Missing from today’s headlines are Ukraine, Russia and their dealings with the US. That might be off the front page, but it’s still inflammatory over there and it’ll probably be back headlining soon, if I had to guess. And doing what I do for a living, trading and investing and writing about it, means I do have to guess. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a chance to buy on day when the markets are down 2-3% the next time Ukraine and Russia and US tensions flare. Keep it on your radar.
No trades for me today. I have buy orders ready to start scaling into Facebook if it gets closer to $50 and Google if it gets below $500. Cree is looking like a good tranche buy candidate too, maybe a 1/4 tranche. But not yet.
Here are today’s must-reads as we continue to connect the dots that make the world go round.
Facebook’s still a buy and Twitter’s still a sell – Three weeks ago, I wrote another bearish on $TWTR and bullish on $FB article. Nothing’s changed. “Companies like my Scutify are taking advantage of Twitter’s stuck-in-last-decade’s mentality to innovate around and on top of Twitter’s own platform. Facebook still has a huge revenue growth trajectory and is taking the kind of risks that I want a “young high tech” company that I invest in to be taking.
Marc Faber: It’s too late to buy U.S. stocks now – I love Marc and used to interview him on my TV show often, but he’s pretty much completely missed this last five years of bubble-blowing bull markets and I think I’d rather stick with my own economic and markets analysis than stay stuck in analysis that’s been wrong. There will be a markets top and there will likely be another markets crash at some point. But I remain positioned for more bubble-blowing bull market action and after having raised some cash by covering shorts and selling puts in the last couple weeks, I’m again looking to start scaling back into some of my favorite longs.
Fight over minimum wage hike comes to a head in the Senate -Someone explain to me how the Federal Govt can dictate to a completely privately funded business a “minimum wage” but they can’t dictate to the fully-welfare-dependent, heavily subsidized banks a “maximum bonus” in these times of emergency measures of welfare for banks? Read also: Stop moaning about our bonuses: Barclays boss slaps down
Tesla close to naming at least two states for battery ‘gigafactory’ sites – Dear Elon Musk and Tesla, Please take your welfare-begging company to some other state besides NM. If you can create jobs without stealing taxpayer money to fund your giga-factory, come on down! If you are a welfare company that doesn’t have a sustainable business model and therefore want taxpayers to pick up the tab for building your factory, DON’T TREAD ON ME! Any of you “conservatives” who support $TSLA or $INTC or RD Hubbard’s race tracks with taxpayer welfare money are neither conservative nor capitalist.
Meet one of the world’s best investors: Google – What did Google pay for Android and its site (Android.com) and operating system and its other assets back in 2005 when they did the deal? Reportedly, Google paid about $50 million for the rest of the equity it didn’t already own in Android, which had gotten funding from Google already to help start up. $50 million in 2005, nine years later and it’s now worth $100 billion. Good job, Google execs.
What did $GOOG pay for YouTube? $1.7 billion. And I remember sitting at a dinner with a Google biggie executive a few days after that YouTube deal was announced and he said to me, “We would have paid anything to buy YouTube.” The implication being that $1.7 billion was by far the high end of the offers that YouTube was getting for its business at the time.” If you were a hedge fund manager and you had invested $2.2 billion in two different companies in the last ten years and you’d seen their value increase to $200 billion over that time frame LIKE GOOGLE HAS WITH ANROID AND YOUTUBE, you’d be a legend.
Happy Hour with Rebecca Diamond and Cody Willard – Errr. I mean, Cody Underground. Featuring Michael Haynes CEO of Apmex. My old co-anchor from Fox Business, Rebecca Diamond, and I joined up to ask Michael some questions like: Do I buy gold coins or bars? U.S. or other countries? Fees? What about these gold companies that advertise on TV? If you’re a gold or silver investor and you’re not following MichaelHaynes, the CEO of Apmex, you’re missing out. His Scutify page is the best gold/silver info flow you’ll ever see.