I Say I Want a Revolution

Reprinted from part of my last day in the diary on RealMoney.com this year:

From a broader (and more important in the long term) level, I want to use this as my parting shot from the diary for 2005.

I spend a lot of time and energy trying to blow apart conventional wisdom. Doing so isn't just for entertainment purposes. Rather, I think one of the most important keys to getting things right on Wall Street (and in business in general) is to, first and foremost, question everything.

I very much want to question the "consumer is about to collapse" thesis. I question how much the Fed matters. I doubt that Sirius and Apple compete. I ask out loud about macroeconomic indicators and whether our bureaucratic measurement systems make any sense at all. I clearly rail against taking those systems and applying the concept of being "better than" or "worse than" polled expectations.

I question all of my own theses. Perhaps the explosion of new distribution channels is actually the best thing that ever happened to the content owners such as Warner Music Group.

I know I upset a lot of conventions when I write about these topics. Isn't that what we should be doing, though? Isn't the only way to be anything other than average to strive to be different from convention?

Think about the topics we're forced to digest every day on the Street, from Treasury rates to CPI to battery life and usability of the latest Palm Treo. Oooh, don't Apple's iPods scratch too easily? (Remember that one?)

The fact is that Wall Street and conventional wisdom spend way too much time looking at worthless inputs. Junk in, junk out, you know? So, yeah, let's question everything. Let's look for revolutions. That's what Apple and Google have done. They've revolutionized things. And it's not a coincidence that those two stocks have been just about the best-performing large caps on the planet.

And with that, I'm going to do very little writing starting later this week. That fin you see in the water is Rev Shark, and he'll be back tomorrow. Thanks for reading.

And seriously, question everything. Flip it, indeed.

Net long AAPL, GOOG; Net short WMG