also, Donaldson (DCI) got hit despite a good earnings report. I’m still trying to figure this one out. At one point on Wednesday, DCI was down 9%.
    Earnings came in at 49 cents a share, four cents ahead of estimates. Sales came in at $484 million which also Wall Street’s estimate of $462 million. The company sees full-year EPS of $1.73 to $1.80.

  • Job Openings at the Federal Reserve
    Posted by on June 4th, 2007 at 7:35 am

    If you’re in the job market, here are the openings at the Federal Reserve Board. They’re looking for everything from economists to IT folks and lawyers, even law enforcement.
    Also, here’s the Web site of Renaissance Technologies. Kinda plain. I guess the best sign of being big and powerful is not caring what your Web site looks like.

  • “One of the most interesting and unnoticed developments of recent decades has been the tendency of big enterprise to socialize itself”
    Posted by on June 3rd, 2007 at 1:27 am

    Nick Schulz writes on “The Greening of Capitalism.” He finds this quote from John Maynard Keynes:

    A point arrives in the growth of a big institution…at which the owners of the capital, i.e. the shareholders, are almost entirely dissociated from the management, with the result that the direct personal interest of the latter in the making of great profit becomes quite secondary. When this stage is reached, the general stability and reputation of the institution are more considered by the management than the maximum of profit for the shareholders. The shareholders must be satisfied by conventionally adequate dividends; but once this is secured, the direct interest of the management often consists in avoiding criticism from the public and from the customers of the concern….They are, as time goes on, socializing themselves.

  • The Earl of Baltimore
    Posted by on June 1st, 2007 at 5:30 pm

    Now that the week is over, I thought you might enjoy this — the great Earl Weaver in top form. I have to warn you, the language is…Earl Weaver-esque.

    Here’s the funny part. On the scoreboard, you can see that there’s one out in the top of the first. Yep, the game had just started.
    By the way, Weaver was right. He’s now in the Hall of Fame.

  • Today’s Jobs Report
    Posted by on June 1st, 2007 at 2:09 pm

    The government reported that 157,000 jobs were created last month. That’s good, not great, but good. The unemployment rate stayed at 4.5%.
    The problem I have is that many Americans have left the job market. The number of employed people as a percent of the civilian population is still not very high.
    Allow me to chartify:
    image475.png
    Warning: The line is bumpy because it’s not seasonally-adjusted. You can see that we’re better than where we were, but far from our best.
    If the same percent of the population were employed today as we had seven years ago, that would mean 3.2 million more jobs.

  • Bancrofts to Meet With Murdoch
    Posted by on June 1st, 2007 at 11:39 am

    Maybe they changed their minds, but the Bancrofts are going to meet with Rupert Murdoch and, we can assume, listen to his bid for Dow Jones (DJ). John Carney* at DealBreaker picked up this quote:

    “If they meet, they sell,” said a Dow Jones employee familiar with the thinking of the Bancrofts.

    They’re also considering other potential bids. I really hope Murdoch wins out if for no other reason to see extra-voting-power shares lose.
    *I also stole John’s HAL 9000 image below. It’s what bloggers do.

  • Where are the Algorithms’ Yachts?
    Posted by on June 1st, 2007 at 10:14 am

    hal.jpg
    Wall Street slowly goes bionic:

    Louis Morgan, managing director of hedge-fund firm HG Trading, has never talked to his best trader. That’s because his best trader is a machine.
    Morgan’s top earner is a computer whose software can monitor thousands of stocks simultaneously, and respond in less than a blink of an eye when opportunities arise.
    “Doing what we do by hand would be impossible,” said Morgan, who focuses on statistical arbitrage — taking advantage of sudden and potentially profitable price anomalies between securities that usually trade in correlation.
    Morgan uses a computer trading system based on algorithms, complex mathematical formulas that quickly weigh a huge number of possible trades and execute orders in milliseconds (a millisecond is one thousandth of a second).

    Best of all, you don’t have to pay an algorithm a bonus.
    If all goes well, I think Wall Street can entirely displace humans by 2011. Of course, stock blogging can never be replicated by a machine. (They wouldn’t dare.)

  • Macy’s Lands the “M” Ticker
    Posted by on June 1st, 2007 at 9:58 am

    On the NYSE, the most highly prized ticker symbols are the single-letter symbols. That’s only for the very elite.
    The NYSE has always kept M and I open, and everyone assumed that was for Intel and Microsoft. Well, they apparently think they’re not going to win Microsoft over.
    Today, Macy’s (M) starts trading under M.
    Two weeks ago, the company changed its name from Federated Department Stores and it used to trade under FD.

  • 207% Returns
    Posted by on June 1st, 2007 at 9:52 am

    Since 2001, this asset has increased from $195,000 to $600,000 today. What am I talking about?
    New York City cab medallions.
    (Hat Tip: Altucher & Stockerblog.)