Week of September 1, 2009

- EBay to sell a majority interest in Skype to private investors. EBay was criticized for overpaying for the internet calling service in 2005 when they outbid Google and paid nearly 3 billion if you include incentives. They didn’t even acquire the technology behind Skype’s uncanny clarity of signal which resulted in EBay going to court in Great Britain with the company who did buy those rights.
The deal helps EBay save facebuy placing the value of Skype closer to its purchase price than most analysts would have. Skype made $600,000,000 last year. Which… [ Read more ]

Here come the Bernie Madoff books: One of Madoff’s victims, Sheryl Weinstein who invested millions of dollars for the charity she ran as well all of her and her husband’s life savings with Madoff, now claims she also had an affair with Madoff in her book “Madoff’s Other Secret:Love, Money, Bernie and Me”. Weinstein writes that “about 10% of the volume of the NYSE was going through Bernie’s firm.” Well maybe that would have been true if he was really investing all that money that people like Weinstein were giving him, but it was an absurd claim that anyone with… [ Read more ]

Week of August 17, 2009

When a tenant failed to paty $87,000 in rent on two townhouses and retail property in Trump Plaza in New York City, the landlord, Trump Plaza Owners Co-op, did what the Donald himself would have recommended and began eviction proceedings. The tenant? Why that would be Trump Corp. owned by one Donald Trump. (Source: The American Lawyer via News of the Weird)

About a year ago, the HBO show Real Sports, profiled former major leaguer Lenny ‘Nails’ Dykstra. The less-than-eloquent, foul-mouthed, tobacco-chewing Dykstra was portrayed as a business genius in a piece that featured CNBC’s Jim Cramer extolling Dykstra’s market acumen and showed Dykstra trying to explain his options trading strategy to a confused Bernard Goldberg who reported the piece. Last month, the same show told how Dykstra’s fortunes have changed dramatically for the worst; living alone in an $18 million dollar unfurnished mansion, being sued by former business partners, former employees, and several creditors. On Thursday, Dykstra filed for Chapter 11… [ Read more ]

Week of August 3, 2009

Newsweek recently proclaimed that the recession is over, and with the Dow over 9,000, the S&P over 1,000 and the Nasdaq around 2,000 maybe it’s true. But Wall Street often gets ahead of Main Street. The street is going to keep a very close eye on Friday’s unemployment numbers to see if the recent market rally is an accurate harbinger of things to come or groundless optimism. As Harry Truman once said, “It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job, and it’s a depression when you lose yours.” Maybe when you get a… [ Read more ]

Week of July 27, 2009

It’s always nice to get out of a rut. At the end of last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above the 9000 level for the first time since last January. It has been a wild ride since the Dow made its all time closing high of 14,164.53 on October 11, 2007, to its recent nadir of 6,469.95 intra day on March 6 of this year. That roller coaster ride created record high levels in the VIX (volatility index) which scared the bejeesus out of many investors while making several professional traders happy… [ Read more ]

July 20, 2009

As you all probably know by now, today is the 40th anniversary of the first men walking on the moon. The amazing thing is that it only took 12 years from the Russian launch of Sputnik, which marked the beginning of the “space race” to Neil Armstrong’s first step which marked its end. In fact it was only 8 years after John Kennedy told Congress that “this nation should commit itself to the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and retuning him safely to Earth.”

Compare that with the… [ Read more ]

Oil prices are on the rise, so once again the fingers are pointing on those evil speculators. Websters defines speculation as “assuming a business risk in hopes of gain”, in other words: Trading. When the oil market goes up, speculators who have purchased oil futures are blamed. When the stock market goes down, speculators who have sold short are blamed. In other words, “how dare you be right, when I was wrong”.

Now if you can prove that a small cabal of moneymen have cornered a market and artificially forced up prices, well go ahead and bust them. But in… [ Read more ]

That’s French for “Happy July 14th” or Bastille Day – The French national holiday that commemorates the storming of the Bastille Prison by a mob of French peasants 220 years ago today. It’s like the 4th of July only there’s an ugly mob of smelly, bloodthirsty, French peasants with torches rather than a room full of patriots signing a document. Have a glass of wine, eat some cheese and be rude to someone to mark the day.