Nervous charts, social investing, and Apple’s cash

It’s the magnitude and swiftness of the move that matters, not the direction. And these intraday charts of most asset classes going crazy the last few days make me nervous. This is a snapshot I grabbed off Marketwatch’s home page on Friday with intraday market charts that look like monthly charts. These charts reflect the higher risks for bank stocks in a time of spiking volatility in currency, bond and energy markets.

For the last couple weeks, I keep getting asked about how best to trade currencies. I think there’s a lot of newfound geniuses and retail traders in the currency markets thinking it’s easy money. Might be time to bet on a counter trend move — maybe a dollar pullback short-term is next? Whatever, I’ve got no interest in trying to game it from here.

Now let’s talk tech.

Here’s an interesting comparison of $AAPL vs $FB vs $GOOG since $FB got above $70 a share back in late July. $AAPL +21%, $FB flat and$GOOG -11% since that time. I wrote back a while ago about how FB’s been stuck in the $70s and it’s only been more of the same for Facebook shareholders since then.

When it comes to the social networking stocks, I’d repeat my Revolution Investing thesis as laid out here: “Twitter, Facebook are the two social networks that everybody thinks of when it comes to sharing news. I have been a longtime investor in Facebook and recently started buying Twitter  in part because of their powerful reach in disrupting the control of media.” Remember that there’s a lot of upside in social networking growth still to come. Think of it this way, as I explained in an interview the other day, “You watch 100 different TV shows in a year on 30 different TV stations on five different form factors. In five years, you’ll be on five different types of social networks that you access from 30 different form factors. The size of the social network pie is growing tremendously.”

There are lots of new companies creating value and new social networking revenue models. Here’s an article featuring my Scutify partner, Kheang Ly with quotes underscores the creative business models still being developed in these early years of social networking, “We want to become the iTunes of finance, and change the way financial information is published. At the moment there are a lot of analysts with their own websites, with newsletters, stock picks and research reports. Scutify now collating all that stuff onto one platform, where people can buy a report for as low as 99 cents.”

Two other tech investing notes to make here, Apple has an unheard of $178BB NET CASH on their balance sheet, but rates are so artificially low they can’t stop themselves from borrowing more (see: Apple files for multi-tranche bond issue.) Does Apple borrowing billions at below natural rates create jobs? Nope. But it will help the most profitable and cash rich company in the history of the planet become even more profitable and cash rich, thus enriching Apple shareholders. That the Federal Reserve’s 0% rates and QEs are corporate shareholder welfare couldn’t be underscored any better than with this Apple bond issue.

I’m going to remove NQ Mobile rom my Scuttle List. It’s down 80% since I cited it as a great short opportunity last January Baidu meanwhile is up 60% since I called it a great long opportunity in the same article: “I think an NQ Mobile short paired up with a Baidu long might be a good mid-term to long-term way to play China tech. Baidu’s been a long position of mine in the past because it’s building platforms for the Chinese consumer.”