In Search of the Perfect Investment

Check out charts for tech stocks — like Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, DELL, Research in Motion, etc. They’re all in free fall.

Big industrials with heavy overseas exposure like Caterpillar and Boeing are being hit badly.

Big miners like BHP and Rio Tinto are also being hit.

Play this market only to the short side.

Paul Krugman has a piece Apocalypse Fairly Soon this morning. For it click here.

God bless RadioShack. It’s been a wonderful short.

The Facebook saga continues. My friend got 2,000 shares in Facebook. He’s with Merill Lynch. I got 50, though I had asked for 10,000. I’m with Fidelity. Another reason not to love Fidelity — the previous one when they failed to disclose a 5.75% fee on a mutual fund I bought, and refused to reverse the deal.

I also have an account with Goldman Sachs but they told me  eons ago that if I didn’t give them zillions of dollars in commission income (fund management fees don’t count), I’ll never receive a single share in any IPO. They’ve kept their word.

There is talk of Facebook opening up $8 or which would value the company at a totally absurd $126 billion. In coming days Facebook will fall — I’m guessing to below $38. In which case if you don’t sell your allocation or buy in the aftermarket, you will lose money. Cramer points out that the last ten Internet IPO has lost their investors money.

Facebook underwriters, including Merrill Lynch, will split $176 million in fees for their hard work in selling the Facebook shares.

JPMorgan continues it cockroach persona. From BusinessInsider this morning:

A bombshell report from the Wall Street Journal says Jamie Dimon personally approved the concept behind the disastrous trades that cost JP Morgan $3 billion and counting. Dimon however did not monitor how they were executed. Meanwhile, the bank’s CIO at the center of the trading loss has built up $100 billion of risky bonds.

The $2 billion trading loss is turning into a $5 billion trading loss, according to the Journal. Read the entire Wall Street Journal’s report here.

Is  RIMM doomed and going even lower? From a report by Craig Johnston  who just visited BlackBerry World 2012:

BlackBerry World 2012
Previously called Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES), BlackBerry World 2012 needed to be a conference where RIM showed the world that it FINALLY meant business in the Smartphone and Tablet space.

By now it has been five years since the iPhone and four years since the Android Smartphones, and RIM’s BlackBerry brand still runs on underpowered hardware and an ancient operating system. Google, Palm, Microsoft and even Nokia have already addressed the issue by throwing away their old operating systems and ideas on Smartphones and adopted a brand new technology. RIM is yet to make this move even though everyone has been telling them to do it for five years.

For the entire  report on Research in Motion, click here.

Last night’s Borowitz Report is totally wonderful:

A Letter from Mark Zuckerberg

About Facebook’s IPO
Dear Potential Investor:

For years, you’ve wasted your time on Facebook.  Now here’s your chance to waste your money on it, too.

Tomorrow is Facebook’s IPO, and I know what some of you are thinking.  How will Facebook be any different from the dot-com bubble of the early 2000’s?

For one thing, those bad dot-com stocks were all speculation and hype, and weren’t based on real businesses.  Facebook, on the other hand, is based on a solid foundation of angry birds and imaginary sheep.

Second, Facebook is the most successful social network in the world, enabling millions to share information of no interest with people they barely know.

Third, every time someone clicks on a Facebook ad, Facebook makes money.  And while no one has ever done this on purpose, millions have done it by mistake while drunk.  We totally stole this idea from iTunes.

Finally, if you invest in Facebook, you’ll be far from alone.  As a result of using Facebook for the past few years, over 900 million people in the world have suffered mild to moderate brain damage, impairing their ability to make reasoned judgments.  These will be your fellow Facebook investors.

With your help, if all goes as planned tomorrow (i.e. this morning) , Facebook’s IPO will net $100 billion (actually $104 billion).  To put that number in context, it would take JP Morgan four or five trades to lose that much money.

One last thing: what will, I, Mark Zuckerberg, do with the $18 billion I’m expected to earn from Facebook’s IPO?  Well, I’m considering buying Greece, but that would still leave me with $18 billion.  LOL.

Friend me,

Mark

The Italian Tennis Open is playing today and this weekend. All the usual suspects. It’s on the Tennis Channel.

Harry Newton who wonders how AT&T can continue in business when it provides such abysmally lousy cell phone service.