The Cody Blog

The Cody Blog Has Moved

2006-10-19T04:23:00.000-04:00

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The Rock n Roll Spirit of AC/DC Is Gone

2006-10-04T20:01:00.000-04:00

You know, I complained awhile ago when AC/DC sold their classic jam, "Back in Black" out to the black Razr from Motorola. But now I notice all the places it's used including the Lewis Black segment on The Daily Show and it's ruined the song for me. And now....it's used for a Gap women's pants commercial featuring Audrey Hepburn? Oh, man, that's just brutal -- and don't get me wrong, I love that Audrey woman -- but she don't mix with AC/DC!

CW on the Real Story

2006-10-04T18:22:00.000-04:00

I chatted with my main man Aaron Task, Executive Editor at the TheStreet.com about the DJIA, Microsoft, and what else I’m looking at right now. Fun stuff, click here to check it out.

Welcome to the revolution hitting full bloom.

Bulls Dance on Dead Bears

2006-10-04T12:34:00.000-04:00

A picture like that 8”x6” picture on the front page of the Money and Investing section of the Wall Street Journal … well, that can’t be a bullish thing.

Just sayin'.

EPSN MNF -- Can't Get Much Worse

2006-10-03T11:59:00.000-04:00

I don't really know how to rant about how bad the commentary on ESPN's Monday Night Football was last night. Did anybody else catch that interview with Steve McNair in which a good 90% of the questions were, "Well, back to Brett Favre, Steve, how do you think it must feel to [fill in blank here]."

Here's an revelatory idea, Joe Theismann, et al: Ask Brett about Brett and ask Steve about Steve and the Ravens!

Sheesh, some heads need to roll at ESPN before they completely blow this MNF franchise to hell.

A Cody News Spot: Ivory Coast Dump Tragedy

2006-10-02T12:38:00.000-04:00

Global Sludge Ends in Tragedy for Ivory Coast

By LYDIA POLGREEN and MARLISE SIMONS
Published: October 2, 2006

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, Sept. 28 — It was his infant son’s cries, gasping and insistent, that first woke Salif Oudrawogol one night last month. The smell hit him moments later, wafting into the family’s hut, a noxious mélange reminiscent of rotten eggs, garlic and petroleum.

Mr. Oudrawogol went outside to investigate. Beside the family’s compound, near his manioc and corn fields, he saw a stinking slick of black sludge.

“The smell was so bad we were afraid,” Mr. Oudrawogol said. “It burned our noses and eyes.”

Tough, tragic story here from the NYTimes about these criminal enterprises who dumped toxic waste in Ivory Coast, leaving civilians in the area in a major health crisis and even killing at least 8. The article's wrong to call this an "underbelly of globalization", but these criminal enterprises who are guilty of murder must be prosecuted by the global courts. And yet again, where is the UN when it could be helpful? Of course if they do get involved, I suppose Kofi's kid can finagle another new Mercedes out of this deal anyway.

CW in FT: New Windows promises a breath of fresh air for tech

2006-10-02T09:29:00.000-04:00

As oil spurted from the $30s to the $70s during the past few years, as the price of petrol at the pump in the US exploded from about $1.50 to nearly $3.00, as copper quadrupled, the handwringing was all about how the consumer would collapse and inflation would skyrocket. It turns out that the positives, a strong global economy, a friendly Fed and the coinciding booming housing market, trumped the negatives of spiking raw material costs and energy prices, writes Cody Willard. | Read

Channeling Positive Feedback

2006-10-02T08:35:00.000-04:00

Got this email on Friday and it sure made my day heading into the weekend. I get a lot of very supportive email from readers — my only question is: Why not post it in the comments to counter the negativity there? I think the reason why is that the readers who reach out with positives want to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the comments. Anyway, I thought I’d share this one, and the author gave me permission to use her name to boot.

Dear Cody,

Hope all is well for you in New York ! I was looking at your new video today and I thought it looked very nice! You look and sound great. I am sorry to read so much "off" stuff on your blog this week...My letter to you earlier this week was a joke...You got that, right? Not interested in meeting you in the ring, only if I can buy you a drink whenever you are stranded in Dallas as promised in my first email to you:). But thank you for posting my blog about global warming. I hope others share in my passion and I hope you appreciated the sense of humor along with my message.

I must confess you are quite a trooper when it comes to all this criticism. The way you press on is impressive and I am learning from you how to be more like that....It is a good thing for me to remember your character and how you continue and not give up. That is the kind of thing that separates men from boys.. Anyway about your new video, for some reason your face on my Mac screen goes in and out in a bizarre pixel looking blur and then the video stopped halfway before you finished. Don't know if you know that or if it is just my compute screen r, but it did that on the last video too, just didn't stop halfway.

As I said you look great and I like when you are more poised. I am up for a television gig myself in Philadelphia and so I can understand having to be "on" and pulled together in front of a video. It is a lot to keep together...Take care, Cody..press on....Sincerely, Ellen Borlenghi

Thanks, Ellen. Press on — and ROCK ON!

'Til Death Killed by Overexposure?

2006-10-01T20:44:00.000-04:00

A few months ago I went with my friend Mitch to see his client Bill Maher at the Apollo theatre. After a quick meet and greet afterward Mitch and a couple other Hollywood biz biggies and I took a car downtown to some incredible hidden gem of a classy Italian place. It must be a Hollywood secret hangout or something because not only did we meet Jennifer Anniston (I smiled and have to admit I found myself a bit addrenalized as we chatted) but we also sat next to Brad Garrett at the bar while we waited for our table.

I sure thought Brad was good in Everybody Loves Raymond. And 'Til Death, which I've seen a few minutes of a few times and found pleasant enough that I didn't immediately switch the channel, seems like, if given a chance, might develop into a decent enough family sit com. But why is Fox intent on killing it with immediate overexposure before the show, the characters, the plotlines, the nuances and inside/recurring jokes that make a sitcom are even revealed, much less developed?

I mean, I think I've seen the show multiple times every night I've flipped through the channels on the television for the last two weeks. I'm sick of it already.

Looking to Leave Blogger

2006-10-01T19:11:00.000-04:00

So, I'm so sick of Blogger because:

1. You have actually program the html when you post from a Safari browser on your Mac.

2. My blog is oft-slow to load.

3. The log-in pages from which you post are too often unavailable.

4. There are more, but mainly, I'm sick of Blogger because it won't let me tag posts and then categorize them by subject.

So we've exported my blog and all the archives and comments from posts past to typepad. We're beta-testing it right now, but I'm loving typepad relative to blogger right now and am about to point this site and the URL TheCodyBlog.com to http://thecodyblog.com.typepad.com. I'm afraid my RSS subs will have to re-subscribe from the new site's feed, if and when we make the move official.

I like the idea of being able to categorize by subject matter though, as I think some readers come here for my personal stuff, others for music, and others for stocks. or whatever. I also get a lot of emails from random posts asking if I've elaborated on the particular subject in past, so now readers will be able to find that with just one click. Anyway, before I make the official move, I figured I'd float it out there for readers to check out and give me some feedback.

Post a comment or shoot me an email with your thoughts and comments.

http://thecodyblog.typepad.com

The Cody News Video Edition September 29, 2006

2006-09-29T14:40:00.000-04:00

Click here for a high quality, downloadable version in quicktime. (right click to save, left click to play in the browser)

Click here if you would like the podcast version (right click to save, left click to play in the browser)

CW on RM: Big-Cap Tech Is Back

2006-09-26T09:41:00.000-04:00

Big-Cap Tech Is Back
09/26/2006 9:18 AM

The market snapped back from the red yesterday morning to rally into the close with some big gains. And those gains once again were led by tech, as they have been since the market bottomed (at least in the intermediate term) in late July. Even the semiconductors reversed and ripped higher, closing up 2% on the day.

The rally from the July bottoms has been broad and strong, with the Nasdaq up more than 10% from its lows. And, despite being written off more times than an oil man's Enron investment on his tax return, the biggest leader in the market has been big-cap tech.

Yes, big-cap tech has been in full-on bull mode. Oracle now up more than 40% on the year. Microsoft is up more than 20% from its recent lows. Cisco is up nearly 30% since it reported its most recent quarterly results. So much for big-cap tech's exaggerated rumors of death.

To be sure, the whole group is not exploding higher. Intel has crawled back from its lowest points of the year, but it's still bumbling along just about 10% above its recent bottom. Dell, of exploding-computer and failed-MP3-player fame, is also about 10% above its summer lows.

Even recent qualifiers for "big-cap tech" status, Apple and Google have bounced strongly from recent lows. Apple has been really smoking from the mid-$50s to the mid-$70s since summer, with a 30%-plus rally.

With the retail and bank indices each up single digits from their summer lows and with energy and commodities in free fall, big-cap tech is back. "Is" is the operative word in that sentence, because if Microsoft's Vista spurs any meaningful upgrade cycle in PCs, if Intel's new chips rock at a low temperature, and if Cisco keeps enjoying the fruits of accelerating enterprise tech spending -- well, multiples can continue to expand and estimates can go higher. And that would provide a double-whammy to fuel these stocks further.

I won't chase these names right now, but I continue to hold Microsoft as my biggest position, and I'm holding my more recent addition of Cisco steady, too.

P.S. Speaking of Enron, can you imagine how big and powerful that firm would probably be if it had managed to hide the corruption long enough to enjoy the huge energy boom? That's a scary thought. Or perhaps a beautiful thought, because they did get busted and justice was served.

"A Way to Deal With Your Blog Trolls?"

2006-09-26T09:30:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine sent me this article with the comment “A way to deal with your blog trolls?”. One of those trolls, er, readers of mine gave one of their usual barrages of always-anonymous comments in three or four of my posts last night. My favorite of the night is, “ Saw you....besides your hair looking all greasy, as usual, you added nothing!”

I think I love these folks who care so much about me that they catch my appearances on TV and keep coming back to read this blog...and read my stuff from other outlets to boot....and even care so much that they help me generate traffic with their funny comments on my blog.

But I guess I could go this route:

Director takes swings at critics -- literally

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) -- Tired of the criticism of his films, controversial German film director Uwe Boll took on four of his critics in a Vancouver boxing ring, and ended each bout with a knockout.

The director of the vampire flick "BloodRayne," based on a video game and starring Kristanna Loken and Ben Kingsley, issued a fight challenge to his critics several months ago. Fifteen responded.

"I like now the critics," Boll told a news conference after the fights on Saturday. "Everybody who was in the ring showed (guts). Nobody dived.

Hey, latest anon, got the guts to meet me in the ring? ;)

Jonesing For But Leery About Dylan's Concert

2006-09-25T14:50:00.000-04:00

I'm pretty jazzed to have some great tickets to go see Bob Dylan for the
first time ever in a few weeks. Even though I'm pretty jaded by
his Apple endorsement (that reminds me how my good friend Joe used to scream "I'm jaded!" along with Garth's cover of Billy Joel's hit "Shameless" instead of "I'm shameless". Gawd, did the corporate playlists ever kill that song back in 1991/2 in Texas). And I'm still banning music from post-1982 too, so I can't speak to his newest album (though I will listen to it before I go to his show...).

At any rate, I had to pass on this review from my favorite music
critic/analyst/whatever, Bob Lefsetz wrote up:

So now plagiarism is the FOLK TRADITION?

The reviews of this album are demonstration of why you can no longer trust
print/reviewers. To look cool, to be a member of the club, to remind you of
the way things WERE, you've got to dig deep and give a good review of this
record. Whereas you've got to listen to it almost a dozen times for it to
reveal itself, and almost nobody's gonna give it that time and should you
have to TAKE the time? Isn't that like saying if you're alone on an island
with a member of the opposite sex for three months you'll grow close?

This is not a bad record. But it could have used an outside producer, the
sound is anything but revelatory, never mind ear-pleasing and Dylan could
have used a Jacques Levy.

If you consider this to be classic, you've never listened to "Blood On The
Tracks", never mind "Bringing It All Back Home", "Highway 61" or "Blonde On
Blonde".

Now if you were alive back then, if you weren't looking at the past through
rose-colored glasses like the aforementioned writers, you'll know that Bob
Dylan released a turkey, "Self Portrait", and after the reviews were
SCATHING, he went back into the studio and released the almost classic "New
Morning" within six months. Maybe if they gave this guy BAD reviews, he'd
come to his senses and make something more accessible.

Oh, don't tell me "Modern Times"' virtue is its INACCESSIBILITY. "Anna
Karenina" isn't inaccessible. And if inaccessibility is the criterion,
"Trout Mask Replica" is the best record ever made, maybe challenged by
"Metal Machine Music".

This is not a word of mouth record. These same worthless print writers are
selling this record. Getting baby boomers who want to look cool and in the
loop to buy it. Because if you heard it at a friend's house, you'd NEVER
buy it!

PS. Tune in Friday -- New Music Friday (with a twist) returns!

CW on RM: 10 Market Thoughts

2006-09-22T16:51:00.000-04:00

10 Market Thoughts
09/22/2006 4:28 PM

It was an intense week of action in the markets, and there was a lot of macroeconomic news flow to blame it on. Here's what's on my mind as we close out the week.

1. If spiking energy didn't matter to consumers while they kept spending over the past few years, why should we think energy's collapse will matter in our consumer outlook now?

2. Is there any, any, any remote possibility that housing will actually strengthen again?

3. What if, now that even DaimlerChrysler has all but thrown in the towel and that the Philly Fed and who knows what other macrodata are being hit by Detroit's problems, Detroit's fundamentals have finally bottomed?

4. What if it turns out that the automakers actually roll out some products that consumers really dig?

5. Why can't the automakers become "tech" companies and innovate in ways they used to in decades past?

6. Was it too obvious to buy Google on Yahoo!'s warning? Sure was a lot of commentary on both sides of that bet.

7. Is it time to bet that Nokia will be OK this quarter and guide fine for next?

8. Should I pair that idea with a Motorola short because the market has deemed that Moto can do no wrong lately?

9. I complain all the time about the fallacies of stereotyping, er, grouping stocks by market cap and sector, such as "big-cap tech." That said, is the strength in Cisco, Motorola, Microsoft, Apple and Oracle a function of money flowing into "big-cap tech" as a sector because the rest of the world doesn't see it my way?

10. What if the Zune does bomb as badly as most all the world thinks it will? Does that present downside risk to Microsoft? Probably not. Would a Zune boom present upside to Microsoft? Probably so.

I am going to get outside and hit some tennis balls on these last days of summer-like weather here in New York City. Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.

The Cody News Video Edition September 22, 2006

2006-09-22T14:01:00.000-04:00

Click here for a high quality, downloadable version in quicktime. (right click to save, left click to play in the browser)

StockPickr.com Takes Off...

2006-09-22T09:00:00.000-04:00

My boy James Altucher, oft-mentioned in my adventures on these pages, has just launched his new stock-referral service at StockPickr.com. It's pretty interesting stuff, as you enter in your favorite and least favorite names and the site generates new ideas for you based on hedge funds and super investors (Buffett, Icahn, Soros, Miller, etc) and individuals who have similar stocks. Click here to check it out.

All Wet, But Having a Blast on CNBC Squawkbox

2006-09-20T12:25:00.000-04:00

Last Thursday I had a 7am spot on the Squawk. I was up at 5:30ish and got cleaned up and ready to rock n roll. Armani leather jacket in hand, I stepped out into the misty rain and ran across my bricked street and hopped in the back seat of the Town Car waiting...the driver was surprised to see me and said I had the wrong car. Uh oh.

No other cars were waiting outside, and it's now 6:20 so there was no sense in wasting any time trying to track down the right car. Now being a cowboy from NM, I'm an utter umbrella incompetent. I lose them all the time (no shocker there, right?), and I don't currently have one that I know of. So I wrapped my jacket inside of my WSJ and after a few minutes found a cab on Houston. To the studio in a skyscraper in midtown then, and I find the doors locked. Sloshing through a giant mudpuddle and I get inside through a side door, rather soaking wet (as noted by a commentor here). No hairdryer (and no handdryer in the bathroom for me to pull a Desperately Seeking Susan)...what can you do? Was still a blast to get on there and talk Revolution.

A Cody News Spot: Life is Better?!

2006-09-20T12:00:00.000-04:00

Life Is Better; It Isn’t Better. Which Is It?

By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: September 20, 2006

When the first snow falls on the North Shore of Chicago this winter, Robert Gordon will take his Toro snow blower out of the garage and think about how lucky he is not to be using a shovel. Mr. Gordon is 66 years old and evidently quite healthy, but his doctor has told him that he should never clear his driveway with his own hands. “People can die from shoveling snow,” Mr. Gordon said. “I bet a lot of lives have been saved by snow blowers.”

If so, most of them have been saved in the last few decades. A Canadian teenager named Arthur Sicard came up with the idea for the snow blower in the late 1800’s, while watching the blades on a piece of farm equipment, but he didn’t sell any until 1927. For the next 30 years or so, snow blowers were hulking machines typically bought by cities and schools. Only recently have they become a suburban staple.

What an awesome "Flip It" this one is -- the world is better for most Americans (really?!)...and also -- after all the whining about hedonic adjustments by our bureaucrats understating inflation, Leonhardt explains how they might be dramatically OVERSTATING inflation. Provocative ariticle.

ESPN Blows It on MNF

2006-09-19T14:21:00.000-04:00

I'm gonna write up a whole post about this in the Digital Revolution theme, but for now, let me just say that I watched a few minutes of last night's Pitt vs. Jacksonville game -- you know, the MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL for 2006 version -- and I'm just appalled at how badly ESPN has dropped the ball. How hard could it be to find some announcers with some sort of clue and some sort of personality in the same vein as Madden and Summerall? And really, more to the point, how hard could it possibly be to have hyped ESPN's Monday Night Football so that it could capture some of the relevance and momentum of ABC's long, long MNF program. MNF on ESPN could have legitimized that network like nothing before it ever could. Fire that producer and get out of the Revolution's way, ESPN.

Launching Cody's Digital Revolution Newsletter

2006-09-15T15:41:00.000-04:00

I'm pretty excited to launch my tech newsletter today, appropriately called Cody's Digital Revolution Newsletter.

The first issue, published today, is titled: Five Stocks That Will Win Big in The Digital Revolution.

You can click here to read a sample of it.

Or click here to sign up for the newsletter -- we're kicking it off at a special offering of a one year subscription for $129 at 35% off the list price.

Thinking Positive (and It's Not Just "Latinos" Who Do So)

2006-09-14T13:05:00.000-04:00

Readers surely know that part of my whole Flip It™ mantra is centered around overcoming the incessant whining and negativity by the mainstream media, the mainstream public and mainstream investment pundits. I got this newsletter today from TrendCentral.com, a company that, in full disclosure, is affiliated with my buds at CAA -- the same folks who brought you the lonelygirl15 headfake/new video paradigm -- and while I think it's a mistake to try to break down analysis by "race" in this acceleratingly (ooh, nice word, Cody!), melted-pot-society, the analysis itself sure rang true to me:

POSITIVITY
With so much negativity in the world—the challenging economy, continuing military conflicts, worldwide famine and disease, and even the mean-spirited tone of celebrity gossip—young people are seeking positive messages and reminders that the world is, in fact, a good place. At the same time, although young Latinos are also concerned about the world, they remain enormously positive in their outlook and perspective. This is a generation that feels remarkably optimistic about their place in the world in the context of how far they’ve come. They see milestones within their reach that their parents only dreamed of—going to college, buying a house, starting a business and they feel confident that, as a generation, they are bound to be more successful. They see Hispanic politicians (Villaraigosa in L.A., Martinez in Miami) in the news, Latina celebrities on magazine covers (Eva Longoria, Shakira), and Latin trends invading the mainstream (Reggaeton, telenovelas, obsession with car culture, and overtly curvy looks on the runways).

However, this relative optimism is not often reflected in the marketing and entertainment they see. Much of the media messages aimed at Latinos focus on the risks they face—the risk of not graduating high school and making it to college, the risk of teenage pregnancy, or the scourge of violence in their schools. Very few marketing campaigns or entertainment properties offer a view that reflects the optimism of this Latino generation. The hunger for positive aspirational Hispanic portrayals was reflected as a number of participants applauded Desperate Housewives for showing a Hispanic family living inside the house, and employing their own gardener.

Right on!

CW on CNBC SquawkBox Tomorrow at 7am EST

2006-09-13T14:28:00.000-04:00

I'll be on CNBC's SquawkBox to talk about the Video Revolution manana at 7am EST. Fun topic, I am jazzed about it. You can read another one of my Trading Blog posts about it at 360 on Apple.

Back to Boycotting College Sports

2006-09-13T11:43:00.000-04:00

When I realized my dream of playing for a nationally-ranked NCAA basketball team, the University of New Mexico Lobos, I was quickly disillusioned and alienated by the evil-doings of my coach, the one and only now-infamous Dave Bliss. From players who didn't have a pot to piss in suddenly driving brand new Eddie Bauer Ford Explorers to the way that somehow none of the scholarship players, including my poorest teammates, didn't have to work during the summer breaks, but still always had good spending money and clothes and what not to the time two of my teammates who were arrested for burglary or something were punished by having to sit out a meaningless game against someone like Hawaii, I didn't have to look hard or long for the stereotypes about college athletics.

How many of my team-mates graduated? I'd guess less than 50%, but I wouldn't know for sure, because I essentially got kicked off the team -- and never looked back -- for calling it like I saw it when the Albuquerque Tribune did a feature story on me. The jist of the story? Well, the call out on the frong page sorta says it all, "The Dreaded Chant: When Lobo fans start chanting for the walk-ons to get in the game, it's meant affectionately. But for Lobo Cody Willard, the chant is the knife in the heart of a proud player who believes he can contribute." My first high-profile "Flip It" perhaps? (BTW, I searched on Google archives for this article, but I guess it's not added...yet.)

Anyway, the day I walked up the ramp at the Pit for the last time, I pretty much had decided that I'd be boycotting college athletics in the same way I boycott Woody Allen movies -- the dude married his ex-wife's daughter, a girl whom he helped raise for crying out loud, and I'm not okay with that -- because of my fundamental objections against the tyranny of the NCAA monopoly. It's not okay that young kids are constantly exploited and lucky to get what is deemed illegal SUVs and clothes by the system that generates hundreds of billions of dollars for itself and its cronies and coaches and publicly-funded schools.

However, my dad and my uncle and my cousins sure do love college sports as most people in this country do (I remember sitting on the bench at UNM and watching the 25,000 wacky fans in the stadium scream horrible things at the refs and wondering how any one who's not actually on the team can possibly care so much as to be so cruel) and I got this forward from my uncle about the bounty that their alma mater (and where I'd paid half the fees to a half-dozen basketball camps as a kid with the money I made working full-time in my pop's animal hospital, contributing to the outsized revenues of the school's basketball program) is receiving from Nike.

Here I'd finally watched a part of a game or two since I caught Vince Young's amazing championship game performance last year, and then this article in the Sports Illustrated College Basketball Blog by Luke Winn reminded me of all that's wrong with the sport and why I'm going to have to put my boycott back on.

Bob Huggins arrived in Manhattan, Kan., in March, and shortly thereafter, big things began to follow. National media attention. A 7-foot-3 high school center from Florida, Jason Bennett. Controversy over wresting rivals.com's No. 1 recruit from the Class of 2007, Michael Beasley, away from Charlotte by hiring 49er assistant Dalonte Hill. But the biggest thing of all -- at least for Kansas State's athletic department -- came last week: a $12.3 million contract with Nike.

Nice bounty for the coach and the school. How much do the kids who will be the ones constantly on TV wearing those swooshes get? From the article...

If I'm Nike, I'm keeping a close eye on what happens the weekend of Sept. 23. That's when Beasley -- and a host of other big-time recruits -- will make official visits and get their first look at the K-State campus. Louisville will be in town to face the Wildcats in football, and Huggins and his staff will no doubt be pulling out all the stops.

Ooh, the recruits will be treated to a coach and a staff who will pull out all the stops! That probably includes some great tours of the campus and some great food and parties. Give the players on the team anything of value -- besides that education that's measured in value in tens of thousands of dollars (the school makes tens of millions of dollars a year on the basketball team, remember) -- and they get criminalized. What a great system!

Oh, and if you're a school who wants to do something right by your student athletes? You could always join one of those other collegiate associations, like the NAIA which has the same damn rules.

I'm back to boycotting college sports -- because free trade and individual rights are important, and the NCAA oppresses free trade and individual rights.

Rolling Down a Window, Please

2006-09-12T19:25:00.000-04:00

As cutthroat as business is in this global economy as it is, the fact that the engineers at Lincoln who designed the Town Car have been complacent since the first design in which they had messed up the simple function of ROLLING DOWN the window the whole way in the backseat speaks volumes as to why the domestic car companies have steadily lost all their marketshare. Fix that mistake already....or just kill the line as is actually happening.

CW on RM: This Revolution Will Be Televised

2006-09-12T17:12:00.000-04:00

This Revolution Will Be Televised
09/12/2006 12:48 PM

Lost in the hubbub about Apple's upcoming announcement, which will almost certainly include the availability of downloadable movies at the iTunes store, is this press release that hit my inbox this morning:

"Blip.tv today announced it is bringing its best user-generated online video to the television through a partnership with Internet video-on-demand service Akimbo. User-generated content is quickly moving from the computer to the TV screen, and blip.tv is leading the way."

You see, as I've been writing for the past few years -- and really laid out in this column -- the video content business is being completely turned on its head by two facts. First, there is no longer a capital-intensive barrier to creating content. Second, distributing content is becoming entirely free.

That's exactly what this deal between Blip.tv and Akimbo make reality: the distribution channels to putting end-user video content on people's home televisions. Slowly, to be sure, it is happening. And that is as revolutionary a development to the entrenched media business models as any change the Internet has brought in the past 10 years.

The major content creators (read: Hollywood studios) have had a symbiotic relationship with the networks that push their content over the "channels" that you get on your TV. They charge the end user a sickening amount per minute of watchable TV by bundling hours of unwatchable crap with hundreds of unwatchable channels.

Just as the music label and distribution model has been ruined by the unbundling of songs from entire albums, the TV model is facing the writing on the wall. The content creators and content distributors have made hundreds of billions of dollars using these models since the first TV show was broadcast in 1941. Uh-oh.

In the next few years, we're going to see successful "television" series made by "users" who will create entirely new paradigms of programming. You might call YouTube.com's Lonelygirl15, which James wrote about in his must-read "Blog Watch" yesterday, the first shot across the bow in this new shift. This is rather ironic, given the recent reports that she is a creation of Hollywood's big Creative Artists' Agency. (Full disclosure: I have affiliations with them.)

When these series get legs -- and they will -- they'll sometimes be picked up by the major studios and/or outlet channels. And other times, often by the creator's own choice in order to stay outside of the "system," they'll be distributed by companies like Akimbo.

While Apple's rightly going to focus on Hollywood content in its announcements today, it too will eventually become a distributor of user-generated content. Google will also benefit from this coming trend. So will others.

The Hollywood content owners and creators will continue to benefit from the explosion of their addressable market, as more and more of the world's population comes online and new outlets for their content continue to explode.

Who will suffer? The guys who own the pipes that have centrally controlled what content they push on their customers. They can't stop the revolution, which is a term I've trademarked exactly because they can't. CBS, Viacom, even the Fox assets inside of my new News Corp. purchase -- they are on the wrong side of this slowly but surely coming paradigm shift.

CW on RM: The Real Problem With Xbox 360

2006-09-12T11:53:00.000-04:00

The Real Problem With Xbox 360
09/11/2006 2:10 PM

I might have been the single most vocal bull on Microsoft for the past few months, and I remain convinced that it is a "safe" tech stock with lots of upside ahead of it.

That said, I'm concerned about one area in particular. Given that I'm Mr. "Flip It," that worry is a very recent development that most pundits have been proclaiming as a new positive: the gaming console business.

I think Sony's going to wallop Microsoft something awful when the PS3 finally comes out en masse sometime in 2007. Sony's way behind schedule after having postponed the rollout of the PS3 for a second time, most recently blaming production delays in the Blue-Ray DVD technology that it is including in every PS3.

Most of the commentary I've read has explained that the delay will boost Microsoft's fortunes for the Xbox 360 because it'll be widely available this holiday season and the PS3 won't be. Yeah, that's all true. Sony will sell a few hundred thousand fewer PS3s and Microsoft a few hundred thousand more Xbox 360s this Christmas season. Given that more than 50 million copies of PS2 and the original Xbox were sold in the U.S. over the past five years, it's not as if that rounding error of a difference will determine which machine dominates.

And that leads me to the real problem with Xbox 360 -- it's just not that great a machine. The PS3 is going to be much cooler with much better graphics and movie playability. Xbox 360 is fun, and it looks much cooler than the original Xbox. But it's not really all that much more functional or fast than my old Xbox.

The graphics -- yeah, incrementally improved. So is the way most games save themselves and so on. And I've seen some rather amazing modified versions by obsessive gaming geeks who tap into the unutilized processing power and storage capabilities of the Xbox 360.

But without a meaningful improvement in the system, something from which a killer app/revolutionary new game can be developed, Microsoft is only getting those of us who feel like we must have the latest and greatest -- whether because we're geeks, competitive, jocks or whatever. The rest of the 50 million-plus gamers in this country rightly see no reason to upgrade.

Microsoft rushed this system out to get a head start on Sony and Nintendo in the next generation of consoles. In their rush, Softee rolled out a 2.5G box instead of a 3G. That head start has amounted to a whopping 2 million units -- and that small number isn't attributable to shortages. The lack of sales is due to lack of demand for a 2.5G system.

We won't know whether Sony or Nintendo will fare any better until the systems roll out, the games get developed and we see if the forces of critical mass and de facto standardization hit on their next-gen games.

Maybe the Blue-Ray technology will enable some unthought of killer apps. Maybe none of the new games will revolutionize and we'll call this generation of video games the 2.5G mistake. Certainly, Xbox isn't going to be "the" catalyst to drive Microsoft to new highs. It'll have to be one of the many other ways to win with Softee, including the rollout of Vista, the value of MSN, the PocketPC, or the IPTV platform.

I'll stick with my Microsoft, but not because of any success in the Xbox or failure in the PS3.

Finding Sleep and Commercializing 9/11

2006-09-12T09:52:00.000-04:00

Since I got back from my flyfishing trip (pics and stories coming in the next day or two...), I'd been having a terrible time sleeping. I thought it was just usual stress about work, etc, but last night I got home from teaching my first class of "The Valuation of Innovation" at Seton Hall at 9pm-ish and I fell onto my couch and woke up to a bad episode of Law & Order on the TV at 10:40ish. Sometimes I can't ever fall back asleep when I wake up so quickly from a night-time sleep, but I barely mustered the energy to get to my bed where I fell face first and didn't wake up til 7am this morning.

Ahh, sleep. Makes me think that maybe it's been this endless coverage and over-the-top media hype/commercialization of 9/11 that's been my biggest sleep deterrent of late.

The Cody Show: Still ToY (Up at Night)

2006-09-10T21:30:00.000-04:00

Last summer I really got hit hard with some 9/11 flashbacks of memories that I'd basically convinced myself weren't entirely of reality. In the midst of dealing with those night-terrors, I decided I'd make a movie/music-video/modern art short film on the nights whenever I'd not sleep. I wonder how much if at all working on this piece helped me deal with my issues over the event, but it did make me focus on it, which is still something I am struggling with, as I avoid all news pieces and specials about 9/11 this weekend. Anyway, here it is:

I've never published the full version of the song, mainly because I struggled with being okay with the lyrics for so long. It is what it is though, and as I come to terms with my guilty feelings over my 9/11 experience (rightly or wrongly, whatever), I am okay recognizing them in lyric form too. Here's the full song (right click to download).

Click here for a high quality, downloadable version in quicktime. (right click to save, left click to play in the browser)

CW Featured in NY Daily News Article about Post-9/11 NYC

2006-09-09T20:16:00.000-04:00

They bet on biz to bounce back

New Yorkers who refused to give up their business dreams after the terror attacks have played a major part in helping the city's economy rebound in dramatic style

BY GREG WILSON
DAILY NEWS CITY HALL BUREAU

When the city's economy was on the ropes, battered by a post-9/11 recession and a bear stampede on Wall Street, some New Yorkers stood fast and gambled on Gotham - and themselves.

Rebuilding their own lives and reinventing the city's staggered economy in the process, they joined the swelling ranks of the self-employed. Five years later, from tourism to technology, from finance to food, they are helping fuel the city's remarkable rebound since 9/11.

"It reflects the dynamic and entrepreneurial character of the New York City economy," said Mitchell Moss, professor of Urban Policy and Planning at NYU's Wagner School.

The number of self-employed workers in the city rose to 719,986 from 554,204 between 2000 and 2004, a jump of 30%, according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. While those figures are the latest available, Moss believes the trend has accelerated.

"Between the dot.com collapse, a trend of mergers among big companies and 9/11, you had a lot of extremely talented people looking for work," Moss said. "A lot of them, either by necessity or choice, went into business for themselves."

The new generation of risk takers is finding success and confounding some experts who predicted that the city would never come back economically.

"The vigor with which New York City rebounded surprised a lot of people," said Jason Bram, who researches economic trends in the region for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. "What ended up happening was much closer to the best-case scenario than the worst."

It's not just entrepreneurs that have brought the city back. Unemployment is at an 18-year low, putting the number of payroll jobs within 100,000 of the pre-9/11 high of January, 2001.

But a recent Federal Reserve report authored by Bram and fellow Fed researcher James Orr bore out Moss' theory that the burgeoning self-employed sector has a huge and sometimes hidden impact on the local economy. The report suggests a major shift of payroll workers - who count in unemployment figures - to the self-employed ranks, where they do not, could be disguising an even rosier picture.

But James Parrott, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, said there's another side to the boom in self-employment. Parrott said the best measure of the job market is wages. He says they're falling when adjusted for inflation.

"The 10% drop in the real median wage for college-educated city workers over the past three years reflects a weak labor market," said Parrott, who said his research shows most of the city's self-employed make less than $20,000 a year. "In this environment, people have been turning to self-employment for any income at all."

But city Department of Small Business Services Commissioner Robert Walsh sees the self-employment surge differently.

Walsh believes the trend taps the ideas and passion of some of the city's most talented people. His agency, which supports new businesses, has more than doubled in size since Mayor Bloomberg - the city's most successful small businessman - appointed him.

"You think of where the mayor started - four men in a small office with a coffee pot and a dream," Walsh said. "It worked out very well for him.

"I see people all the time who have a great idea and a passion. They have that fire in the belly to make their dream work, and it is truly fascinating."

Walsh's department has "solution centers" throughout the five boroughs where staffers help aspiring entrepreneurs get started, including support with financing, business planning and finding employees.

Walsh said information services, technology, hospitality and food service are among the growth industries for people starting businesses.

And Moss said there has never been a better time for people to strike out on their own.

"The ability of people to function in small business has been enhanced by information technology," Moss said. "One of the great changes is that people can work from home, from Starbucks, or even from Central Park."

* * *
The hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs driving an increasingly dynamic post 9/11 economy include people from around the world working in all sectors. Here's a look at a few:

Cody Willard

Cody Willard, a Wall Street wonder at 25, lost his job a week before 9/11. Then the terror attacks took his apartment in Battery Park City, prompting a head-clearing, trek across the country. Now 33, Willard runs a booming hedge fund, writes regular columns for the Financial Times and TheStreet.com and appears frequently on TV, touting the opportunities of a renewed tech revolution.

The youngest partner ever at Oppenheimer & Co.'s Lanyi Research, Willard had moved on to a venture capital firm when a receding economy cost him his job Sept. 4, 2001. The New Mexico native had no idea how much worse things would get for him and his adopted city just days later. But he regrouped in Austin, Tex., and returned months later with a dream and a vengeance.

"I knew that this city, harsh and lonely as it can be, was the only place for me to realize my dreams," says Willard, who is finally undergoing therapy for 9/11-induced post traumatic stress disorder. "I belong in New York City, and I always have. It's the capital of the universe and I still strive to fit in - and strive to be different. Which is exactly the point, no?"

Ilir Sela

Ilir Sela, 26, drained his savings to start Nerd Force out of a tiny rented office on Staten Island three years ago. Starting his own business was less a leap of faith than an act of necessity: After graduating from CUNY Staten Island with a computer science degree, nobody else would give him a job.

Nerd Force quickly morphed from web designer to on-the-go IT for small business. Now the company employs 25 and its distinctive yellow Scion minivans are seen all over the Island.

Ironically, the bread and butter of Sela's own business is helping other entrepreneurs. And given the local explosion of small business, he figures his client base is only going to grow.

"Due to 9/11 and the poor job market that followed, a lot of small businesses were born," explained Sela, whose family came here from Albania in 1990. "They were in need of IT support, but they didn't have the budget to do it in-house."

As for Sela, his business may not stay so small: He's already been approached about franchising rights.

Debra Harris

Debra Harris and her husband, John Shepherd, used to watch from their Battery Park City apartment as hordes of tourists visited the World Trade Center prior to 9/11.

Harris, 38, dreamed of offering them the same tour of the birthplace of hip hop culture that she gave friends and relatives who visited her. The couple, displaced for seven months following the attacks, spent much of the time putting together their business plan. Less than a year after the attacks, they launched Hush Tours.

"It's been great to start with a dream and then work hard to make it come true."

Now regular charter buses, hosted by rap legends Kurtis Blow, Kool Herc, Rahiem and Grand Master Caz take tourists from around the world through Harlem and the Bronx, where they see the graffiti wall of fame in Spanish Harlem, the Apollo Theatre, and the numerous city parks where hip hop pioneers paid their dues.

The rollicking bus rides feature a pulsating beat, the chance for tourists to try their hands at rap and Japanese translators.

Next up for Hush Tours: routes through Brooklyn and Queens, which have hip hop roots of their own.

Veronica Leung

August of 2001 was the month Veronica Leung's fledgling restaurant on East Broadway in Chinatown, Dim Sum Go Go, finally turned the corner.

The divorced former housewife's dream was starting to work: tables were full, the kitchen was humming and dinner checks wereat last covering expenses.

"I was really happy, and September - the first 10 days before 9/11 were great," recalled Leung. "I said, "'Veronica, we did it.'"

When the dust of the terrorist attacks cleared, Lower Manhattan and Chinatown were left crippled. Leung's dream nearly died.

"There were days when I thought I would never make it," she said. "There were no customers, and no one would lend money to a new restaurant to help me get by."

Somehow, Leung hung on, betting that when New Yorkers got back on their feet, their appetite for good Chinese food would be as ravenous as ever. Now the 50-something restaurateur's biggest problem is finding tables for hungry customers. The Shanghai-born Leung's battle-tested dream is alive again.

"I'm the bookkeeper, the host, the waitress - you name it," she said. "And I am loving it."

CW on RM: Slicing Up Apple's News

2006-09-08T18:23:00.000-04:00

Slicing Up Apple's News
09/08/2006 11:52 AM

So the tech, media and investment worlds are holding their collective breath in outsized anticipation of what Apple will reveal in the announcement on Sept. 12.

Its stock has been pretty strong lately, especially after bottoming amid the options controversy in the middle of the summer. (You know, the "Hey, don't worry about the options scandal because Steve Jobs canceled those options after they were totally worthless, and we gave him tons of valuable stock to replace it!" revelations.)

The Street seems to have convinced itself that the risks surrounding those options irregularities have passed, though I have my doubts about that. Therefore, the focus has moved back to the fundamentals and new product potential. As good as Apple's fundies are and as uniquely positioned as it is for meaningful new product introductions, the stock's been rightly moving higher.

Tuesday's announcement will most likely include something about how Apple will offer downloadable movies at the iTunes storefront. Traders who are looking for a pop next week had better hope for more than that because expectations for this announcement are running rampant. Here are some possible new products and what I'd expect the stock to do, based on each potential new product:

A living room computer that enables easy downloading of content from the Internet and iTunes, perhaps even playing high-definition content. If there's anything besides movie downloads from iTunes in the announcement, this is what I'd expect. The stock would probably hang tough around $73 or so if this gets rolled out.

An iPod phone. An Apple-branded phone that really is a full-on video iPod would be a huge, huge hit. I don't expect this rollout yet, but if it were to happen Tuesday, I'd look for a 5% to 10% pop in the stock.

A new lineup of video iPod and/or iPod nanos. If the announcement is about new iPods that aren't phones, they sure as heck better have something else awesomely compelling about them. Bluetooth enablement won't be enough -- neither will a touch screen. I'd look for 5% hit if it's "just" new iPods and downloadable movies.

Miscellaneous. If something comes out of left field, that would surprise just about everyone, including me. The stock's action would obviously depend on just how cool (or uncool) the product is.

Just movie downloads. The market is expecting more than this, and if it's just movie downloads from iTunes, I figure a hit of about 5%.

The upshot is that this isn't exactly a good risk/reward for a trade, as most scenarios that I expect to play out next week entail some downside. Part of the reason for my pessimism is the way the market has just not been trading well and seems to be selling most news.

I still own a decent bit of Apple from much, much lower levels and continue to hold it as the long-term outlook -- as long as the options debacle doesn't kill it -- is very bullish. But I wouldn't want to flip it for a trade into next week.

By the way, the last time the hype got this big was right around the time Apple announced its stupid iPod HiFi system. I had gone on CNBC before it was announced and downplayed it.

You Know What They Say About Assess

2006-09-08T13:44:00.000-04:00

I don't want to be too mean, so I won't name names on this one, but I thought I'd share this pretty funny email from a mid-cap tech company's PR firm that arrived in my inbox just now. When I first saw the subject I thought it'd just been a mistake as they typed that subject line in, and figured -- been there, done that, empathize. But it's in the "body" of the email too:

Subject: How Do Employers Asses Their Employees' Performance?

Body: How do employers asses their employees’ performance? Are they showing results? Is he/she a leader? Did they receive the proper training? Are the employees’ goals aligned with the company’s objective?

...

Anyway, back to work.

Confessional: Love for Judge Judy

2006-09-07T11:56:00.000-04:00

It's true -- I watch Judge Judy when I catch it on TV. I love how cutthroat she is; you better know that there are only three answers to any of her questions: yes, no, or I don't know I'll find out. And there's nothing better than when she senses BS and then digs and prods until she gets the BS out in the open for everyone to see.

You wanna see a modern-day "Perry Mason" in action, it's not that contrived L&O spinoff with D'Onofrio -- It's Judge Judy.

I think I'd marry Judge Judy if she were younger...well, that or at least I'm gonna set my Time Warner DVR -- which completely blows compared to Tivo in overall functionality (more on that in an upcoming RealMoney column) -- to start recording that show.

Uneasy at This 9/11 Anniversary

2006-09-06T22:01:00.000-04:00

I'm flipping through my handful of HD channels on my plasma television when I once again can't turn the channel once I get to 706 Time Warner Cable NYC and the amazing Discovery Channel in HD. This time they have this show on called "Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb", and they are showing these what seem to be real-time clips of the first explosions of the A-Bomb and I've got the volume turned up on my system and I'm almost doubling over in shock over the impact these Hydrogen bombs are making. The color video of Grable, a 15 Kiloton bomb shot out of a cannon on May 25, 1953 is so crisp, so cold and scorched in the HD imagery. The power of the bomb. The power of mankind.

Great pine trees, crisp from a dry desert summer, are windswept as and pulled from their earth by mankind's creation as a toothpick is from a cheap glass trey at any remarkably cheap steakhouse in any city where a huge percentage of this population relative to any other civilization's population in the history of the planet can afford to eat meat. Buses like those that I rode in and my parents rode in and children still ride in today are stripped of their paint, their glass, their metal til they are skeletoned and melted into one piece.

The awesome power unleashed in the torrent and delivered by the system on my wall really do almost make me double over. The mushroom clouds, in what might or might not be slow motion are the buildings collapsing as I ran with my ex's cat, Marquis de Marmalade so named because he was one 23 pound portly orange tabbie-gentleman, in a porta-cage in my hand on that fateful day almost exactly five years ago.

And you know what...the worst part of writing about this is the same reason I don't talk about it...I feel so guilty for not having somehow helped people get out...whew, that hurts to write...

I am feeling uneasy about this anniversary. Restless nerves.

Worried About My Lungs

2006-09-06T11:00:00.001-04:00

At some point, soon after 9/11, I fought through all the barricades, police check points and other obstacles to get down to my apartment building in Battery Park City near ground zero. I rode my bike down and had to show my driver's license, sometimes two bills with my name and address on them and mainly use the force ("these are not the droids you want"...er, "I am approved to be on my way to my apartment down there at ground zero") to get "home".

The lobby of my apartment building was full of cots and dozens of heroic firefighters were sleeping there. I hiked up to the 23rd floor where my apartment was and got my two guitars, my computer and a few clothes and headed back down.

Storming right past the barricades and firefighters smoking cigarrettes outside my building, I went out the back straight into ground zero where my car had been parked and where I'd been about to move it when the second plane had hit and dropped debris all over. I found my car and while cars on either side of it were pretty much done for, I could make out the design of my car under the mound of drying, caking sludge. I scooped it out with both hands and I got the door open. I threw my gear in and, to my pleasant surprise, the car started on first turn.

I drove my car out of the area and on up to the upper west side where my friend, Greta, was working at a home-office where I could base myself for the afternoon. As hard as it was getting down to ground zero, you should have seen the shocked looks as the firefighters and police and soldiers along the way out would open their gates for this sludge-covered Nissan Maxima coming out from the stench and steaming hole of ground zero. I cried as I drove and nobody stopped me.

I think it's a healthy thing that I've started therapy to deal with some of this -- and especially about some of the individual horrors I saw on the day itself. The whole of it obviously weighs heavily on me still.

On top of it, I think I'm going to have to go to the doctor to have my lungs checked out. I've never really been much of a believer in "asthma" because as the hard core athlete I was growing up I'd always figure any time I'd be short of breath it was an indication that I mainly just needed to get in better shape. And it took a lot for me to get out of breath as I was obsessive in my workouts. I figure many kids use the "asthma" thing as a crutch for not pushing it harder.

At any rate, my lungs bug me a little bit sometimes lately. Maybe it's just a symptom of geting older, maybe it's just that I don't work out like that anymore. But all these press reports this week about lung problems in 9/11 workers have me thinking that maybe I need to have it checked out.

P.S. I'm not sure what it means but I find it interesting as an aside that both times I've written about my apartment and 9/11 we have used a picture from the cover of the Economist.

Hoping It's Insults From Ancient PR Policies, and, Learning to Fight Darfur's Horrors

2006-09-05T22:14:00.000-04:00

I can't remember the last time I had the patience to sit through much more than five minutes of a traditional newscast. I find the pace is too slow for my Internet-paced brain. That, and the fact that the topics they most often choose to focus on are often pointless in the extreme (or is pointless a superlative?). But isn't it mainly just infruriating how the media will print and broadcast ("push!") the most insulting comments from those who serve us and lead us in government?

I'm watching The News Hour with Jim Lehrer tonight and they show a clip of a Democrat citing some ridiculous study that shamefully purports to somehow scientifically refute some other ridiculous study from a similarly in-the-pocket research shop of that other fraternity, er, "mainstream political party" -- that we collectively pretend provide us some substance of the actual concept of democracy. Said report cited by the Sigma Chi, er, Democrat dude purportedly scientifically proving that we're safer today because of some combined, compromised foreign political policies that the Republican party I suppose rightly claims as being mostly closest to their compromised-among-hundreds-of-millions-of-individuals-in-the-fraternity (er, party). This followed a similarly embarrassing clip from the President (fraternities and this nation each have Presidents, right? Do sororities call their presidents, "Presidents"? Have to ask my mom that one) in which he cited that other report.

On a "flip it" side of things, I'd like to think that maybe all these endless insults and avoidance of responsibility for both the good and the bad of this world is all the collective result of ancient political PR parties and that most of the time these guys who can't possibly be so stupid as to believe for one second their own spewing of this pointlessness (to the extreme...or superlative?) is somehow going to determine whether each us "public" individuals out here think the policies of frat parties', er, political parties in power are responsible for how protected we are or aren't. It might be just a wee bit more complicated than that, no?

But then again, sometimes optimism can be naivety , just as sometimes pessimism can be cynicism. (And sometimes that's okay, btw.)

It also upset when they briefly overviewed the the horrors of of Darfur and the rest of Sudan and they bothered to show and appeared to objectively imply that the people they chose to quote who shamefully/horrifyingly (neither superlatives, right (...or wrong?) ) said that a UN deployment of troops would be about expanding US/western values (man, I think I'm making the jackass they quoted sound good here). THE PEOPLE, INDIVIDUALS, IN DARFUR ARE BEING SLAUGHTERED. Seriously, this is like one of the the very few ways in which the UN could do some good and serve its purpose.

It's as if objectivity of any sense gets suspended in the name of trying to remain objective. The horrid murderers and criminals which the mainstream press chooses to give any semblance of credibility as a government might be a case of when objectivity dictates not implicitly verifying such a body as a government. Which is conceptually parallel to the idea of my complaining about the made-for-scroll-paper-town-crying coverage of the insulting claims/soundbites of our own politicians.

A few frustrations, er, "flip it's" in this one, eh? Let's keep reading, learning and trying to figure out ways to help.

Apples and Dylans -- They Don't Mix

2006-09-05T16:59:00.000-04:00

Now I love Apple, as most people know. I've owned the stock since the dawn of their foray into the music business and continue to hold it.

And I have come to truly love the mind, lyrics, music and performances by Bob Dylan since I finally dove into his full, original non-greatest-hits albums. He's truly a genius, a legend, and I can gush about him for hours.

But I am sickened by his endorsing Apple, the iPod and iTunes with their new campaign. What happened to artist integrity? What happened to not selling out? What happened to fighting the damn system? Is Dylan even human anymore or is he a cyborg now since he's been fully assimulated into the system?

What's next -- The Who singing for the intro to Friends and the Rembrandts singing the intro for CSI? Er, somethign like that, right?

And then what -- maybe Jimmy Page can play for the opening on of the New York Stock Exchange. Wouldn't that really be the ultimate sell-out? Oh, wait, that already happened too didn't it?

Only Neil Young and his "This Note's for You" mentality remains pure, no?

Sad, really. But rock n roll will never die, even if these fallen stars' principles already have.

Referring to Oneself Is a Sign of Sanity

2006-09-05T12:00:00.000-04:00

I was too excited about coming into work today to get much sleep last night. And at some point, I was watching a clip from one of the 2072 actual Law & Order spin offs (as opposed to the 823,208 Law & Order knockoffs) that is also a spin off of Perry Mason and which stars that one strangely named dude who's a good actor.

Anyway, the point is that as he's breaking down this dude who's trying to convince them of his innocence by saying his shrine to women's underwear and dead animals is simply a method of method acting, the bad guy says, "I've seen that type of stuff on TV. You know, all those forensic cop shows." And I'm wondering to myself -- you know, if they really wanted to make it realistic wouldn't they specifically refer to the name "Law & Order" in that dialogue?

You know they won't because conventional wisdom would tell you that it's unrealistic to refer to one's own show in the show. Right? I mean, they'll pretend that their own shows don't exist in the actual show because they think that people would think that'd be disingenuous. But that's wrong, man -- flip it. Shows should refer to themselves to remain realistic.

Then again, would it make sense if that D'Onofrio's character referred to his own character? Pandora's box? Maybe that's where the saying of "referring to oneself in the third person is a sign of insanity" comes from. Speaking of which, I always wonder if the person saying that is referring to oneself in the third person by using the word "oneself."

Whatever. I guess I'll get back to the work that I was too excited about to sleep last night. Now that I've finished this post. (Ah, yeah, I referred to my own post in the post -- that keeps it real, according to this post, right?)

Wishing I Could Use My Hands to Wash and Dry My Hands

2006-09-05T02:54:00.000-04:00

Ah, it's great to be back in NYC. Amazing how quickly our perspective of our own life can change when we get a little breather. I just took my first week off in more than 3.5 years. I didn't look at a newspaper, I didn't read a magazine, I didn't let any of the central powers broadcast any of their propagandic (ooh, I like that one) take on the news to me over a radio or TV. I was mostly in the middle of nowhere on the border of Colorado and New Mexico and spent several days hiking and camping all alone. I'll post more about my reflections, my experiences and what not with some pictures throughout this week.

But I had one pressing observation about the conveniences of our modern world that hit me when I got to the airport in Denver on my way back.

I can't work these automatic sinks or hand dryers. It drives me crazy. First of all, I can be a bit of a germ freak when I'm in a city (dirt and mud and stuff don't bother me so much in the country....but all these people in the cities...) and so I so very much want to love these sinks and hand dryers that are supposed to work without me ever having to touch them. And second of all, aren't they supposed to be pretty much idiot-proof? I think I must be beyond indiocy when it comes to simple, every day tasks like washing and drying my hands. I can't ever get these damn machines to turn on. I move my hands, up closer to the sink or the blower -- nothing. I move my hands further away -- nothing. I move my hands towards me, away from me and suddenly they'll turn on. For like two seconds. And then I can't find the sweet spot again. I look around at the 7 out of the 23 other guys in the bathroom who bother to wash their hands and they don't seem to be having any problems with these auto machines. What's my problem?!

I'd almost rather just use my own hands to wash and dry my hands, you know?

Digital Revolution Video of the Day

2006-09-01T17:39:00.000-04:00

Today's video is a very funny spoof of a classic film. I hope you enjoy it.

Digital Revolution Video of the Day

2006-08-31T16:11:00.000-04:00

During a recent show, Steven Colbert of Comedy Central's Colbert Report taped himself fighting with a lightsaber in front of a green screen background. He then challanged his fans to edit the background and upload the video to YouTube.com.

Today's video is one of those entries, inspired no doubt by a certain tech company's advertising. I hope you enjoy it.

Digital Revolution Video of the Day

2006-08-30T18:02:00.000-04:00

Here is today's video, how many have you read?

Digital Revolution Video of the Day

2006-08-29T11:08:00.000-04:00

Here is today's video, it's called "Slo-Mo Home Depot". I hope you enjoy it.

Cody in FT: Inside curve: Waiting for the noise pollution to die down

2006-08-28T13:06:00.000-04:00

Is a US recession already a foregone conclusion? Is that really what the markets, the fundamentals and the Federal Reserve are telling us? I’d argue that the set-up at the moment is more “binary”. Two starkly different outcomes look possible.

Certainly, the US economy has cooled from the torrid pace that had surprised all those economists that shoot off their guesses about the future of this $13,000bn economy in the first few months of the year, writes Cody Willard. | Read

Digital Revolution Video of the Day

2006-08-28T12:42:00.001-04:00

Hello readers, my name is Jonathan. While Cody is on vacation this week, I will be posting a "Digital Revolution Video of the Day". I hope you enjoy them.

Today's video shows a man solving a Rubik cube ... in 26 seconds ... using one hand!

CW on RM: The Wisdom Found in 'What if'

2006-08-25T14:48:00.000-04:00

The Wisdom Found in 'What if'
08/25/2006 1:19 PM

What if I go fly fishing and camping in the mountains of southern Colorado next week and never come back to New York City? What if I could just let go of all the stress and pressures that come with running a fund in public to boot?

I'd have thought going to cash and subsequently being pleasantly surprised by a market collapse would alleviate some of the constant stress that comes with running other people's money. I'd have thought catching a big move in my Microsoft calls and further distancing myself from the market would help that omnipresent stomach knot that I whine about sometimes in these pages. I'd have thought that taking a break from being mostly aggressive in the market for the last 3 1/2 years of running this fund would have made this summer less stressful than last summer was.

And you know, I suppose that's all true to some extent. As I've outlined before, the pain that comes with persevering through the drawdowns -- especially big ones like I had last summer -- is brutal and horrifying. And I'm not brutalized (well, by some of my readers I am, but what's new there?) or horrified this summer.

But it's still stressful, isn't it? What if the market takes off while I'm still mostly in cash and Mister Softee? What if Mister Softee blows up? What if I start putting some money to work and immediately get crushed?

It reminds me of that ol' Marvel Comics series that I loved as a kid, What If, although it explored past events for characters, such as Captain America winning the 1980 presidential election.

I often think of that series when I write my "What's on My Mind" pieces on Friday afternoons, such as when I recently wondered what the setup would look like if Greenspan were still Fed chairman instead of Ben Bernanke.

We as investors always need to ask ourselves "what if." That analysis helps us determine our own risk/reward and can give perspective, such as the differences between Greenie and Ben.

It's an important tool, and while I wish that asking "what if" didn't stress me out like it does, I will, unfortunately, be asking myself that question constantly next week. I hope to have some new answers when I get back.

See you Sept 5.

The West Coast Blog Mafia

2006-08-24T18:04:00.000-04:00

I'm gonna have to do more work on this idea, but is anybody else about as sick of what I call the "West Coast Blog Mafia" as I am? If you're a blogger, you know what I'm talking about.

Maybe I'm paranoid, as it's true that I like my independence and I certainly like to strive to rail against whatever I perceive to be "the system" (meaning pretty much any of "the system"s that exclude outsiders, free-thinking, etc). The West Coast Blog Mafia all link to each other and high-five each other and affirm each other's brilliance, you know? And, like all mobsters -- you're either in their mafia or you're not.

It's sorta' heartbreaking to see a "system", a "clique" or as I call it here, a "mafia" developing in what's supposed to be a wild west, meritocratic blogosphere. But it is what it is. And it's a shame.

That Addictive HD

2006-08-24T16:35:00.000-04:00

I often write about how we'll eventually be able to "pull" whatever content we want off the net rather than having to let the centrally-controlled powers-that-be "push" that content to us. Most of that video content that we "pull" off the net at Youtube.com and what not is not exactly HD.

That will change over time, but in the meantime, I don't know if you guys realize it, but HD really is pretty awesome. We've got a 102" DLP HD projector from InFocus in my office and I've got a 42" Plasma Panasonic at my apartment. One thing I've noticed is that I can't hardly watch non-HD on my cable systems now. Might as well watch YouTube.

I think I've seen 10x more Discovery Channel in the last couple months than I'd seen in the rest of my life combined. Sharks, tigers, even just clips of the Grand Canyon, which my father and I almost died in once in a bad idea camping trip back in college -- it doesn't matter, you just can't take your eyes off it.

A New, Improved MetroCard

2006-08-22T16:50:00.000-04:00

For a while when I lived in Harlem, it was a good thing I had a bicycle, because there were a few periods of time when I ran out of money for even a subway until I got my next paycheck. Since 9/11, I rarely ride the subway. It seems that when people were running around in panic after the planes hit and I was surrounded these masses, one of my primary fears was to lose control of where I was headed. Crowds in a panic are scary things, and it terrifies me to picture being underground when the next attack hits NYC (which hopefully will be many years from now, but who knows.)

But anyway, here's an idea that came to me when I was with my pop going to meet my mom and an ex-girlfriend a while ago. I suppose I could try to monetize the idea, but what the hell, Andrew Lanyi taught me long ago that pro bono (while cynically never really pro bono) is good thing.

Why don't they print the subway map on the back of each MetroCard? Even if just the subway map of Manhattan, it'd still be great to have right there on the back of the Metro Card. It'd fit pretty nicely.

And on the front? How about selling advertisement space instead of that stupid yellow MetroCard and MTA logo? Create more revenues and help lower prices for the taxpayers who get screwed by having to subsidize the MTA and then pay $2 to use the subway or bus.

I think it'd work. Too bad bureaucrats never try to help the people they purportedly help.

Best Damn Rehash Ever

2006-08-21T23:52:00.000-04:00

Tonight's question: Who's dominated by group think more -- TV producers or hedge fund managers?

Don't these sports shows always drive you crazy with how conservative these guys always are with their picks. Tonight I happened to flip to the Best Damn Sports Show Ever and for the first time damn time ever, I actually made it through more than like 30 seconds of the pointless banter since they were doing a Top 50 Best Finishes Countdown. After they got to the top five, I could pretty much name each of what was going come up.

And #1? Yeah, REAL shocker that "The Play" kickoff return from Cal v Stanford was. Not that it's not an absolutely thrilling play, but come on. It's not like there was some championship on the line or something. If you're going to put a show together like this, how about shaking it up a little bit? To copy the same list as every other greatest finishes ever is pretty much pointless.

PS. How bad are these "Who's #1" shows on ESPN Classic? The concept is great, but those stupid jazzy raps are so cheesy it's insulting. And the only footage they ever show is of interviewed people and photographs of whatever they're talking about. Hey, producer -- you do realize we watch TV to see video footage? Thank goodness the content revolution will put these incompetent producers out to pasture once and for all. Too bad that's still years away.

Present at the Reunion, or, Alone. By Choice.

2006-08-20T22:11:00.000-04:00

Ah, the reunion. We didn't have a ten year for some reason that nobody who came to the event could explain, but whatever. So we had ourselves a 15-year. Class of 1991, Ruidoso High School. I've never gone to a college or high school reunion (hell, I didn't even bother to go to my college graduation as I'd bought a one-way ticket to NYC and caught a plane out a couple hours after my last final at University of New Mexico) so I really have no frame of reference as to what a reunion is supposed to be like, but I'd have a hard time believing anything could top the setting we had for this one.

Elyn, one of the oldest friends I have in the world whom I trade emails with often to this day, so graciously set up the whole event at the soccer fields at White Mountain Elementary School, where we'd gone to third through fifth grade. I'd also played in about a million soccer games on those fields on our way to winning the little kids' state championship back in like fourth grade or something before I'd foolishly made the mistake to focus on only the "big three" sports.

I'd been so nervous to show up at the event, as I didn't know what we'd say, who'd be doing what, and I knew that if they'd ask, I'd not have much to talk about except for my work and NYC life. Family? Kids? Wife? Girlfriend? Hell, dog, cat? I got nothing.

I dragged my little sister Lindsay to the event as my date (and possible buffer), but as soon I got to the fields, I felt transported back to childhood. I remembered running track at the end of the year track meet -- oh what a sweet memory. And then so many of the people I've known longer than anyone in my life were streaming in. Most with their beautiful kids in tote. I think only 12 or so people out of our class of 80ish showed up. I sure wish more people had come, but what can you do?

But what was so neat was that almost all of the people who did come were the people who'd actually gone through the Ruidoso School System for pretty much their entire education. A few had moved before graduation, others had moved into town after kindergarten, but these were truly "my people" in that they had experienced the same town, teachers, principals, flash floods, forest fires, cliques, opportunities, stores, sports, the endless plane crashes in town (including the one which crashed in my front yard up the road from the school, an experience I'll write about soon), and so many life events that I had.

It was beautiful. I sat and talked with so many of my friends that I'd lost touch with and at various points wondered about. We talked and asked about everyone. Interestingly, as I often feel like I've lost touch with so many friends and never have been much of a stereotypical gossipper, I think I might have known more about more people than just about anyone else there. Then again, maybe everyone walks away from these things thinking that.

I also got to see some other former classmates later that afternoon, including the first girl I ever, well, felt up. Of course, I also remember getting in trouble for jumping on her bed when we were like three years old, so what can I say? I've known her forever. Though I felt again like I was in some sort of time-space wrinkle as I pulled up behind the old lumber yard where I'd loaded I don't know how many tons of wood over the years for various building projects. I even remembered visiting the old house behind it as I pulled into the driveway of one of the now-deceased patriarchs of the village where she and my other old friends were hanging.

Nervous as I was when I pulled up in my 1976 Rusted old F150 pickup truck to my first day of high school, I got out of my mom's giant SUV and walked up to the porch. Awkwardly at first, we eventually broke the ice with a toast to 2006, and I sipped on some sort of spiked beverage.

Afterward, I stopped back by Elyn's, where we had spent part of the afternoon, and more people whom I'd known pretty much all my life were there, and we all piled into a couple big vehicles and headed downtown. A half beer in and having just ordered a new round, I realize I'd not eaten dinner. So Vince and I hop into my mom's vehicle and head to the one and only Ole Taco where my parents had gotten sick once when I was a little kid and I loved to eat at anyway.

After chatting for a while with Vince's girlfriend's relatives, who also happen to be my sister's boyfriend's (who by the way, whips up meals to challenge any hip NYC restaurant) and a former classmate of mine's parents, we head back up and find ourselves sipping Bud at the Win Place and Show where a live country band is rockin' the house with some great classic country covers. (While I'm on the small town kick, the next day I pulled over and offered a ride to a "kid" walking down the street. He was going to library which was on my way and it turned out he was the bassist in the band I'd seen the night before.) We get a phone call from the others and they're across the street at Quarter's, which is absolutely hopping by Ruidoso standards with lots of rich young white kids from Texas two-stepping to country and grinding to dance music, depending on what's playing.

It's getting to be 3am NYC time (1am Ruidoso) and my mind's been melted by the sum of the day's flashbacks, new experiences, and the intimacy of it all. We're taking bad pictures with our cameras, and as I snap a picture of Michael a Texan smartass sticks his face in front of my camera as he passes us on his way to the bathroom. I get up and start after him and I make some comment to the others joking that I'm going to go talk shit to the "outsider".

Lots of hugs and handshakes later and I'm walking out the door and Michael and I are talking about life's struggles and changes and what not and he says, "The thing is, Cody. In the end, none of that matters. The only thing that matters is that you are present." That comment's been boomeranging around my head since.

So the reunion was a trip, it was neat, it was heartwarming, it was fun, and it was heartbreaking too. I've written before about how I wonder about whether I've sacrificed the right things in life as I am in this different world so disconnected from where I come from and my family and oldest friends. I loved seeing how some of my old friends had grown these families, some of which included like three or four kids already. Doesn't it just about say it all that I just struggled to find the right word "grown"..."built"...both make me think of good businesses. And I guess that's what I'm pondering as I'm back here in the big city. Alone. By choice. But hopefully present. Hmm.

On Being a New Yorker, or, The Cody Band Returns

2006-08-19T19:45:00.000-04:00

I guess that makes me a "real" New Yorker. I've just passed my ten year anniversary of having moved to New York. Isn't it strange that our minds gravitate towards these arbitrary numbers as significant? If we only had four digits per hand and thusly used a base 8 number system, would we mark our 8th and 20th anniversaries as we do our 10 and 25? I've been saying I'm "from New York" for a long time, and I do refer to New York when I refer to "home" these days.

Anyway, before I went home for my high school class' 15 year (another aribitrary period of time to mark), reunion a few weeks ago (more on that event coming), I pulled my journal from back in New Mexico. I was pretty jazzed to find some songs that I'd written when I first started playing guitar. I've been working in the studio to put a few of them down, and we got one done so far. It's the "Bleed" song below. "Small Town Kid", as you might surmise was written when I'd first moved to New York.

We also stripped some of the songs that I'd published already down. At any rate, rock on, eh? (Right click on the song titles to download for free.)

Small Town Kid
I'm just a small town kid
Tryin to make it in the big city.

I say things like fixin' to,
But I never had a pair of cowboy boots,
I hope you think this song is pretty cute,
Cuz lord knows that I surely do.

I'm just a small town kid
Tryin to make it in the big city.

I used to mow lots of lawns,
I like brunettes and blondes,
I wanna sell stocks and bonds,
But don't look for me because brother I'm already gone.

This big city.
It ain't such a big city.

Bleed
And so I come home to myself,
Knowing your silence says so much,
I see your shadows mocking me,
And I remember how we touched,

Peace be with me, time of need,
Love comes for me, watch it bleed,
Lose myself, lost myself,
I can't stand to know myself,
I'm not asking for anybody's help.

What do you do when you think of me?
What do you cry when you feel lonely?
Watch it bleed.

I feel the flames start to rise,
I know the story they will tell,
It's pointless to run, they're everywhere,
I'll just go to burn in hell,

Sovereign pity, all for me,
It's so fun to watch me bleed,
Drink myself, drank myself,
I don't want to be myself,
I now hate everybody else.

What do you do when you think of me?
What do you cry when you feel lonely?
Watch me bleed.

Think it later, plant a seed,
Inhaling you, feel me bleed,
Loved myself, hate myself,
I'd do better to just kill myself,
For I got nothing left to sell.

What do you do when you think of me?
What do you cry when you feel lonely?
Feel me bleed.

Two Cents Worth (Stripped)
What's your two cents worth?
A penny for your thoughts.
What do I see what I look at me?
Do I even want to see?
I turned my life on a dime.
A penny for your thoughts.

Whisper to Me (Stripped)
Wanting to desire wanting only you,
Reaching for the memory of remembering only you,
Visions of the sights of looking down at you,
Our two tongues cross like swords.
Whisper to me.

Suddenly you tremble anew,
And I just know that you knew,
I feel born anew, Yes, I feel born anew,

And I won't come down, I'll bring you home,
No, I don't wanna stop now, don't wanna lose control,
No, I won't stop now, as hard as stone,
As I taste your sweet sweat and touch your soul.

Now I hear your breath, as I feel you plea,
Crystal visions of your essence in front of me,
Devoted emotions, bring out what we feel,
Our two hands grip reality.
Whisper to me.

You can check out my previously released music video for "Whisper to Me", now on YouTube, by clicking on the graphic below.

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PS. I don't really know what to say about that FT column. It's really, well, neat. The real kicker is being called a "part-time rock star"!

CW Quoted in the FT

2006-08-19T14:41:00.000-04:00

Both bulls and bears are running scared of a recession
By JOHN AUTHERS
Published: August 19 2006

When dashing young technology hedge-fund managers decide to sell everything and go into cash, you can tell that fear is stalking the market. That is exactly what Cody Willard - who combines hedge-fund managing with blogging, appearing on CNBC business television, writing columns for a number of outlets including the Financial Times' US edition, and part-time work as a rock star - did back in May.

Formerly an ebullient bull, Mr Willard decided on May 10 to sell all of his considerable range of tech stocks except for small positions in Microsoft, Google and Apple Computer, and started to opine in his blog on the attractions of cash.

The call made him very unpopular, as a number of aggrieved responses to his blog made clear. But it turned out to be inspired. Mr Willard, who makes his CNBC appearances wearing a black leather jacket, is one of the more colourful and likeable figures on Wall Street today. But the market suggests his actions were copied by many others.....

Click here to read the full article.

Cody on RM: The Long-Term Bull of Free-Flowing Information

2006-08-17T15:00:00.000-04:00

The Long-Term Bull of Free-Flowing Information
08/17/2006 2:35 PM

We all focus on the Googles and Texas Instruments of the world when we talk about the information revolution, but there are implications are much, much bigger than just whether or not Google wins the next MySpace or AOL advertisement delivery bid or not. I argue that the incredible revolution of free-flowing information (and capital, which I will address again in an upcoming post) is the very reason that China, India and the rest of the developing world will become so economically viable.

Want a bullish counter to the endless drone of "we are doomed eventually from our twin deficits, profligate Fed, etc."? There you have it. I sure won't argue that we're going to enter some period of Utopian peace. But just as the magnitude of today's global issues has changed -- we've gone from discussing war deaths in tens of millions to tens of thousands -- so too does our ever more informationally and economically connected globe drive other remarkably bullish changes.

A story on the front page of today's Wall Street Journal underscored this revolution, perhaps without even meaning to:

Why Ping-Pong Star Had to Spend a Week In a Cucumber Patch
Rowdy Chinese Player Got A Taste of the Simple Life; Shades of Mao Zedong
By SHAI OSTER

For many, talk of the Cultural Revolution remains taboo. The Communist Party officially condemned the episode in 1981, but fears too much discussion today about its role could damage its reputation. Schools don't teach about how Mao and other party leaders exhorted hordes of youthful "Red Guards" to destroy temples, harass intellectuals and, often, denounce their parents.

See, the state-sanctioned information flow that is taught in the state-sanctioned schools in China still tries to deny the truth. And while China does actively try to stem access to information by blocking certain Web sites and search terms, they certainly can't block it all in this day and age. And the Communists (or any other politicians) who try to continue to lie about reality will fail to convince anyone.

Another item in the Journal reinforces my thesis:

An Entrepreneur Has Quixotic Goal Of Wiring Rwanda
Greg Wyler's Internet Outfit Offers High-Tech Service In War-Ravaged Country
'A Booming Metropolis!'
By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS

MOUNT KARISIMBI, Rwanda -- Greg Wyler, an American tech entrepreneur, dreams of bringing the Internet to this troubled country. There are a few hurdles. One is a battered communications tower atop this 14,787-foot volcanic peak. The air is too thin for helicopters to transport the several tons of equipment needed for repairs. Instead, it has to go by hand.

In April I wrote in the Financial Times exactly about how burgeoning access to telephones and the Internet is by far the most important development for Rwanda and other places of horror in Africa. Forget "aid" -- the best way to help these places is to invest in them. And the gains will be huge as the ramifications of networking, communicating and free-flowing information forever alter the balance of power in these places.

My near term caution notwithstanding, one of the most important tenets of my being so bullish on the markets, the economy and especially society over the next few years is the free flow of information and the impact it will have on all facets of society. The masses -- all of us -- have always been subjected to compromised, biased information flow. In this country, the information flow has mostly been controlled by massive media titans who focus on the very politicians, issues and events that they have vested interests in. In too many countries, the information flow has been controlled by corrupt, oppressive governments.

As the old saying goes, "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own the printing press." And as I've written before, for the first time in history, the printing press is free. Whether we're talking about blogs, which have completely eviscerated the need for any capital to publish information, or podcasts or YouTube, the results are the same: Information flow is no longer controlled by anyone but the content creator.

And while each and every one of us will always have innate biases in our writing and therefore compromise the "truth," there's no arguing that having no filter between writer and reader is infinitely better than the many layers which in the past always had to approve any information flow. That is, we get "better" information without all the filters. Moreover, having many of sources for information that provide for triangulation of the truth is always better than having few sources that can collude with and/or feed off each other.

As this information flows ever more freely and often and can be accessed by ever more people through new devices and sources, corruption, coercion and, as I wrote in that FT article, even genocide become ever more difficult to carry out. Why? Because information flow is always the enemy of evil -- evildoers try to hide and don't brag about their actions for a reason after all.

People keep asking me when I'll get aggressive in the market again. I'm working diligently on finding some of the best-positioned companies to drive this revolution in the developing world. Motorola is on top of my list for its WiMax and cheap handset businesses. There are many more, and I would welcome any ideas from readers via either email or on our own revolutionary town hall Comments board.

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

Cody on RM: Similar Setups, but Yes, It's Different

2006-08-16T19:43:00.000-04:00

Similar Setups, but Yes, It's Different
08/16/2006 2:33 PM

Where's that playbook from last summer? It's pretty much the same one I used the summer before that. And isn't this current setup awfully similar to the one we had when I used those playbooks? So, as many an emailer has been asking me lately, what's the diff, man?

Good question, and perhaps the difference is only in me, not the market or the economic setup.

I don't know if you remember the pain that the market doled out to the tech bulls in the summer of '04, but I sure do. My approach at the time had been to trim into strength and buy into weakness. As the market took off at the beginning of the year, most of my stocks exploded higher, and I had double and triples in some of my biggest positions before January was even over. I sold down a ton of stock and hedged aggressively to try to protect those gains.

Into spring, most of my favorite stocks at the time, which included Tellabs, Apple, JDSU and F5 among others, were getting pummeled on concerns about inventory levels and the strength of the consumer. As the stocks came down 20% and 30% in a straight line, I started buying many of them back, only to watch them go lower -- and my gains on the year start to evaporate.

By late spring, I had bought back a good bit of my positions and taken off almost all of my hedges, as I was confident that the economic "soft patch" was, indeed, only a soft patch, and I wanted to be long and strong when the rebound came. I have written before about persevering through the day when Nortel announced that all of its numbers were wrong and perhaps fraudulent. That day crushed me and took away almost all of my gains on the year, as anything telecom or tech related was smashed in the selling frenzy that ensued.

I held on through the summer and continued to buy on weakness and build up my positions. By the time the market bottomed that summer, I was in a horrible drawdown (some might call it a hole). As the Nortel problems faded from memory and the tech inventory concerns proved to be only a temporary wrinkle, tech stocks went on a tear, and I was positioned to catch a big move to the upside.

Burn me once, right? Well, heading into spring last year, tech was trading ugly, as tech inventory concerns were once again front and center of the market's mind. Tech was sold down, and I'd been too long and was in another drawdown by the time the dog days of summer settled the market into a gentle malaise. I saw the setup as binary, and again my analysis told me to stick it out because the economy was strong and the inventory concerns would again work out fine, despite many permabears being certain at the time they'd roil the industry in the second half of the year. The market took off and killed the shorts, while rewarding the bulls.

Here we are in 2006 and what's the setup? Well, once again, there's concern about tech inventories (along with the standard ol' lines of "consumer is dead," "twin deficits are going to collapse our economy," etc.) and the Nasdaq has been crushed from its spring highs. Perhaps those inventory concerns will work just fine again. But I have to say that housing's downturn is no longer "looming" as it was in 2004 and 2005. And oil and energy have been awfully high for how long? And we had a blow-off top in commodities. And the market's been crushing every cyclical without pause for months on end. And rates have gone from pretty much "please take this money" to "it'll cost you if you want this money."

I went almost entirely to cash before this crash in the semiconductors and other techs that I usually love to be long. And let's keep it real -- that is a factor in the risk/reward analysis I must do when trying to decide how long, short or underinvested I should be.

So, yeah, I agree that there are lots of similarities between the setup in tech (and the economy and the broader markets) to each of the last two years. But there's a lot that's different, too. And I'm going to stay patient. The binary outcomes of tech spiking back because the fundamentals work out great or tech tanking because the inventory problems really get bad aren't something I want to make a big directional bet on right now.

It is what it is, and that's my stance -- at least until my analysis changes because I will strive to be flexible and disciplined above all else.

Seeking Best Steak Frites or Bar Steak in NYC, or, Three Sexy Italian Ladies and a Bottle of Pelegrino

2006-08-16T01:03:00.000-04:00

When I first moved to NYC, I wanted to break out and try anything and everything, which of course included food. I mostly lived on pasta, tuna and vegetables for dinner most nights, as there certainly wasn't any money to spare for nights out at nice restaurants.

But anytime I did go out, I'd always order something that I'd never tried before -- swordfish, octopus, seared tuna, whatever the specialty of the house was. Most of the time, I liked whatever was served just fine. But then one time after a year or so in the city, I was at a steak house and I was like, "Hmm, I'm gonna have me a steak and potatoes meal for dinner like my ol granpa always did."

We were at Peter Luger's and I ordered steak with everybody else at the table. And, oh, man it was a great steak. Crisped on the outside and a pink that converged in the center where you could to a razor-thin deep red stripe. By the time I finished savoring my first bite, I was trying to remember exactly why I'd ever ventured from my love of beef.

And while I eat out most nights a week these days, I rarely venture out and try something new anymore. I usually just order some sort of beef dish.

So I was at Les Halles with Doug Kass and coincidentally I'd been there a few weeks before with James Altucher who had rightly ordered the chef's specialty, steak frites, and then raved about it for days after. I didn't hesitate and ordered the steak frites, medium, and oh, man it was good. Darn nearly a perfect steak, sliced not-to-thinly and just singed on the outside and not to juicy on the inside. I give it a full W+, the brand my great-, grand- and father have used to mark our own bulls.

The next night I was at Lucky Strike and I ordered the Bar Steak with french fries from a pretty short-haired waitress that I'm not sure but either really liked me or couldn't wait for me to leave. It was dry and just a bit too flavorless as the quality of the beef itself (rather than the cut) wasn't of great quality. I give it a V, which is more than a /, both of which are less than a W, which is less than the perfect score of a W+. Follow all of that? I know any editor I've ever had would throw that line out in a heartbeat, which makes so thankful for the ability to have a free printing press of this blog so that I can write in what's my own voice -- sometimes restrained or not -- on my own terms. Viva la revolucion. But I digress.

On Sunday night I'm out to dinner at Barolo with a friend whom I met from having exchanged emails about stuff on this blog. I had the steak frites again. I love Barolo, but the steak frites there needs something to jazz it up. Maybe the waiter was supposed to tell me that I should have a side or something, but he didn't and the steak experience was especially lacking without it. A V.

Today for lunch I ate at Balthazar with an analyst from Goldman. I ordered, yes, the steak frites. And it was undercooked, especially for a lunch meal, and I didn't like the garlicy butter that they put on top. Another V.

If I know anything about the phase cycles I tend to go through in my own idiosyncratic ways, I figure that I'll be ordering steak frites or bar steak at just about every place I go for the next few weeks or months. I also figure it's going to be awfully tough to top Les Halles (ever see that guy's show on the Food Network? It's really good.)

Okay, I'm just home from a very long day and then a dinner out (steakless though it might be) with a buddy from Google, a media consultant from McKinsey and a distressed bond broker...and wrapped up with a bottle of Pelligrino (yes, water, it was late and it's Tuesday for crying out loud) with three sexy Italian ladies who might or might not have been pretending to not really speak much English.

The quest continues.

Flip It: Are We Too Nice? Is That Even Possible?

2006-08-14T22:09:00.000-04:00

Okay, I'm back. It's been a wild, hectic summer full of excitement, exhaustion, joys and heartbreaks. Since the summer hit, I have been simply dizzied by all the changes in my life. I opened a new office in Soho. After years of being aggressively in the market, I went to cash. Went through another painful ending to a relationship (is there ever really another kind of ending to a relationship?). Took my first vacation (and day off of the market of just about any kind for that matter) in three and a half years. I moved to a new apartment, also in Soho, about a five minute walk to my office.

Speaking of which, I no longer have a doorman and on Saturday when I was about to have my new king-size bed delivered, I sauntered across the street to Belladora to buy a set of sheets. Oh yeah, a pretty woman, Carly, who referenced a boyfriend at one point (sigh -- James you can't stop the sighs! as Neil Young would say, "Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away") patiently answered all of my questions about sheets (who knew you could actually think of any questions to ask about sheets -- I mean, 300 or 400 threadcount yada yada, whatever...until you're buying 'em.)

So anyway, I drop nearly as much on sheets, down comforter (is Hungarian good down, as it seems to be marketed?), whatever you call that thing that covers the comforter (duvee? Is that right?) as I spent on the bed and mattress and I wonder outloud about what an appropriate ratio one should spend on each relative to the other. I jog back across the brick street to my apartment building's entrance. I set one of the bags down and reach into my pocket. Now I used to always keep my keys in my left pocket and my wallet in my right one -- I strategized about the most ergonomic place to put them and somehow at some point decided that was the best set up. But then I lost my keys to my apartment at the place I had moved to many months ago; I'd not locked my door there aside from setting the alarm (hey, I lived in Harlem for a year and never spent the money on putting a bolt lock in the gaping hole in my door and lived to tell about it without ever getting burgled) except when I go out of town and then I lock the door and have to break in by going over the sundeck onto my deck to break in where the window is unlocked. So I lost the habit of my hands always knowing which pocket my keys are in and I wasn't too upset when my left hand came up empty on its first dig.

But when I reached into the second pocket and came up empty-handed, then I got to realizing that I'd left my keys in my shorts that I'd changed out of before going into the nice sheet store. Hey, no prob, right? At least, that's what I was thinking as I scanned the wall and scoped out my course. I set my bags down and jump onto the railing around the storm door entrance to the basement. As I throw my weight forward and grab part of the face of the limestone facade, I kick foward and am on the wall. A quick push up and I'm hanging from an iron bar that's bolted into the facade and the final floor of the fire escsape. Said iron bar sure is rusty, I notice as the bar starts bending from my weight. I can see the scene straight out of a bad Stallone movie, picturing the nuts holding the bar popping and dropping me onto the pavement or the railing a good few feet below me. I scramble back to the wall and let myself down, adrenaline pumping. I call my new landlord who of course isn't going to be in town on a beautiful summer Saturday and leave a message for her. I call my friend, Carly (yes, there's more than one Carly in this town) who's a badass at a meatpacking-based fashion house and with whom I'd worked on some songs with the night before. She is in Brooklyn chilling with The Beast, a fashion badass in her own sense as what must be the world's youngest fashion editor ever or something and they just ordered pizza so come on out.

The mattress delivery comes and I have to reschedule for the next day and I drop my bags full of my sheets off at the record label's office down the hallway from my office (what a strange sentence "I drop my bags full of my sheets off at the record label's office down the hallway from my office"....oh, and see, I had my wallet to buzz me in to the building, but no keys to my office itself obviously) and I head out to Williamsburg where I usually try to convince myself that I'm cool enough to realize that trying that hard to be cool ain't cool.

I accidentally upset the cabbie when I complain that he turned left instead of right, when he could only make a left, so I hop out and give him the change. Down a side street off Broadway in Brooklyn and I'm in a rather rough drug store buying a bottle of Chianti from Italy and trying to speak Spanish to the nice Puerto Rican lady behind the counter. I ask if they sell gum and she says no, but asks her co-worker who's leaving to give me some gum and she searches in her purse and hands me a fresh piece. People really are so nice, you know?

So I head over to The Beast's and toast 2006 (I've toasted this year every toast this year and I'm not gonna stop now) and eventually Carly and I catch a cab back to the city and she lets me crash on her couch. That's a nice friend to have, you know? After brunch mid-morning Sunday, I walk to the real estate office which acted as broker for my landlady hoping they'll have keys. They're closed.

In an epiphany, I cross the street to Belladora and ask Carly -- the Belladora Carly -- if she's got a really tall ladder. She thinks she does, but after searching the basement and the closets upstairs, she comes up empty-handed. How nice that she tried so hard to help, right? She sends me over to Capellini, an Italian furniture store next door, and the nice guy there fetches a ladder from their basement. Niceness, anybody? I take the ladder across the street and climb up to the fire escape. I get it pulled halfway down when I see that I need to unhook a chain that keeps the fire escape from going to the ground. My bud at Capellini lends me a broom handle, I get the chain unhooked and am in. Except I need someone to hold the fire escape as I start to climb it from the ladder, so I ask a nicely dressed middle-aged couple walking by for help and they nicely help out, and even offer to hold it while I climb the whole way up. I tell 'em I'm cool but thanks so much (people are SO nice!) climb up to the third floor where I pull open the unlocked window that I'd been looking out while waiting for the mattress guys the day before.

As I carry the ladder and broom handle back across the street, with my keys fully in my pocket and plenty of plans of giving copies of my keys to friends now that I have no doorman/deck in my mind, I'm pondering how nice everybody was to me when a thought strikes me: Do I need to flip it? Are we too nice? I mean, aside from Carly who is from Kansas, whom I met at UNM, who worked for Senator Domenici with the daughter of orthopedic surgeon who reconstructed my ankle twice in Ruidoso and casted me up countless other times, and I've been friends with here in NYC for the last few years -- and her fellow Wichita-an Ashly (The Beast), none of these incredibly nice people who helped me break into my apartment knew me from Adam. Nobody thought twice about helping this jeans- work/camping T-shirt-clad long-haired white guy get into an apartment in Soho that might or might not have been my own for all they knew.

People really are so nice. But is that always a good thing?

A Cody News Spot: August 10, 2006

2006-08-10T14:16:00.000-04:00

Democrats Abandon Lieberman, Back Lamont
"I'm going forward because I am fed up with all the partisanship in Washington that stops us from getting anything done." -- Sen. Joe Lieberman, on his decision to run as an independent after being beaten by Ned Lamont in Connecticut's Democratic primary

You know, the fact is, he's right in that we all should be fed up with the partisanship in Washington that does stop us from getting anything done. But how incredibly insulting that an entrenched, soldout crony like our Mr. Lieberman, who is the problem -- i.e. he is a life long Democrat politician -- thinks that just because his crony-ized party voted him out in his party's so called democracy now thinks he can become part of the solution. He's can’t; he has been and always will be part of the problem. Down with the two party system.

Cody on RM: Microsoft Remains a Tech Safe Haven

2006-08-09T16:45:00.000-04:00

Microsoft Remains a Tech Safe Haven
08/09/2006 4:50 PM

Good times are comin', I hear it everywhere I go.
Good times are comin', but they sure comin' slow.
I'm a vampire, babe. -- Neal Young

That was a classic fade. And that fade drives a stake into the heart of the bulls, who refuse to succumb.

There are so many broken stocks, broken charts and broken dreams out there that I want to start getting bullish. But I also feel like a broken record by saying that I prefer cash and Microsoft to fighting these ugly spirits who own this market right now.

Rev Shark taught me long ago to look at the speculative stocks as good tells for the direction of the broader markets, especially the Nasdaq. It's a great "Flip it™," in that conventional wisdom always tells us that we should be bearish when speculation runs amok while in reality those speculative stocks often foretell a spreading of the speculation.

What do those speculative issues say right now? Well, most reversed ugly, ugly, ugly from the open, and ended up down, blood red on the day. And the bulls don't want to see Transmeta down 10%, ON Semiconductor down 6%, Brightpoint down 10% -- on a day when the Nasdaq was up 2% midday. And speaking of a 2% reversal in the Nasdaq -- that's a "dislocation" with a capital D.

Finally, after noting that Microsoft has been hitting new recent highs this morning, I had us put together a chart put of its relative performance since I went almost entirely into cash and Mister Softee back on May 10. It speaks volumes:

Microsoft
Taking the Tech High Road

Click here for larger image.
Source: StockCharts.com, CL Willard Capital

Put simply, I think Microsoft remains the "safe" tech stock, though I sure expect to meet demons, devils and other boogeymen along the way.

Cody on RM: Stay Patient With the Market and Players

2006-08-09T12:09:00.000-04:00

Stay Patient With the Market and Players
08/08/2006 11:17 AM

I'm gonna pass me a brand new resolution, I'm gonna fight me a one man revolution, someway,
Gonna start my rebellion today. But here come the people in grey,
To take me away. -- The Kinks

In the last 24 hours, I've received dozens of impassioned pleas in my inbox on top of scores of blog Comments and prior emails, all of which say something like this: "Make some paper trades so you have some trades to write about."

"Just make up a trade, if nothing else."
"I thought you were a money manager, not a poser wannabe."
"If you really think X, then you should be short Y. Players play, man, and writers write."

As James Altucher asked me this morning when I shared some of this with him: Why are people so upset that I went to cash?!

It doesn't make sense -- and is a real disservice to all readers -- for me to just pretend that I'm excited about a trading idea when I'm not, or even worse for me to just make stuff up. The ol' transparent manipulation ploy ("A real trader would do it") doesn't work, either. I think that worked on me when I was five. It doesn't work on me at 33. Seriously.

I think I've made it clear that I'm going to approach this market on my terms and my terms only, and all the chastising, pleading, anger and whatever else you send my way won't change that one iota. So enough already. I'm doing the best I can and writing about what my best is. And sometimes my best will be dead wrong, of course. But my best is all I can really do in the end.

The markets are flatlining slightly in the green as we approach the Fed announcement. Gun to head, I figure we rally more into the announcement and then we'll have to see what's said and done from there. Until then, I'm just going to have to tell you, I'm being patient. And I am.

Cody on RM: Cycling Through Cyclical Trade Ideas

2006-08-09T11:59:00.000-04:00

Cycling Through Cyclical Trade Ideas
08/08/2006 9:44 AM

The Fed and oil. The Fed and oil. Throw in a little housing weakness and some geopolitical bad news and you've about got this week's headlines, nay, obsessions, in a nutshell. The economy's weakened -- or so everyone tells us, after the market started telling us that months ago. Perhaps there's some arbitrage in what's been priced in disparate cyclical sectors as the headlines and the markets converge.

The bad news is that those headlines are indeed bad news. The good news is that at some point (perhaps right now?), when those headlines truly become obsessions of Wall Street, they'll already be more than priced in. That's one of the biggest problems with the bear thesis: The shocking decline in such stocks as the semis, specifically Intel and Broadcom, has already priced in a lot of bad news. Of course, those stocks that Wall Street considers for some strange reason more purely "cyclical" than semis, such as Caterpillar and Phelps Dodge, haven't come down nearly as much.

That huge gap of relative outperformance in the traditional cyclicals vs. the more volatile tech cyclicals probably has to close somehow. And that likely means that either the semi's are screaming buys or the old world cyclicals are screaming shorts. Perhaps there's a sweet paired trade to be made by going long the tech cyclicals and short the traditional cyclicals. Of course, if the economy sputters and the sell through in the semi's really falls off, those stocks would have a lot more downside to them -- probably even more than the downside in the traditional cyclicals in such a scenario.

I keep working on ideas like this, but I keep ending up deciding that the risk/reward isn't compelling enough just yet. Thus, more patience is required.

Cody in FT: Inside curve: Cable could win the battle but lose the war

2006-08-07T09:25:00.000-04:00

My investing is based on a central thesis about the “content revolution” – the inexorable process by which the distribution of content, such as songs, books or films, is being taken from traditional distributors and democratised through online technology.

Not everyone in the content business will be a winner, but owning and distributing content that people find entertaining has been a great business. Even the companies that lose out because of the revolution are not doomed to death, writes Cody Willard. | Read

Cody on RM: On My Mind: Fed and Freedom

2006-08-04T19:03:00.000-04:00

On My Mind: Fed and Freedom
08/04/2006 4:02 PM EDT

Today's market was nasty enough to shake up a lot of the bulls that had just started to find some confidence during the stealthiest 5% S&P 500 rally in the last few years. Tough market, indeed.

Here's what's on my mind as we head into the weekend:

Why do the shorts love the cyclicals so much if they hate the economy so much?

Is it time to buy the cyclicals and sell the defensives?

How different would the setup be right now if it were Alan Greenspan instead of Ben Bernanke who will sign off on the next Fed announcement?

Why did Microsoft choose to do this stupid buyback instead of just starting a 5% dividend?

Should we just assume that every single company implicated in the options irregularity scandal is guilty? (Probably.)

Are most of these companies really going to get away with sneaking around behind the backs of their shareholders and our government, as seems to be the consensus?

Does this consensus really think the IRS is simply going to say, "Hey, thanks for writing us this check, after you got busted for lying to us, have a great life"?

If eBay, Google and the rest of these lobby-happy Internet companies who want the government to legislate the status quo are really concerned about the "end-user/consumer," then why don't they all just form a standards body and agree never to pay the pipe owners for premium access to the "end-user/consumer"?

Are they worried that the pipe owners and the companies that would pay them would create a better experience than can be created on the current platform?

Shouldn't we want better experiences? Isn't that the whole point of innovation?

Once we open that legislated can of worms, how will it effect peer-to-peer networks, which I think will be a much bigger driver of innovation than the telcos and cablecos that have the right to build their own style of networks ever could be?

Freedom is what it is, and no matter how these companies try to frame their crying to the government, asking for intervention and legislation, they're trying to strip one of our freedoms, the one to choose to pay for a different type of connection. (This one's not a question.)

Might the very fact that these Internet companies are fighting against their own ability to innovate and therefore generate profits be what's behind the endless declines in their stock prices? "Flip it™," eh?

And with that, I'm heading out to watch the Goo Goo Dolls and Counting Crows tonight. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

Cody on RM: Indices Hide Some Horrendous Action

2006-08-02T14:21:00.000-04:00

Indices Hide Some Horrendous Action
08/01/2006 1:42 PM EDT

One of the more fascinating aspects of the market during the last couple months has been how the major indices have hidden the meltdown that many sectors and geographies have experienced. Heck, as Doug Kass has been reminding people, the S&P 500 has been up six out of the seven months we've had in 2006.

I wanted to parse this phenomenon further, so we pulled a bunch of data (from May 10 through yesterday's close) on a bunch of disparate S&P 500 Spiders:

Sector/Change
Materials/-7.66%
Industrials/-6.88%
Consumer Discretionary/-3.50%
Technology/-4.97%
Financials/1.07%
Energy/2.43%
Consumer Staples/5.73%
Health Care/8.36%
Utilities/10.43%

Say what? I know there are sectors that are down much worse than those data reveal. A little further digging reveals the performance of market subsectors, as broken down by the disparate DJ U.S. indices:

DJ Index/Change

BEST
DJ US Tobacco/10.28%
DJ US Autos/9.88%
DJ US Fixed-Line Telecom/9.67%
DJ US Pipelines/7.65%
DJ US Soft Drink/4.77%
DJ US Electricity/6.66%
DJ US Gas Distr/6.57%
DJ US Utilities/6.31%
DJ US Beverages/4.34%
DJ US Real Estate Investment Trusts/3.09%

WORST
DJ US Recreational Products/-16.70%
DJ US Telecommunications Equipment/-18.02%
DJ US Building Materials & Fixtures/-20.02%
DJ US Industrial Suppliers/-21.49%
DJ US Mining/-22.36%
DJ US Business Training and Employment Agencies/-24.29%
DJ US Home Construction/-24.79%
DJ US Tires/-25.15%
DJ US Coal/-27.68%
DJ US Platinum & Precious Metals/-36.39%

And that's where things got really interesting. Starting with the winners, how about those autos being the highest outperformers? Street Insight's Doug Kass long ago called for GM's relative outperformance in one of his surprises lists, and back in early May, I commented that all the negativity in the sector made me want to buy the autos. But seeing autos on top of the list of outperformers just about made me fall out of my chair. Pipelines? Oil's hung tough, so seeing the pipelines up isn't a surprise. And defensive sectors like tobacco, soft drinks and even telecom service providers are also understandable because they tend to outperform in times of economic downturns.

And then we get to the juice, man. How about those precious metals! Again, I was flabbergasted to see a sector down nearly 40% like that -- and don't forget that one of the primary catalysts for my going to cash back in early May was the parabolic action in the precious metals. Sure wish I'd shorted some.

Coal, tires, employment agencies, mining, industrial suppliers, building materials -- oh my! Talk about cyclicals. You know my thoughts on the cyclicals and how everyone keeps telling us about how they're so "cheap."

The major indices are hiding what's been some horrendous action in these markets. It's obvious that many bulls are reeling because they've had exposure to many of these sectors that have been crushed. And as I've repeatedly noted (try that link on "cheap," for example), there are so many bears who keep buying into the "cheap" cyclical concept that many of them have been crushed and/or they haven't coined much money during this downturn.

That's why people have been so negative about these markets, despite the relative calm in the major indices.

The Cody News (July 30,2006)

2006-07-31T14:26:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-28T17:11:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-28T12:53:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-28T10:10:00.000-04:00

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”

2006-07-27T14:27:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-26T14:36:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-19T14:34:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-17T15:49:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-13T12:36:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-10T15:47:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-10T12:05:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-08T15:32:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-03T12:40:00.000-04:00

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)

2006-07-01T00:49:00.000-04:00

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.

What Year Is It?

2006-06-30T23:14:00.000-04:00

Why can't Apple simply put the year the album was released in the spot where the year the album was released is supposed to go? I marveled a long time ago at the wonders of Tivo's showing what year each show comes from. iTunes supposedly gives me that option, but albums such as Boz Scaggs' debut which I think came out in the late 1970s was released, according to iTunes on October 18, 1988. I have to google each album and spend minutes looking for what year they actually were released. How hard can this be, Apple? And another thing, put in the name of whoever wrote the damn songs since you offer us that viewing option too.

Sigh.

Cody on RM: Breathtaking Rally

2006-06-30T15:25:00.000-04:00

Breathtaking Rally
06/30/2006 9:43 AM

Paranoia strikes deep, Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid, You step out of line, the man come and take you away -- Buffalo Springfield

Put simply, it stinks to be wrong, but that's no reason to change your strategy. I was wrong in thinking the Fed announcement wouldn't be a catalyst. It was a catalyst, and it was a big one.

I spent most of the night beating myself up for having missed a chance to profit off that announcement. Heck, I even considered buying some Semiconductor HOLDRs and QQQQ on Wednesday when they were both trading poorly and had been trashed the day before. But I didn't, and that upsets me.

To be sure, I wouldn't have used much capital on such a trade at all, as I've explained that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for me to risk hard-earned gains at this juncture.

This setup of mine is new territory for me as a hedge fund manager. As long-time readers of my columns know, I've spent most of the last nearly four years aggressively long, using lots of common stock and calls in what some would call high-beta tech stocks and what others would call speculative, high-risk tech stocks. From my long-held Apple and Google positions to JDS Uniphase and Tellabs, which I also owned and traded around for years, I've been very aggressive on the long side. I've had long-term positions and I've put on short-term trades, often right before an earnings report.

And that approach, as my practically nonexistent personal life and the omnipresent knot in my stomach attest, is difficult and scary although also often profitable. In April, after a huge first quarter, I felt like I went ice-cold into the first quarter's earnings reports, and no matter how good a grasp I had on the fundamentals, I felt that the market wasn't rewarding my analysis. Seeing commodities and commodity companies go into parabolic blowoff-top mode and then interviewing the CEOs of some of those commodity companies and hearing endless commentary about how this cycle is going to be "different" and perhaps "secular," I pulled my chips off the table for the first time in years.

I told Larry Kudlow on TV and wrote here on the site about that move and explained it at times as "wanting to catch my breath." And, up until yesterday's huge rally, which I missed, I was really enjoying my newfound inhale, exhale pattern.

Now comes the test. I've got investors, readers, subscribers, friends and family who want to know when I'm going to get back into the market with some gusto again. I can feel the pressure building after the Nasdaq spiked 3% yesterday. "How could you miss something so obvious?" ask some of them. Others say, "I told you so." And yet others want to know, "So, is it safe to get back in now?" Even my friends Bob Marcin and RevShark unwittingly added to the pressure last night. Bob, when he pinged me last night rightly reminding me how he repeatedly told me that we'd spike after the Fed met and that I should be high-fiving him right now. I agreed. And RevShark, when in his column last night rightly chastised those of us who doubted the market would or even could rally post the Fed.

So much for catching my breath.

The fact of the matter is that, as longtime readers of my column also know, I'm going to be wrong a lot. Certainly anyone who takes a stand about the market, the economy, stocks or anything else will often be wrong. I was wrong yesterday, and it makes me upset, and the pressure that comes with it now builds.

But pressure is a terrible catalyst to trade on, and I'm not going to play that game. I'm going to continue to strive to just be cool, and not be goaded into making any trades or even market calls simply to meet the expectations of anyone else, whether readers, investors, emailers, blog commentors, editors, or anyone else at all. You should do the same.

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

CNBC's High Net Worth, Sunday at 8pm EST

2006-06-30T12:46:00.000-04:00

Hey, I mentioned it Tuesday, but wanted to highlight again -- I went in and filmed a fun segment about American capitalism for CNBC's "High Net Worth with Tyler Mathesin" yesterday morning. Also on with me is Michael Santoli from Barron's. Pretty thrilling to sit down with those two men to discuss stocks, you know?

Anyway, hope you'll check it out (though I wish I'd made a joke about Warren Buffett's love of Coke and Burgers when we got to that topic...) this Sunday, July 2 at 8pm EST on CNBC. Shoot, tell a friend to watch even.

They also replay it at 11pm, btw.

The Cody Cam on CNBC Wednesday

2006-06-27T22:12:00.000-04:00

I have to say, I sure am having a blast with this TV stuff. If you haven't caught the "Cody Cam" clips on Kudlow & Company, I hope you can this time. As long as it's not raining tomorrow morning, we'll be filming the latest "Cody Cam" segment for CNBC's Kudlow & Company tomorrow morning at 9am outside Rockefeller Center tomorrow where they film the Today Show. And then I'll be on the show from the studios in NJ tomorrow to show the clip at 5pm-6pm. Hope you'll tune in.

Also, I'll be on CNBC's High Net Worth with Tyler Mathesin Sunday night at 8pm EST this Sunday, July 1. (They replay it at 11pm and 2am EST also).

Cody on RM: Changes Will Drive Our Future

2006-06-27T19:03:00.000-04:00

Changes Will Drive Our Future
06/27/2006 3:58 PM

I can't remember before '49,
But I know that '48 was there,
My ears let in what I should speak out,
Hmmm, there's something in the air. - The Who

The trashing of the world's financial markets has us all questioning the sustainability of the ongoing bull market and economic boom times. We all look around and wonder if we're about to melt down like we did in 2000. Or maybe we'll crash like we did in 1987, and head into a recession like we did in the early 1990s. Heck, maybe we're doomed to a 1930s style depression.

These are serious issues and matter to all of us as investors, traders, employers, employees and citizens of the global economy. But are things really that bad? Is the world really teetering on the edge and our economy and society really that fragile? The short answer is a resounding no. We must not lose sight of the reality of this economy and society and how bullish both really are for our financial markets.

We often hear commentators say that the current market or economy is similar to the market or economy back at some other time period. They'll argue that 2006 is a lot like 1996, because the Fed's raising rates and the economy's cooling. Or that this time period is parallel to 1933 because the U.S. savings rate, in the way that our bureaucrats report it, has turned negative. Meanwhile, anyone who ever proclaims that it's "different" this time gets filleted for not having learned from the bubble. Well, despite the risks of becoming a piece of sushi, I'm willing to call it like I see it, and I'm here to tell you that it's a very different time, and that difference is a reason to believe that our stock markets, economy, and society are heading to all-time highs.

The fact is that, over time, just about everything does change. Here's a big change that nobody really knows how to reconcile with the past: We got off the gold standard back in the early 1970s, and the implications and ramifications of having a fiat currency are ignored when people make economic comparisons to times past.

And that currency debate is changing today, even though nobody's really writing about how big the change is going to become, because now that Google has rolled out GBuy to compete with eBay's PayPal, the two have created what in some sense could be argued to be a new class of currency. And MasterCard and Visa have made short-term debt freely available to the majority of the population, and we have to wonder how relevant the U.S. fiat currency, currently the world's standard, will be in another 70 years, when some young money manager will be arguing that any parallels to the first few years of the new century are specious at best and silly at worst.

Let's underscore a few more differences to times past.

In the 1930s, less than half the world's population could even read. Today, more than 80% of the world can read. And most of that 80% is in the developed world. And most everyone in the developed world now has access to the Internet in some form or another. And that means they have unfettered access to all the information the world has to offer, and that they can contribute to that information. And as all that information flows around, and lies, corruption, fraud, and other wrongs become increasingly difficult to carry out on any type of a large scale because everyone is watching everyone and can now reach out to everyone else. And that alone is another hugedifference, and yet another one that makes me more optimistic about the future of my stocks and economy.

In his piece yesterday repudiating 10 bullish arguments , Doug Kass wrote that the 1950s were "placid" and that today "is increasingly fraught with continued risks of terrorism, political change and other factors that will weigh on commodity supplies." I completely agree that our time is far different from the 1950s, but I believe we live in a much more placid time, and that placidity makes me more bullish than I would be otherwise because capital and information can continue to flow mostly unfettered during these times of relative peace.

In the 1950s, the southern U.S. was terrorized by the KKK and other terrorist groups who were born and raised right here on this country's soil. Not to mention that the developed world had just lost tens of millions of young, productive men to World War II, which came just a couple decades after the first. I will say that firsthand experience of terrorism weighs on my life and mind, but I don't think it's anywhere near the terror that folks must have felt in those world wars, though such a statement is purely anecdotal and impossible to quantify. More importantly, I think these terrorist concerns do impact the multiples of stocks (and boost the price of oil tremendously), and that as those concerns are alleviated, multiples will expand, driving the stock market in general higher over the coming years and decades.

Both today's, as well as the 1950s' political changes seem to me to be all about rooting out evil and corruption, although today's movements are driven by the fact that there are now billions of us who can report on such political and social evils. That means there's much less violence, death and war in these political changes. I think that the political changes in the world are increasingly positive, driven first and foremost by the aforementioned free information flows. These trends and the technologies driving them are now fully entrenched and aren't going to just disappear tomorrow. Someday, far, far in the future, probably, but not tomorrow.

Doug Kass wrote about the impact the differences in the time periods will have on commodities. I don't know how all of this will weigh on commodity prices, but my best guess is that with more than a billion people who can read, learn and invest in commodities and the incredible capital flow that follows, that the commodity cycles of years past are going to discounted and played out in much quicker time frame. Jim Rogers says 16-18 years is typical. In the modern, connected, literate world I believe that cycle will be cut by at least half. That would be another big change and one that would work to the benefit of all of us, both consumers and enterprises who consume the finished goods in which those commodities go into.

I really do hesitate to write all of this about how different it really is, because I fear the stigma that comes with being overly optimistic. I think that most people who argue against ever saying "it's different this time" are looking at a much broader picture and have their time frames messed up. Indeed, I agree that the economic dominance of the US will at some point be threatened by our endless borrowing and fiat currency. Every fiat currency in the history of the planet has eventually gone worthless, as the political reasons for devaluing a currency in the short run at some point always get the best of those in power. At some point. For all we know, that point could be 300 years in the future. Or thirty years in the future. So in that's sense, yes, I agree that it's "never different this time." But you have to frame that statement with time. And that time frame is mostly irrelevant to the near and intermediate term.

In all seriousness, with things getting so ugly and pessimistic, it's high time that we remind ourselves that we are indeed living in the most wondrous time full of more opportunity for more people in more places in the entire history of the planet. The single most important reason to be excited and bullish about the long-term future: We've got a lot more work ahead of us to keep the changes going. Let's get on it.

P.S. I want to note that I'm using the "mean" vs. "median" in regards to those literacy rates. I could very well use the same argument as Barry Ritholtz made when he grabbed some random report from some bureaucrats somewhere that shows the top income earners are growing richer at a faster pace than those below them. Following that same logic, I could sound the alarm bells about how it's the developed world that's getting a higher percentage of the world's literate population, but, just as it is when discussing incomes, it's not a zero sum game. The point being that we should all cheer for everybody everywhere to get more and learn more. And as most of the world is indeed getting and learning more, I see yet another reason to be excited about the future.

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

Cody on RM: Break From The Herd

2006-06-23T12:30:00.000-04:00

Administrator's Note: In his RealMoney Blog Cody rants on the money management business selling its soul:

By Cody Willard
RealMoney.com Contributor
06/22/2006 2:04 PM

Break From the Herd

Wall Street has always been a bunch of lemmings who copy whatever system has been working and attempt to further systemize it and then scale it for profit. And just like corporate group-think has all but ruined the music business, it is also a major threat to the markets and our economy. As the monies at stake have scaled to historic proportions, the growth of systemized money management has been exponential.

In particular, there are the fund-of-funds that have systemized the management of hundreds of billions of dollars. These systems lead these fund-of-funds managers to select only those money managers that will put money to work in accordance to the fund-of-funds expectations, and that leaves no room for free-thinking or flexibility, two traits I believe are valuable on Wall Street.

Running institutional money and want to change your approach because your analysis dictates such? Tough. Stick with the system that got you the money or the fund-of-funds will pull that money, regardless of your performance.

I've had systemic money in my fund before, and I kicked it out after they hounded me for being overly flexible. I'm serious. These system managers have no time and place for free-thinking and flexibility. In my approach to the market (and in my approach to life), I strive to be independent and free willed, and I have sacrificed size for flexibility.

Of course, the record-breaking decline in volatility over the past few years abetted the growth of many of these systems, and that cycle fed itself, delivering steady returns that appear to be "safe."

So what does Wall Street, in its endless greed and systemization of everything go and do? Rather than adjust, these managers try to juice those returns by levering up. And not just at the money manager level, but at the fund-of-funds level. So levered up money gets levered up, and the "safe systems" feed on themselves, further juicing those returns and "proving" the value of those systems.

In a similar vein, just this morning several new ETFs were launched that are double levered up, as Roger Nusbaum noted earlier. I often write about the virtues that the democratization of, well, everything, that the Internet and cheap computing brings about. But it's not all virtuous. These levered ETFs formally mark the introduction of levered systems to the masses.

Maybe this all works out smoothly and maybe even if it does get ugly it won't be for years to come. But music provides a case study here. Record labels spent millions convincing the public that the Simpson girls have a place in music. But they have since been reminded -- and harshly! -- that the public will only accept systemized groupthink until it doesn't. And then it gets ugly indeed. I worry that Wall Street's current trends, at the institutional and retail level, have our markets headed down this same path. As Dylan wrote: "Live by no man's code, And hold your judgment for yourself, Lest you wind up on this road."

I would love to get a dialogue about all of this going in our town hall of blog commentary. Are you running money? Are you part of the systemization of running money? Are you sure that is something that will pay off in the long run?

The Cody News (June 23,2006)

2006-06-23T11:19:00.000-04:00

Drilling Firm Seeks Favor as Expatriate

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Published: June 23, 2006

WASHINGTON, June 22 — The language in the House measure seems innocuous enough. Tucked into the Coast Guard budget bill, it says merely that Section 608 ( c ) (1) "is amended by striking the second sentence."

Okay, here we go AGAIN. So let me try to get this straight. Nabors moves its "tax headquarters" and "legal headquarters" so they don't have to pay taxes into our system. But they've greaseed enough Republican and Democrat pockets that they seriously think they can get a permanent exception to another law that some other crony had put in place to keep non-American companies from competing for US business. Please, please, please -- enough of the cronyism of the two mainstream parties.

9/11 Suit Tests New York Stand on Immunity

By ANTHONY DePALMA
Published: June 23, 2006

A federal judge heard oral arguments yesterday on the city's motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought on behalf of more than 8,000 firefighters, police officers and construction workers who say they were harmed by exposure to toxic substances while working at ground zero.

I spent too much time down on Ground zero in the days right after 9/11, and I am worried about my exposure to those toxic substances. I should do something about that. Guess I'll have to spend some of my own money to do so, since I don't use public assistance (except for those unavoidable roads and schools and etc etc) and I don't have but "disaster" health insurance with a $5k deductible. Regardless of the finances, this toxic substance stuff scares me, because I remember how strange and bad it smelled down there after the towers collapsed.

For Dealer, Stolen Maps Point Way to Jail

By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
Published: June 23, 2006

NEW HAVEN, June 22 — A map dealer who specialized in finding elusive treasures for rich collectors admitted in federal court on Thursday to having stolen 97 antique maps worth more than $3 million from more than a half-dozen universities and libraries over the last seven and a half years.

The b*lls on that guy, eh? Simply stunning. You can't make that type of stuff up.

Knicks End Year of Disharmony

By HOWARD BECK
Published: June 23, 2006

Larry Brown was cast as a savior when he came home to coach the Knicks last July. In the months that followed, he came to be viewed instead as an enigma, an agitator, a failure and, finally, a pariah.

I've long argued that Isiah Thomas, as great as he was, is the single most over-rated basketball player in the history of the NBA. I'm not going to bother arguing that anymore. It's too easy to just point out how he screwed over everyone in the CBA and how badly he and Dolan have messed up the Knicks. Larry Brown or Isiah Thomas? And Dolan goes with Isiah? Wonder how many trades for dudes from his era Isiah will put on the sheets this year. Wonder if Isiah will be able to convince Dolan not to fire him when he misses the playoffs by 20 games next year? Isiah disgusts me at this point. I think I'll move on.

Cody on Kudlow & Company (June 20,2006)

2006-06-22T12:43:00.000-04:00

Administrator's note: We've got clips from Cody's June 20th appearance on Kudlow & Company uploaded.

Click here for the first clip.

Click here for the second clip.

The Cody News Special Edition: The Death of the Two Party Political System is Nigh!

2006-06-21T19:17:00.000-04:00

Timber Becomes Tool in Effort to Cut Estate Tax

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published June 21, 2006

WASHINGTON, June 20 — In a new attempt to permanently reduce the estate tax on inherited wealth, House Republican leaders moved on Tuesday to win over crucial Democrats with a tax sweetener for timber companies.

Let me try count the ways that this upsets me:

1. Why are we subsidizing timber companies at all?

2. And are they serious about paying each other off like this in public -- vote for this bill, and we'll hook you up with a bunch of money for your croni, er biggest donors?

2. Why is the Democratic party, which pretends that they aren't as sold out to corporate America every bit as badly as the Republican party is, willing to be so upfront about this crony-ized horror?

3. Shouldn't the folks like, uh, Democrat big head, John Kerry who try to create alarms about things 40 years in the future to redistribute our wealth to their corporate cronies who benefit from that alarm be all over the timber companies for supposedly screwing up our environment instead of throwing nearly a billion frickin' dollars at them?

4. Why do I feel like I'm the only person who freaks out about how utterly criminalized the Dems and the Repubs -- each and every one who's willing to run under one of those parties -- appear when I read this stuff? Self-introspectively-speaking here for a moment, I always feel so isolated and confused around election time. Why do you vote for Republicans if you hate this type of stuff too? Why do you vote for Democrats if you hate this type of stuff too?

I know what you're going to say. Something about how it's always been this way and that you're voting for the lesser of two evils. But doesn't that mean that you're voting for evil? I don't want to vote for evil. I want to fight evil, don't you? So shouldn't we be fighting these evil-doing politicians in the Republican and Democratic parties instead of embracing them in any way shape or form?

Isn't the best way to do that to stop voting for them, and if you're an honest politician (naively or not, I do believe they exist, at least until they sell out to one of these parties) shouldn't you get out of these parties?

Does the Internet and the fact that I can write this and you can read this and then we can discuss this freely and, most importantly in regards to the change, EASILY in the comments change everything? I do believe it does! The death of the two-party political system is nigh!

Ah, long live democracy. Finally.

CW in FT: Free Downloads Are Worth Their Weight In Gold

2006-06-16T23:16:00.000-04:00

Every day brings an article about how music labels, video studios or book publishers are facing new headaches caused by the content revolution. But they aren’t headaches – they are opportunities, and, luckily for everyone, the opportunities are so large that pretty much everyone in the content business is going to win, writes Cody Willard. | Read

Cody on RM: What's On My Mind

2006-06-16T21:42:00.000-04:00

Administrator's Note: As a parting shot into the weekend, here is a post from Cody's Trader's Edge Blog on RealMoney this afternoon:

By Cody Willard
RealMoney.com Contributor
06/16/2006 3:29 PM

What's On My Mind

It's a beautiful afternoon here in NYC, and given that I remain mostly in cash, the action is dead out there today, and my parents are in town for the first time in years, I'm going share what's on my mind and then head out into the weekend.

Economic

Has the Fed's incessant jawboning of inflation this week already undermined its efforts at jawboning because it was so incessant as to become transparent?

Is Bernanke as classic a textbook economic thinker as it appears?

Does the Fed think about all of the change the unedited, unfiltered and freeflowing information in our society is having on their policies -- and how that is undermining its ability to control what the public reads?

And much, much, much more importantly, does it ever think about the effect that free-flowing information will have on the economy and society?

Are corporate spreads really indicating health? Or are they simply a trigger waiting to be hit by the rolling dislocations that have struck seemingly every other financial market?

Trading

Doesn't it make you nervous when you realize how ridiculous that last bullet point seems given how healthy and strong the corporate bond market has been?

So, from a trading perspective then, is the healthy corporate bond market really a healthy stock market signal? Or is it one giant complacency indicator?

Technology

How close is Apple to hitting critical mass in the legal digital video download business when we start reading articles that start off like this: "Three hours before a start against Florida, Colorado Rockies pitcher Jason Jennings sits in front of his locker, puts on his headphones and stares at his video iPod."

Isn't how much memory and processor power the new Vista system requires exactly what a believer in the coming Vista, dual-processor upgrade cycle wants?

I mean, seriously, what's with everybody talking as if they know that there aren't one, two, ten or a hundred new killer apps out there that Vista, dual processors, unlimited memory and fiber speeds will unleash?

Given the history of the ongoing technology and information revolutions and the amazing fortunes society and the economy creates, doesn't it make more sense to invest on the flipside of that "knowledge" and practically assume that there will be many new killers apps unleashed in the next year, two years, 10 years and beyond?

Am I the only one who gets butterflies of excitement and potential when he starts picturing that future?

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

The Video Revolution Will Be Televised

2006-06-16T20:11:00.000-04:00

Administrator's note: We've got the "Cody Cam" clips from June 14th's Man on the Street segment on Kudlow & Company uploaded.

Click here for the first clip.

Click here for the second clip.

Click here for the third clip.

Cody and the "Cody Cam" Will Reemerge Tonight

2006-06-14T10:34:00.000-04:00

Administrator's note: Cody and the "Cody Cam" will reemerge tonight on Kudlow & Company. Hope to see you there.

Cody on Kudlow & Company Tonight

2006-06-12T12:50:00.000-04:00

Administrator's note: Cody will appear on Kudlow & Company tonight, along with Jordan Rohan from RBC and others.

CNBC Unveils the "Cody Cam"

2006-06-12T12:37:00.000-04:00

Administrator's note: We've got the "Cody Cam" clips from last week's Man on the Street segment on Kudlow & Company uploaded.

Click here for the first clip.

Click here for the second clip.

Click here for the third clip.

Death to New Music Fridays

2006-06-09T21:47:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday this week, I was on the street talking to strangers in front of the Apple store with CNBC. I quickly figured out that the best way to put people at ease was to first ask a very simple question: “Do you like music?” No surprise that every one I talked to answered affirmatively. I badmouthed radio to an older couple who told me they love the radio. The thing is, I’m utterly sick of Top 40 music. Isn’t everybody?

I remember when my brother was starting his first heavy metal band in high school that my mom told him that he needed to make sure they covered some Top 40 songs so that people could relate to them. I got to thinking about that logic a few weeks ago at a dinner with a group of Hollywood and music agents and managers as they debated the future of the business of music.

The debate covered topics that I’ve been writing about for a long time, from the decline of bundling to piracy to immediate access to all music ever recorded. Now the first two topics are obviously negatives for the music industry, and one look at what has been a steady, several-year-long decline in music sales tells the story clearly. But the latter point is finally starting to kick in and I think the music content ownership business might be in better shape than I’ve previously argued. That is, I was wrong that the value of music content would be more impacted by the former points than the latter.

A somewhat silly anecdote that I’d shared on Kudlow & Company the day I held up a hand-written sign saying “MSFT” saying that I wanted to pretend like I was on a 70s game show underscores the shift. You see, a few weeks ago, I had an epiphany. I don’t ever want to bother buying Top 40 music. I hear the very same songs in line at Duane Reade, in the elevator of my former office in a hedge fund hotel, when I visit my father’s animal clinic in New Mexico, in my car, in…well, you get the point. I got to thinking that there’s been about 40 years worth of Top 40 hits since selling music became a valid business model. 40 years of, say, 150 Top 40 hits per year equals out to about 6000 songs. All of which I think know every beat, rhythm and nuance of the music, not to mention a good deal of the lyrics you and I can both recite off the top of our heads. “I’m bad, I’m bad, you know it”? Why do we have to know who sang those lyrics? (It was Michael Jackson for those of you who want to pretend you didn’t know that already.)

And new music? Until I’d had my epiphany, I’d been writing a “New Music Friday” column on TheCodyBlog.com for months, as a lot of people send me new CDs and I figured I’d pass on some of the bands I get into.

But then one late Saturday evening when I’d turned on the “Classic Rock” station on my TV and pumped it out over my Bose speakers in my apartment, I’d heard this cover of called, “Time Has Come Now”, an eleven minute jam that blew my mind from 1967. How could I not have ever heard this song before?

I went straight to my iMac and pulled up the iTunes store and looked up this band called The Chamber Brothers. And I started downloading a couple of albums from the band. And every song I listened to got better, because the band had created art with their ALBUMS. Not this one song of theirs that became a Top 40 hit that I’d just not happened to have been privy to for some strange reason given my obsession with rock and roll.

And I realized, I don’t know anything about music history, despite knowing every Top 40 hit in the last 40 years note for note.

In my office, I’ve banned all singles. I’ve banned all music from 1982 and on. (Why 1982? Why not?) I almost always have music blasting in the background when I’m reading and analyzing stocks and when I’m writing these pieces for my blog. And from Bob Dylan’s amazing Nashville Skyline album to Curtis Mayfield’s smooth Curtis album, I’m in music heaven. Now that I don’t listen to Top 40 anymore!

And the label that owns the rights to the three albums by this Nick Drake dude that I’d never even heard of until I Googled “Best albums of 1970)? Methinks iTunes and the power of the Internet are probably the best thing that ever happened to them. If only because everyone who reads this post can immediately go purchase this “Bryter Layter” album with out even getting out of their chair because I’m going to put a link to it right here.

The Cody News (June 9, 2006)

2006-06-09T11:54:00.000-04:00

With Oil's Cash, Venezuelans Consume

By JENS ERIK GOULD
Published: June 8, 2006

CARACAS, Venezuela, June 7 — On a recent Sunday morning here, free-spending customers have emptied Vintage, a trendy upscale bar, of nearly all its best vodka. At the Castellana Chevrolet dealership nearby, buyers wait eight months to get the keys to cars they paid for long ago.

Confusing how this author seems to take some of the concepts of supply-side economics and writes as if this evil despot's methodical theft of the property and wealth of Venezuela's people has some parallels. While it's nice to read the anecdotes of how a few cronies and otherwise privileged few in the country are spending, Venezuela's certainly not in any type of cycle of empowering the "consumer".

None Too Friendly: Allegations Swirl At Ice Cream Shop

By JOHN HECHINGER
June 9, 2006; Page A1

WILBRAHAM, Mass. -- In a tweed jacket and paisley bow tie, 91-year-old S. Prestley Blake strode to the microphone at Friendly Ice Cream Corp.'s annual meeting last month. His voice quavering, he accused directors of "covering up" improper spending by the chairman. Executives gave the shareholder a frosty reception, interrupting him and even threatening to have him removed.

Sad story, but if the CEO's making self-dealing business transactions and using company money for private purposes, what leg does he have to stand on? It is what it is, no?

What Happens if Inflation Is Overstated?

By FLOYD NORRIS
Published: June 9, 2006

AMONG some Americans, it is almost an article of faith that the Consumer Price Index understates inflation — there are conspiracy theories about why that happens. After all, holding down the C.P.I. saves the government money in a variety of ways and hurts those with pension or Social Security benefits linked to the index.

Heads, the bulls win. Tails, the bears lose, I guess. Why does anyone even care what inflation rate is reported by the endlessly manipulated and adjusted and re-adjusted numbers from those who have political motivations to lie to the public?

At MoMA, Douglas Gordon: The Hourglass Contortionist

By KEN JOHNSON
Published: June 9, 2006

THOUGH relatively few have seen it, and hardly anyone has sat through the whole thing, Douglas Gordon's "24 Hour Psycho" has become one of those mythic monuments — like Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" or Vito Acconci's "Seedbed" — that embody the dreams, anxieties and aspirations of a generation.

Sounds trippy. I'm in.

To Find a Mate, Raid a Dungeon Or Speak Like an Elf

By DAVID KESMODEL
June 9, 2006; Page A1

Over the years, Mark Brown searched for Ms. Right in all the usual places: at parties, work functions and the occasional singles bar. He ended up meeting her inside a videogame.

The revolution! You see, every day, we're all growing closer. And that's the single best remedy to stop future wars, by the way.

Fishing on the Ubiquitous Ken Fisher

2006-06-09T11:52:00.000-04:00

Got this email from a reader this morning. What a funny rant.

You want to know what is the worst thing to happen to me in "the market"?

Ken Fisher.

Not wipe-outs. Not spread. Not commissions. Not lousy advice. Not bad trades, late trades, missing trades, too-many trades. Not Black-Scholes. Not Yiddish. Not poor discipline. Not stock tips. Not greed and fear. Not bad record-keeping. Not phony hedging. Not Mr. Market. Not even being chucked into the "position trader" bucket by eTrade's software just for backing out of a few bad trades quickly. Not thousands spent on books. Not more thousands spent on subscriptions. Not who-knows-what spent on computers and multiple Internet portals. Not who-knows-what else spent on software, historical data, nice big screens. Not losing friends by yabbering on and on (and on) about the market.

No, Ken Fisher.

This guy is everywhere. Her's on TV. He's in my mail (he's in my MOTHER-IN-LAW'S mail). He's wrapped around otherwise entertaining Cramer StreetWatch shorts. He's staring back at me right now from my spam bucket -- "A Surprising Prediction by Forbes Columnist, Ken Fisher," courtesy of TheStreet.com's mailing list (this, by the way, is almost the best part, since he's paying, only to be chucked into the trash by Postini).

He smirks at me in my dreams. I can do his sales pitch from memory: "Which way is the market headed? Find out now. Hi, I'm Ken Fisher, twenty-year Forbes columnist and CEO of Fisher Investments, a multi-billion dollar, multi-product money management firm, serving prestigious institutions and high net-worth individuals. Get my latest stock market outlook. It's got powerful market insights you can use with your investments now. This is a (beat) limited time offer." He's taking over my brain! All hail Ken Fisher!

Emacs!

OK, Ken. I give up. You win. Send me the damn "surprising prediction." I already know what it says: "Hi, I'm Ken Fisher. Yuh wanna make money in the stock market? Easy. Whine, noodge, cajole, plead, beg, pester, kvetch, yammer, snivel, annoy. Crab, grouse, bellyache. Be everywhere. All the time. Smirk, smirk, smirk, smirk at everyone. Eventually they'll send you money just to shut you up. Or they would, if I hadn't thought of this first."

Thanks. I'm guzzling down the KoolAid. I feel much better now.

He's going to squash me like a bug, isn't he?
Jim B.

p.s. There is a "kenfisher.com" and... IT'S SOMEBODY ELSE!!! Har har har!!!

Invading Protectors

2006-06-08T08:41:00.000-04:00

Why does McAfee think it's okay to put up a pop up window on my Dell PC this morning with a 50% renewal offer on the software I pay them for, said software of course was supposed to keep pop up windows that offer 50% renewals off my Dell PC?

The Cody News (June 7, 2006)

2006-06-07T12:59:00.001-04:00

Senate Contender in Florida Presses On

By MARK LEIBOVICH
Published: June 7, 2006

VENICE, Fla. — Undaunted by a run of horrific poll numbers, staff turmoil and public doubts from leaders of her party, Representative Katherine Harris is thinking confidently beyond November.

Nothing's uglier than in-fighting over embarrassment. And on such a grandiose level too. You know, she only happens to be, single-handedly, one of the tiebreakers in who went on to lead the most powerful nation in the history of the planet vs. who has seeemingly chosen a self-imposed exile as the spokesperson for fixing Social Security because his cronies who want totransfer some wealth have found some scientists who have created "proof" that it'll collapse on itself in 2042. But take it seriously RIGHT NOW because, you know, we can see that far into the future.

Oh wait, he's a spokesperson for fixing the environment because his cronies who want to transfer some wealth have found some scientists who have created "proof" that it'll collapse on itself in 2042. But you better take it seriously RIGHT NOW because, you know, we can see that far into the future.

Silly me, sometimes I get confused about which party in power uses which panic-story because it wants to transfer wealth to its cronies who are paying millions to those telling us how scary the future is to convince that it's okay that they all keep stealing from us.

Enough already, no? (And yeah, I KNOW this was a major digression, but the silliness of the Harris lady running for Senate was a great segue!)

What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood

By David Leonhardt
Published: June 7, 2006
BETWEEN "The Godfather" and "The Godfather: Part II," Francis Ford Coppola made a movie called "The Conversation." It stars Gene Hackman as a paranoid wiretapper in Watergate-era San Francisco, and the cast includes Robert Duvall, a young Harrison Ford, the woman who played Shirley in "Laverne & Shirley" and the guy who played Fredo Corleone in "The Godfather."

I didn't see anywhere in this article where anybody gave credit to Chris Anderson at Wired, who told almost the exact same story using almost the exact same analogies....oh, about a year or two ago. Just sayin'

Class A Appearance for Clemens, First as an Interior Designer

By LEE JENKINS
Published: June 6, 2006

LEXINGTON, Ky., June 5 — When the Class A Lexington Legends staggered into their clubhouse at 3:30 a.m. Monday, bleary-eyed after an eight-hour bus trip, a few of them might have thought they were dreaming.

Clemens is far from perfect, but man, ever since I read about his workouts and work ethic as a high school athlete, I've been a huge fan. Sweet story.

Side Effects to a Remedy for Housing

By PETER APPLEBOME
Published: June 7, 2006

A State Superior Court judge last month stripped two Bergen County towns of their ability to enforce zoning laws and regulate development within their borders. He also demanded that officials read sections of a book by a Harvard professor who opines on fair housing, suburban planning and the virtues of activist judges. It's hard to be sure which of the two actions seemed more galling.

So, so so many ridiculous assumptions and arguments and points in this story. Get the government the hell out of housing so that the poor can afford housing, please. The only way for "affordable" housing to exist is to stop the inequities created by those in power. And that'll only happen when we all clue in to the transparent system of those mafiosos who keep the public convinced that the poor won't have housing unless those in charge choose who builds, who gets paid, where they can build, how much they can build....ah, the sweet feeling of freedom New Jersey style!

Cody on RM: Revolutions Make for Strange Bedfellows

2006-06-02T16:44:00.000-04:00

Administrator's Note: As a parting shot into the weekend, here is a post from Cody's Trader's Edge Blog on RealMoney this morning:

By Cody Willard
RealMoney.com Contributor
06/02/2006 9:59 AM
Click here for more stories by Cody Willard

Oh, (I wanna show you) the different emotions,
(I wanna run to) the sounds and motions
Electric woman waits for you and me,
So it's time we take a ride, we can cast all of your hang-ups over the seaside
While we fly right over the love filled sea,
Look up ahead, I see the loveland, soon you'll understand. - Jimi Hendrix

I believe Apple's going to take all kinds of market share from its biggest competitors, putting a serious crimp in its competitors' ability to make any money at all, much less grow.

I also expect that Google will take all kinds of market share from its biggest competitors, putting a serious crimp in its competitors' ability to make any money at all, much less grow.

And I happen to believe that Microsoft is going to take all kinds of market share from its biggest competitors, putting a serious crimp in its competitors' ability to make any money at all, much less grow.

YouTube.com? Huge market-share taker.

Yahoo!? Yup, gonna take market share.

P2P distribution? Yet another huge market share taker.

You see, Wall Street's got this Internet competition thing all wrong. Apple, Google and Microsoft are not each other's most important competitors.

YouTube.com's success isn't zero-sum with Yahoo's new user-generated video outlet.

And it's not as if Apple's biggest concern in growing its iTunes outlet is whether Yahoo! and Napster ever figure out that nobody wants to rent music but that they want to own it. GoogleTalk vs. Skype vs. Vonage? All are going to take huge market share and the first two will probably make their shareholders a lot of money.

"Alright then, Cody, who exactly are the losers around here?"

In video, the cable and satellite companies are going to lose huge chunks of viewership as their nearly 100% market share in video content distribution for the home has nowhere to go but down. I've mentioned this before -- I know I watch a little bit less TV these days as I watch a little bit more video on iTunes and YouTube and elsewhere on the Net.

Music? Well, I've been writing for more than two years that Apple is on its way to becoming the world's biggest vendor of music. It should pass Wal-Mart this year, right on schedule (well, my schedule from back in 2004 at least. Wait, did that prior sentence just outline how Apple's biggest competitor in music is ... Wal-Mart?! Yes, it did. That's who all of these Internet music distributors are competing against: the physical world retailers that still dominate music sales. But those retailers won't be a factor in music sales at all in 10 years.

Voice? The Bell companies and other originally tax-funded incumbents in this country still have more than 95% of the market. That'll be closer to 50% in 10 years, as I have written about before.

I was shocked to realize the other day, as I paid Microsoft for three sets of software at 99% gross margins for my new Apple computer that is running on Intel chips, that revolutions make for strange bedfellows. Apple taking share from the Wintel monopoly is actually a positive for Microsoft and Intel. Talk about "Flipping It!"

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

The Cody News: Guantanamo, A Pock On Our Society

2006-06-02T12:10:00.000-04:00

Tale of 5 Muslims: Out of Guantanamo And Into Limbo

By ANDREW HIGGINS
June 2, 2006; Page A1
TIRANA, Albania -- After four years in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Bakker Qassim, a former terror suspect cleared last year of having ties to al Qaeda, got word last month that he finally would be set free.

Guantanamo Bay is a shameful, horrific violation of the Geneva Convention. But you know what? That’s beside the point. It is immoral and wrong to imprison people with no representation and no chance at justice.

Guantanamo Bay now holds around 460 detainees. These include four who have been declared "no longer enemy combatants" -- bureaucratic jargon for innocent. About 116 others, though not exonerated, are no longer considered a serious threat or valuable to U.S. intelligence.

On top of it all we’ve got innocent fathers, sons, brothers, and children being held for years even after they’ve been declared outright innocent. Are you frickin’ kidding me?

About a month later, Mr. Qassim and the other exonerated Uighurs were moved to less-severe quarters in nearby Camp Iguana. They could walk around without chains and were allowed to watch nature videos. News broadcasts were banned. Mr. Willett requested permission to send a Uighur-English dictionary and other language materials but was told this was forbidden. Defense Department rules bar inmates from developing any skill, even English, that might be used against the U.S.

Information flow. Education. Those are the best weapon against all forms of crime, including terrorism. Flip It™: Give these men access to every single piece of information they want. Teach them English! Bring them into the civilized world.

Mr. Willett appealed, and a hearing was set for May 8. With the legal pressure mounting, the government stepped up previously fruitless efforts to find the Uighurs a home. U.S. officials at one time considered letting the Uighurs into America, but that option was rejected "at a senior policy level" out of concerns over possible litigation and security, says a senior State Department official.

“At a senior policy level?!” Who?! We should demand accountability. Who made that decision?

Sending the Uighurs back to China was never an option, say U.S. officials. The State Department's annual report on global human rights, released in March, concluded that China had "used counter-terrorism as an excuse for religious repression of Uighur Muslims." It also reported that a Uighur sent back to China from Nepal against his will had been executed. The State Department's latest report on global terrorism, issued in April, now lists the East Turkistan Islamic Movement as a group of "concern."

Yes, China kills dissidents. And the best way to fight that? I suppose, we could take away all access to information and the ability for Chinese people to learn English just like the geniuses at the Defense Department think they should be doing with these innocent men who were wrongfully detained for years at Guantanamo.

Local newspapers splashed their arrival across the front pages. The opposition blasted the government for upsetting China. Two days after the Uighurs landed, Prime Minister Berisha met with Vice President Dick Cheney in Croatia at a gathering of three countries hoping to join NATO. The prime minister said Albania was ready to "pay any price" to join the alliance. Mr. Cheney said he endorsed the entry of Albania, Croatia and Macedonia.

Finally in the last section of the article, the reporter touches on the reality and roots of this shameful pock on the world—it’s all about rich white and rich Asian men’s politics.