The Cody News (July 30,2006)

So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You

By GINA KOLATA
Published: July 30, 2006

July 30 — Valentin Keller enlisted in an all-German unit of the Union Army in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1862. He was 26, a small, slender man, 5 feet 4 inches tall, who had just become a naturalized citizen. He listed his occupation as tailor.

A year later, Keller was honorably discharged, sick and broken. He had a lung ailment and was so crippled from arthritis in his hips that he could barely walk.

Despite most of society’s incessant whining about how things don’t get better, nobody on this planet can argue the facts such as these: we get two or three lifetimes for the price of one relative to every single society in the history of this planet. Think about that. And the entire article also drives home the point that the quality and health of this life in this country is better than anywhere in history of this planet. Flip It™ indeed.


An advertising model that does not click

By Richard Waters
Published: July 31, 2006

Is the type of advertising that turned Google from just one more cool internet start-up without a business model into a corporate superstar too good to be true?

“Cost-per-click” advertising is one of those alluring ideas that make the internet so disruptive. By letting advertisers pay only when someone clicks on their message, and by targeting advertisements – either by linking them to the results of internet searches, or by fitting them to the subject of whatever someone happens to be reading online – it represents a huge leap forward in efficiency.

The pay per click "problem"? Here we have the fastest growing and most profitable company in the history of capitalism, but the mainstream media can explain how it’s a problem. Do I really have to write “Fl…" on this one?


Media heir wants ‘Airbus of the web’

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in London
Published: July 30, 2006

Christoph Mohn, the heir to the Bertelsmann media empire, has called for Europe to create an Airbus of the internet, to compete with US giants such as Google and Ebay.

Mr Mohn, chief executive of Lycos Europe, said his online community and search company would introduce some products to the US market in the next 12 months but European internet companies were operating at a disadvantage to their US rivals.

How about the nerve of this chump? He’s a friggin’ billionaire heir and he’s asking everyone, rich and poor in his country and other poorer countries to put more money in his pocket through redistribution of wealth. Gotta love how these socialists think.

As I wrote in Real Money when these idiots came up with this socialist pig idea:

Are the French and the mainstream media just jealous of our tech boom?

I mean, first it's some nonsense about the France demanding Apple open up it's iTunes store technology. And now it appears that the mainstream media has decided to latch onto this new nonsensical French tech development(is that an oxymoron?):

Dow Jones Headline: Le Google Francais

The French government plans to invest EUR2 billion (about $2.5 billion) to fund technology projects, including a Franco-German Google Inc. (GOOG) rival, InformationWeek reports. The multimedia search engine is called Quaero, which means "I search for" in Latin. The project, which will get $90 million from the French funds, aims to create an engine for computers and mobile phones.

Yeah, I'm sure a bureaucratic socialist entity with a small fraction of the bankroll of Google, the fastest growing company in the history of capitalism, is really going to create a viable competitor. I'm not a buyer of Google right now, and I can think of about a million reasons to sell Google. A state-funded competitor from France sure as heck isn't one of them. Isn't it great how freedom works?

Cody on RM: Economies on My Mind

Economies on My Mind
07/28/2006 4:46 PM EDT

Time has come today
Young hearts can go their way
Can't put it off another day
I don't care what others say
They say we don't listen anyway
Time has come today
-- The Chambers Brothers


The afternoon almost felt like it just disappeared. The day's not really over, is it?

Here's an economy-focused edition of "what's on the Cody mind" as we head into the weekend:

Is there any chance that UPS and many of the other companies that are warning of a slowdown are simply not executing?

Is the endless sapping of liquidity by the Fed banks really having this profound of an effect on the world's capital markets and perhaps the economy? (Did you see that stat from Frank Curzio Thursday about how 22 countries have raised rates more than 90 times in the last 12 months? It needs some context -- for example, what percentage of the world's GDP do those banks cover? -- but man, that is one mind-blowing number.)

Is our global economy really that fragile?

If the banks turn the spigots back on, will the markets and economies immediately follow and turn higher?

Assuming we will indeed have to pay the piper for endless liquidity pumping and government borrowing, how long can our global economy play this game of chicken?

Further, assuming that we're closer to the end of the game than the beginning, what's the likelihood that we really get a grande-sized blow-off top that makes the late 1990s look like warm-up?

Would that make the potentially coming "tech echo bubble" a misnomer?

Then again, maybe the general boom that we've been experiencing for the last 200 years in this country will last for 200 years more? (Yes, that's a question.)

If we could chart the global economies since the dawn of the wheel, wouldn't the charts indicate that we're decidedly still in the middle of an upward channel, a la Simons' comments earlier?

How about since the "markets" and economies crashed into the Dark Ages? (What a time to buy that must have been, eh?)

In that context, don't you see why I'm so excited about the future that the communications leg of mankind's endless tech revolution will drive?

It's great to be back, and I'll see you next week. Thanks for reading.

A Cody News Spot: July 28, 2006

A Pastor Who Plagiarized Finds a Congregation Willing to Forgive

By MICHAEL LUO
Published: July 28, 2006

WASHINGTON, July 28 — The Bible does not discuss plagiarism. But it does say that thou shalt not bear false witness and thou shalt not steal.

So what to do in the case of a disgraced former preacher who violated both commandments several years ago when he borrowed sermons, often whole-cloth, from other ministers and passed them off as his own?

I’ve made the joke before that Google is in many ways what we pray to today. That is, where we used to pray to “God” looking for answers we now type in our questions to Google.

You gotta give some props to Kathy McGregor, the staff nurse at the National City Christian Church in Washington who prayed to Google about her pastor's sermon. She certainly found some answers for her and her congregation. What a crock that this plagiarist is getting a second chance. He should be in jail.

Cody on RM: One Trader's Take on the Headlines

One Trader's Take on the Headlines
07/28/2006 9:57 AM EDT

I get a lot of great feedback from these posts, so here's my latest look at the morning business headlines from The Wall Street Journal:

Hedge funds would be allowed to manage significantly more pension-fund money under a provision of a bill now in Congress.

You know this -- and by "this," I mean "channeling of yet more money to hedge funds" -- won't end well. But it's not because hedge funds are bad. After all, they facilitate capital movements and grease the wheels of capitalism. No, the problem will be that Wall Street will systemize and leverage up these funds to excesses that everyone will profit from in the short term and get blown up by in the long term. Come on, you know it's true.

Suspicious trading patterns in the securities of HCA, Petco and several other companies prior to news of major deals are raising concerns about insider trading.

If true -- and from the unrelenting media reporting on this (hey, the Mainstream Media, often the target of my rants, has a long history of protecting all of us with such reporting) leads me to believe there is something to this insider-leaking stuff. Yet more scandals on Wall Street are not good for stock multiples.

Aetna reported trouble in raising premiums quickly enough to keep up with rising medical costs, sending it shares tumbling 17%.

A gamed quasi-socialized health care system is much more likely to bankrupt our economy than the much more maligned twin-deficit "problem." Heck, as I've postulated before, I don't even consider the trade deficit to a problem. I see it as a positive.

Bristol-Meyers's offices were raided by the FBI as part of a probe of a deal to delay launching a generic version of Plavix.

Every day it seems there's a new article about these drug companies and the doctors they market to compromising the health of patients. (There's a related article on the cover of The New York Times this morning.) Like I said above: When I worry about the long-term health of the economy, it's the health care system that's near the top of the list of potential takedowns.

ExxonMobil's net jumped 36% to $10.36 billion, its second highest profit ever; Shell's net rose 40% on soaring oil prices.

Oil sure is in a boom. If our own tiny little oil companies are generating these types of profits, you have to wonder just how much the nationalized oil companies around the world are generating for their governments. Are the OPEC countries stockpiling huge amounts of capital? What are the implications of that?

Though conventional wisdom might say otherwise, might the oil boom actually be our greatest hope for peace in the Middle East? That is, in this day of the communications revolution, well-capitalized countries won't be able to stop the shrinking of the world and the interpersonal and business relationships that comes with it.

The Dow Jones Industrials lost 2.08 points to 11100.43 after an early rise crumbled on a rise in oil to $74.54 and interest-rate concerns.

Sigh. There's little that more irritating to a trader than reading a 25-word wrap-up of a global market. You ever see those Web sites that take a sentence and generate a version of it in, say, nothing but Instant Message acronyms? I bet there's a great business in creating one of those for business reporters -- just type in whatever the DJIA did that day and it'll spit out the headline, including causes of the movement.

New-home sales fell 3% in June and durable-goods orders, excluding defense products and aircraft, grew at a slower pace.

Inventories were up too. Not bullish stuff.

DaimlerChrysler's net more than doubled on a rebound at Mercedes, but Chrysler's profit slid as sales of trucks and SUVs fell.

Luxury items continue to boom. How long before that changes? Will we measure it in months, years, decades?

Sharman's Kazaa agreed to pay over $115 million to the entertainment industry to settle allegations of illegal file-sharing.

Yes, that's right! How dare Kazaa try to distribute and market the entertainment industry's products -- not.

Sony swung to a $277.7 million profit, helped by a revival at its electronics unit and bolstering hopes for its turnaround plan.

Sony (SNE) needs to break itself apart and separate its content ownership business from the rest of the company. I'd probably be a buyer of Sony if it did that.

Bank of America is close to overtaking Citigroup as the world's largest bank by market value, a goal it has long pursued.

Success story? Or roll-up doomed to end badly? And yes, I'm referring to both companies.

The DOT is investigating allegations that two safety valves at BP's Alaska oil-field weren't working at the time of a March leak.

Remind me again why BP (BP) is hailed as the environmentally friendly oil company? What a crock.

XM Satellite Radio posted a wider loss and again cut its subscriber estimate for the year.

I couldn't believe how bad my father's XM (XMSR) service was in Ruidoso, N.M. Worked great at night, but the signal continuously clicked out during the day. And I had a hard time finding a station that played anything besides the same ol' songs I've already heard 8,202 times before.

EADS reported a 9.5% decline in profit and trimmed its earnings forecast for the year.

Why anyone thinks a government-owned, politically driven entity can compete with less-socialist, more capitalist companies like Boeing (BA) over the long term is beyond me.

US Airways benefited from its recent merger and an industry rebound to post a $305 million profit.

I often wonder how great our airline industry would be if the government quit the cycle of subsidizing, bankrupting, subsidizing, bankrupting the industry. Some day, airlines will make a great investment. Today is not that day.

As KISS Would Say, “Lick it up”

Here’s a good question … did you brush your teeth before you read this?

And actually the question part of this post is why did you have to lick your teeth after you read this? I mean, did you really have to check?

Addendum 5:56pm: Even if you didn't lick your teeth when you first read this post, I bet you did at some point today...and I bet you thought of this post! I'm going home early, but will write up a review of the Fiona Apple concert I went to last night for the return of NMF with a new old name tonight. Rock on!

Cody on RM: Speaking the Language of Change

Speaking the Language of Change
07/26/2006 12:14 PM EDT

It's been one heck of an economic boom and bull market for the last three-and-a-half years. Despite the endless warnings of pending economic disaster from all the permabulls who became permabears after the tech bubble popped in 2000, the economy -- especially the tech economy -- has been on fire. Consumers, who the permabears mistakenly pointed to as the weak link, were indeed the strongest link. Utilizing all that excess liquidity from the Fed, they kept the economy afloat and catalyzed the boom.

The fact is, things change! I started my own change 10 years ago, riding my meager savings and a one-way ticket to go east of the Mississippi to NYC. It took years of fighting, scrapping and living in slums, but at some point, New York City became more my home than my much smaller hometown. It's quite a change, let me tell ya.

The economy changes, too. It goes through cycles, even if they are muted and accelerated by the digital revolution. At first, this latest downturn in the cycle was subtle, indicated mostly by climbing inventories and an end to the acceleration of end-user demand. The turn can be impossible to time, but at some point, the turn does indeed come, and a good economy turns south.

I was one of the most vocal bulls, shouting out loud about the boom. Talking about the good times to most Wall Streeters, most of the time I felt like Big Bird talking about Snuffleupagus. In early May, I pulled in my horns and went almost entirely to cash (and Softee), and though I want to get excited and bullish again, the fundamental picture remains muddled at best and weak at worst.

Coming from New Mexico, where we say things like "I'm fixin' to ..." as in "I'm fixin' to go down to the orchard to pick some apples," sometimes I feel like I speak a different language than most of the folks here on the Street. The latest case in point has me question whether I am crazy or are many of the guys I call "permabears" (because they've been predicting economic and market doom) continually talking about "rebounds" and "long side schnitzels"? Is that some strange Wall Street dialect that I haven't figured out yet? Perhaps it's just noise? Heck, perhaps my own rantings are just noise.

Meanwhile, the market has continued to, as I call it with my New Mexican twang, "dislocate" to both sides (mostly to the downside) as the market comes to terms with the turn that the economy has already apparently gone through. From the companies themselves:

* UPS, CSX, Rockwell Automation: The real question now becomes how sustainable the downturn is. Will the digital economy mute and accelerate this downturn as it has others during the boom?
* Wal-Mart, Target: Will consumers collapse or just catch their breath before running again?
* Black & Decker, Stanley Works, the homebuilders: Will housing only "cool" or "bust"?
* Broadcom, Corning, the semis: Will inventories balloon and crush these companies under their own weight? Or will sell-through flow and clean out the channels?

Gun to head, I think the economy will indeed turn and get booming again. But I'm not going to risk much capital on that thesis until prices come down even more or the fundamentals begin to pick back up. More to the point, I plan to remain focused on trying to find secular growers, regardless of the outlook for the broader economies and markets. Do you speak my language?

CNBC Asia Tonight, or, Heading Home

If you're anywhere near the hundreds of millions of TVs in Asia tonight at 7pm EST (or if your local cable company happens to offer CNBC Asia), check me out on there. We'll be talking earnings, earnings, earnings.

Ah, earnings season.


Also, I am going to make the 12 hour trek to my hometown tomorrow for a long weekend. I'll probably post some from the road..perhaps even some personal reflections! Remember those? I've been wanting to write some stuff about having started therapy to finally start dealing with my PTSD stuff from 9/11. It's tough, but very enjoyable stuff.

ToP: There's Only So Much Oil in the Ground

So I'm trying out some "new" music this morning, jamming to an album I downloaded off iTunes a couple weeks ago. I'm half-listening to the lyrics of this funky song when I realize it's all about the peak oil theory of all things. No joke -- the song's called "There's Only So Much Oil in the Ground". Here are the complete lyrics:

There's only so much oil in the ground
Sooner or later there won't be much around
Tell that to your kids while you driving downtown
That there's only so much oil on the ground

Can't cut loose without that juice
Can't cut loose without that juice
If we keep on like we doing things for sure
Will not be cool - It's a fact
We just ai't got suffiecient fuel

There's only so much oil in the ground
Sooner or later there won't be none around
Alternate sources of power must be found
Cause there's only so much oil in the ground

There's only so much oil in the earth
It's a fact of life - for what it's worth
Something every little boy and girl should know since birth
That there's only so much oil in the ground

There's no excuse for our abuse
No excuse for our abuse
We just assume that we will not
Exceed the oil supply
But soon enough the world will watch the wells run dry.

Oh, what is that song from? Tower of Power, 1975.

Yes, thirty one years ago.


Surely those peak oil theorists and secular growth of oil stories have got it right this decade around though!

Cody on RM: The Competition From Cash

The Competition From Cash
07/12/2006 9:26 AM EDT

I got ramblin', I got ramblin' all on my mind
Hate to leave my baby, but you treats me so unkind -- Robert Johnson

Monday night I was at dinner with one of my partners. We were talking about his investments, his career and how he (and others) manages his overall portfolio.

Eventually we started talking about his investment in a bunch of high-yield trusts and high-yield preferred stocks that he'd put a bunch of money into a couple years ago, when he'd sold his apartment in New York City for a big gain. He'd grown increasingly leery of the real estate market and rents an apartment in the city now as he still has no interest in real estate.

Most of those high-yield assets are in energy-related vehicles, so we started talking about the blow-off top in commodities and how energy has hung pretty tough during this meltdown. He said he felt like he'd been lucky because he has 20% of his assets in these investments. I said, "Whoa, 20%! Nice job and all, but should you take something off the table?" He answered, "Yeah, I suppose I should, but dammit, Cody, it's hard to walk away from an average of about an 8% yield on these things."

And that's when it hit me, and I pointed out to both of us at once: Hey, you know what? Cash yields more than 5% in some places right now -- 5%!

Now, 5% ain't 8%. But cash is cash, man, and unless the fiat U.S. dollar and the society we've built on it collapse tomorrow, cash is as just about as safe an investment as you can have in this world right now. Those energy trusts and preferreds and other assets and whatnot that yield 8% are decidedly not cash. Every investment in any company comes with fraud risk, options-backdating risk, execution risk and all kinds of other risks.

So my friend turns to me and says, "Hmm, I think I'm going to sell some of that high-yield stuff and park it in some cash."

That is a real-life example of what it means when someone points out that the higher yields of cash are starting to compete for investment dollars. Indeed, my buddy's capital has flowed out of the system from which we finance growth and investment in this capitalistic society. It's now drawing 5% while sitting idle in cash.

In the last couple of years, depending on your starting point, while the yield on cash has been sprinting to 5%, the S&P 500 has been mostly rangebound and essentially flat, yielding capital appreciation and dividends of about 5% or a little more. You don't think investors look at the yield and safety of cash and wonder why they're dealing with all the stresses and risks in the market? They do.

Maybe it all will reverse and maybe the Fed will cut rates because the governors end up deciding they did take things too far after all. Maybe the market will take off in a huge rally, and the returns on stocks will suck everyone back in.

I do think the stock market is a much better place to be in the intermediate and long term than cash. But we can't analyze the attractiveness of stocks in a vacuum. Because there are indeed other asset classes competing for our money. And one of those is safe ol' cash and its 5% yield.

So, for right now I still prefer to be in cash, as I have been for the last couple months, during which time cash has yielded about 1% while the markets have, well, melted down.

Cody on RM: Tech's Not a Zero-Sum Game

Tech's Not a Zero-Sum Game
7/10/2006 2:51 PM EDT

You need a whole lot more than money
You need more than to survive
You need to keep your Love
Keep your Love alive -- Heart

If I hear one more pundit or so-called analyst explain to me how Microsoft (MSFT) today is IBM (IBM) 20 years ago, I'm going to pull the bytes out of my hard drive -- er, the hair out of my head. OK, OK, we get it -- someone smart explained at some point how there are some parallels to the Internet wars between Google (GOOG) and Microsoft and the PC wars that pitted Microsoft and IBM back in the day. The fact is, I think both Google and Microsoft are positioned to be big winners in the next few years, though I plan to own Google longer than I plan to own Microsoft.

Specifically, the conventional wisdom (and, seriously, if there was ever a time to call something "conventional wisdom" in technology and the stock market, this is it) goes something like this:

IBM utterly dominated the computing world and was making money hand over fist as it had grown to dominate mainframe and centralized computing. Microsoft, with software purchased from the slums of Albuquerque, N.M. (one summer in college, I lived on the same block where the beginnings of Microsoft were developed), was about distributed personal computers and bringing computing power to the masses. IBM froze and refused to accept the new paradigm, and Microsoft rose to dominate computing so much that it's still being punished for being too successful -- er, for supposedly being a monopoly.

Fast forward to 2006 and everyone (as in everyone) can explain to us how Microsoft dominates the computing world and is making money hand over fist as it has grown to dominate the distributed PC world. And now Google and others are coming up with all kinds of ways to distribute software and computing power over the Internet. The commentators then go on to explain how Microsoft is -- and this is where the conventional wisdom falls apart -- frozen and refusing to accept the new paradigm.

As Cramer used to title his columns back when I first read him in 1997, "Wrong!"

Look, Microsoft gets it. Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie and even the much-maligned Steve Ballmer understand that technology has gone, and is going, through another major paradigm shift that is enabling the masses yet again. And they're actively positioning the company to leverage that paradigm shift. They're rolling out a new operating system that will be the most user-friendly interface they can devise. They're integrating networking capabilities into every possible facet of the software.

With 98% of the world's billions of computers still running a Windows OS, Microsoft certainly has an entrenched user base to leverage. With that type of a base, I wonder when Softee will get serious about the voice-calling business. When it does, the rules of Metcalfe's Network Effects (scaled down from the original theories as they are) will really kick in for free voice calling as billions of people will have instant access to it. Wonder if eBay's (EBAY) Skype will join hands with Microsoft's voice services someday down the road.

"Yeah, yeah, Cody, but PC growth is dead, you're wrong about any upgrade cycle next year," you might be thinking. Well, Microsoft is addressing those issues, too, as it has developed operating systems for mobile phones and other mobile devices. It's getting into gaming, rolling out new gaming consoles for the living room. It's getting into the Internet advertising distribution business, which is indeed the future of advertising and a business that will make a lot of companies, including Google and Yahoo! (YHOO) , a lot of money. It's not like Internet advertising is a winner-takes-all sector.

Indeed, despite all the catcalls, Microsoft is having some meaningful game-changing success. MSN has become one of only three meaningful portals on the entire Internet (Google and Yahoo! being the other two, of course). How's that AOL.com site doing?

To be sure, there's plenty of execution risk with Microsoft because regardless of its strategies and tactics, the company might fail to deliver results on those decisions.

A couple of years ago, when Google had first come public, I used to rail against the conventional wisdom that Google was in trouble every time Microsoft rolled out a competing product. In those days of yesteryear, Google would get hit just about anytime Microsoft sneezed in GOOG's direction. A few hundred days and a few hundred billions of dollars in market cap swings later, I think the pendulum has swung too far in the "Microsoft is helpless" direction. Both of these companies are likely to be big winners in the latest historic new paradigm of computing that we are all witness to. Technology's not often a zero-sum game, you know?

At the time of publication, the firm in which Willard is a partner was net long Microsoft and Google, although positions can change at any time and without notice.

Help Wanted

It's always hard to find good help. In case you haven't noticed from the decline in the number of posts on these here pages in the last couple months, I need some more help.

I posted the following on Craig's List and then realized this morning that I should actually be asking readers for help too. I won't be able to respond to all resumes sent in, but by all means, send 'em in!

Tech hedge fund manager seeks smart, aggressive applicants. Tech and web savvy a must. Pay is small to start with lots of potential upside and frequent bonuses for great work. Needed ASAP.

Interested parties, send your resume into me, and let's get rockin':

cody@clwillard.com

CW on RM: Microsoft's Latest So-Called iPod Killer

New Media Revolution Hit of the Day
07/06/2006 2:48 PM

So Microsoft "secretly" talks up how it can design an MP3 player that can challenge Apple. Again. (I put quotes around "secret" because the reports in the press such as The Wall Street Journal are full of "off the record" quotes. It seems Microsoft truly has a new public relations strategy that entails "leaking" details to the press to create buzz. I take that as an ironic but unsurprisingly transparent attempt to emulate Apple's PR strategies.)

The fact is that at some point, someone's going to design a player and system that will be functional enough to crack some of Apple's dominance. Microsoft is probably the leading candidate to do it, since Sony seems so clueless about its digital music strategy.

I think part of Sony's problem is that it owns too much valuable content and can't put a Chinese wall between the content ownership and the content distribution business models. Sony, like so many other content owners such as the music labels and movie studios, just can't seem to grasp that it has no control over what gets distributed where these days. The Internet has truly made the consumer king, and only Apple and Google (and smaller companies like YouTube.com) seem to have figured that out so far. Still.

I will also throw in here that I don't expect the new iPods (and possibly the new living-room media device that I've mentioned before) to hit until November of this year. But we can expect an all-out blitz from the folks in Cupertino, Calif., when it does.

Look forward to more hits like this; I'm going to start a new daily feature in this trading blog, highlighting a "digital revolution" story each day.

Cody on RM: On Being Raccoon-ish

Hunting for Trades
07/03/2006 12:10 PM

When I was a kid, there was this raccoon which couldn't be stopped. He'd sneak in and eat my mom's vegetable garden no matter what obstacles we'd put in front of him. And we certainly did put all kinds of obstacles in front of him. From chicken wire fencing to electric shock fencing to spraying of natural scents around the large garden in our orchard. But nothing we came up with could stop the little guy. He'd always figure out a way to get around it and to get his vegetables.

I bring this up because it'd take a smart, diligent raccoon approach to find much in this market to trade right now.
The markets keep putting up all kinds of obstacles to stop the bulls, from the rolling dislocations to what had been an endless parade of Fed heads talking up inflation and all the other things weighing on this market that I highlighted in my closing post Friday.

But the best, smartest raccoons keep coming and looking for great trades and investments regardless of what the broader picture puts in front of them, including the possibility that the Fed heads start opening their mouths again, which I fully expect.
Oh, and that raccoon from my childhood? I finally took a rifle and my dog and slept in the garden for four nights in a row, and that raccoon never showed up. Until the fifth night when we'd given up.

Don't give up, there's money to be made. I'm just trying to be raccoon-smart about going for it.

I guess you could say that I'm neither bullish or bearish -- I'm raccoonish.

Cody Cam Takes on the News Revolution (June 28,2006)

Administrator's note: The digital revolution's impact on news and how we all consume it,. From the latest Kudlow & Company Cody Cam:

Click here for the first clip.

Click here for the second clip.

Click here for the third clip.