Cody on RM: What's On My Mind

Administrator's Note: Cody is out of the country but will be returning Thursday. In the meantime, here is the closing post from his Trader's Edge Blog on RealMoney:


By Cody Willard
RealMoney.com Contributor
5/26/2006 2:48 PM EDT
Click here for more stories by Cody Willard

It ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe, That light I never knowed
An' it ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe, I'm on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin' you would do or say, To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin' anyway, So don't think twice, it's all right -- Bob Dylan

On Tuesday, for the first time in more than three and a half years, I'm going to miss a day that the market's open as I'll be on a flight coming back from a trip. I wish I could say that I'll turn my brain off and stop thinking and stressing over the economy, the market, tech stocks, technology strategies, the content revolution and how best to make money in all of the above. But let's face it, that ain't gonna happen.

Ahead of this brief hiatus, my editor suggested that my closing post be a list of things I'll be thinking about this weekend and/or looking for next week. I liked the idea, and I've got a lot on my mind, so I broke it into three rough pigeonholes.

Economic
• As steady and strong as this economy has been for the last few years, is it possible that it's all built on stimulative Central Bank policies throughout the world?
• Will the rolling dislocations around the world's financial markets quietly ebb and then stop?
• Will the rolling dislocations around the world's financial markets keep volatility spiked as they accelerate and cause much more pain?
• Why, whenever I point out how unbelievably horrid the emerging markets have crashed (India's now down 30% from its recent highs, for example, and the Middle Eastern markets are down nearly 40% year to date), does everyone always remind me how much those markets are up in the last few years, as if that somehow makes the implications of the rolling crashes less bearish?

Technology
• Was that record executive dead right last night when he told me that there'll never be much money made in the outright "selling" of music now that we've left the physical world for the digital.
• Is the music business about to enter its golden age despite losing the primary business model upon which it was built, as the same executive went on to explain (and blow my mind)?
• What's up with BitTorrent's move to go legal?
• Will there be a massive defection from BitTorrent to another "rogue" P2P system?
• Or does P2P traffic (and therefore bandwidth needs throughout the network) explode as people like you and me adopt it when we can finally trust it. (If you don't know what P2P is, click here and stay tuned. I'll be all over it again next week.)
• Will there be a de facto legal P2P standard?
• Will the government get involved in trying to regulate a P2P standard and force the mainstream P2P to stay black market?
• Is there any way for Google not to lose its soul, err, entrepreneurial edge as they add thousands upon thousands of people from the mainstream education and corporate system?
• How much risk is in Google's brand as they start partnering with lesser companies like AOL and Dell?
• Who sold out more by partnering with Dell? Sheryl Crow or Google?
• Is Apple as close to rolling out a brand new, market-changing media box for the living room as I think they are? I have to give Apple credit for the way they're quietly raising the rights protection abilities of iTunes now that they've already established themselves as the de facto legal music (and perhaps TV show) distribution outlet on the net.
• Will a legalization and cleaning up of the P2P systems of the world undermine Apple and Google's reigning distribution outlets, rendering my point above moot?

Market
• Now that the permabears are starting to look for "the" collapse, does that make it less likely to happen?
• What's the single most bullish move the Fed could do right now? (After the trashing that every single financial market has had, I sure think it'd be to just cut and, well, shut up for a while. )
• How will the market break my heart the next time it breaks my heart?

Thanks for reading and I'll see you next Wednesday. I hope you have a great weekend.