Michael Gracie

Actually from Wednesday night - and it’s really more a “fest” than a “barrage”, but “linkfest” is taken

• Top trends from top investors, live from the Churchill Club (Barron’s)
• Comcast buys Plaxo, and Marshall Kirkpatrick nails the worldview on this development (ReadWriteWeb)
• Carl Icahn knocking on your door? You need help, fast! Or do you? (Wall Street Journal)
• Affluent investors say it’s time to buy equities, but mostly from someplace other than the US (Bloomberg)

IBM recently release a report on security threat trends, letting everyone know that 2006 is expected to be a period of leveling off. Big Blue noting over a billion (yes, a BILLION) computer security threats in 2005. Is this “leveling off” supposed to mean we are out of the woods?

CNET recently published a list of the top 10 dot-com flops, and after reading through the list, I could only think the list was contributed to by the folks at Fucked Company. Simply put, nobody seemed to herald any part of the ideas, and I believed some of the companies actually had some merit.

Read through the list, and ponder these points:

- What is not hot right now could very well be hot a few years later - trends matter
- Business models are often remade for changing times, much the same as major motion pictures are
- Getting the word out is hardly ever a bad thing
- Technology breeds efficiencies, despite what your IT director says about that ERP implementation
- Being spendthrift almost always causes pain down the road

Big failures should lead to learning, or does the free flow of capital simply dumb people down? Certainly, all of CNET’s top ten suffered from one “ailment” - an awful lot of money.

Douglas Adams said “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

I wonder what the next list of flops will look like, and who will make the next billion off of someone else’s “failed” idea.

I’ve heard an awful lot of analyst (and Dell executives) talk about how Apple is a one hit wonder with the iPod. While I have gotten a little more biased after my month on a Powerbook, I still couldn’t take the mindset of the fanatics, and had to continually lean towards the pundits. That notion gained even more strength after I saw the Mac Mini, and thought it overpriced and useless. Now I am beginning to wonder.
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Once again, stock analysts cannot make up their minds about the search advertising model. Month on month, these guys swing recommendations like Babe Ruth swung at fastballs - with reckless abandon and little emphasis on quality. The latest is a flip flop by the folks over at RBC Capital Markets (see Google, Yahoo! Ripped).

Now, I have to give some minor credit, as the companies in question cannot proceed on their tracks forever. But putting in fairly aggressive buy recomendation in January, only to reduce the price target by close to 20% in February, leads me to believe that they really have no idea what is going to happen.

They don’t. Running searches on a Windows 2000 workstations, crunching a one page spreadsheet with nary a variable built in which resembles the companies’ business model drivers, and then issuing a public press release, hardly qualifies these analysts as credible. But that is IMHO.

For further reading, see Sell-side Equity Analysts Continue Guessing.

Meanwhile…
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