Archive for October, 2008
Volkswagen and the free market
Here’s something interesting. At an intraday high of 1,005€ (it was trading around 200 just a few days ago), Volkswagen has been for a few minutes the biggest company in the world for market capitalization. A whopping 380bn$. For a car-maker!!! Why this?
Pretty simple. The whole hedge fund world was short VW because it was […]
Windows in the cloud
Microsoft unveiled yesterday Windows Azure, which is Microsoft’ OS for the cloud. Not only, it also announced web-based versions of its existing tools to run atop Azure. This is a historical shift for Microsoft that is trying to position itslef properly for the rush to cloud computing.
Read more on the FT.
Sphere: Related Content
Time to buy?
The FT is a great newspaper, I think the best, and publishes extremely interesting and thought-through articles. I’d like to share one with you, quite provoking on potential future scenarios.
A funny snippet here:
“…the wealth of the average 50-year-old is $900,000, of which only a quarter has anything to do with financial assets. Worryingly, however, almost […]
Should I buy equity now?
Hopefully, the acute phase of the crisis is over. With the EU governments investing around 2trn€in different ways to sustain the credit markets (either through shares purchase, account guarantees etc), it seems that the risk of a systemic collapse of the financial world is now smaller than a few weeks ago. For this reason, markets […]
TV Ad rates to 15 year low in UK
Not really surprising, but interesting on the FT. TV Ad rates are now back to 1992 levels. We know advertising is a cyclical business, and no surprise is turning downward so quickly in such challenging (to say the least) economic environment. Also, the FT says that 35% of companies cut ad budgets for the 4th […]
What next?
You cannot rule out a big one-day market crash like the 25% fall in 1987. With all that the central banks and the governments are doing, markets are in free fall, down 20%+ in the week, and everybody is panicking. It just takes very little to break the whole system into a one day big-meltdown. […]
S&P starts with an 8
839.80
S&P touched 839 today, time to cash in the second pizza. Time to go long the market? I doubt… It’s better and safer to let the dust clear, even if this means potentially missing a 20% or plus upside. The situation is so dire, that you don’t really know what’s next. Also, from an economic […]
Global Recession?
From Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis, a concise representation of the current situation:
Global Recession Headed Our Way
The world is heading for a global recession and a sure bet is that it will be blamed on a subprime crisis in the US. The reality is the greatest liquidity experiment in history is now crashing to earth.
The […]
Bank of America 10bn$ capital raise
How on earth a bank that spends 50bn$ to buy Merrill Lynch would after a month need to raise 10bn$ at a discount of some 20/30% versus market price, diluting existing shareholders, in a market that is extremely tight on cash? It seems to me that some people might not have understood how serious the […]
UK house prices down 1.2% in September
According to the Halifax index, UK house prices have been down 1.2% in September, with an annualized decline of 12.4% in the last quarter. It looks a given that house prices in UK have come down at least 10% from the peak, the question is where will they stop?
I think the earnings ratio might give […]