Want to Present Like Steve Jobs?

Few speakers are as anticipated as Steve Jobs. My Twitter feed is already filled with comments from the many people watching his WWDC keynote today.

Clearly nobody would be interested if he didn’t provide stellar presentations (performances?) to accompany his company’s stellar products; here is a great presentation that illustrates just how he does it:

Why I’m Done with the Stock Market for Good

Oh so close! I was holding a stock, waiting for a positive earnings release, with the full intent of exiting stock ownership for good once I saw a nice bump to reward me for my time and risk. Instead, I watched a combination of a bear market, overly optimistic analysts and a heavy short position drop my stock 50% in 2 days.

This was so typical of my experiences on the market: years of careful effort and minor gains, more than erased in seconds on the stock market.

Now before you start to think this is purely emotion, remember that I was already planning on exiting before my recent calamity, and here are some reasons why:

1) Given Enough Time, the Market Used to be a ‘Sure Thing’… NOT Anymore!

When I entered investing ca. 1998, this is what the trend on the Dow Jones Industrial average looked back to approximately the time of my birth:

Sure thing right? Little burp back in ’87, but if you look at any 10 year period you are still in the money.

Now look at plot of the market over my ~12 year trading career:

Hmmm… not such a sure thing. Lets assume I made all my purchases back at 8000, and not at 11,000 and 14,000 like I actually did, and I actually had an index fund (and not a bunch of crappy tech stocks). My potential gain was about 10,000-8,000 = 2,000 or about 20%.

Guaranteed funds provide a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR), but relatively low rates (low single digit), so it is worthwhile understanding what kind of CAGR this gain translates into. To get a 20% gain over ~12 years, you would only need a CAGR of 1.88%. You can EASILY have found a GUARANTEED fund that would have returned more than this! Keep in mind I am already using a best-case scenario, not including this notable stock that I did invest in:

2) So if you were a lot smarter than me, and stuck with index funds, you at least saw some gains right?

Again, not so fast!

The Dow Jones is based on the US dollar value of stocks. What has happened to the value of the US dollar since 1998? At the start of 1998 $1 US would purchase about $1.44 Canadian.  Today, they are trading close to parity, meaning that the USD has actually depreciated about 40%.

Lets see what happened to the $8000 USD we invested in the DJIA index fund: we used about $11,500 Canadian to purchase that $8000 USD, rode it up to $10,000 USD which is now worth $10,000 CDN! We have actually lost $1,500! That isn’t even counting the opportunity cost of that money.

3) Give it your full attention, or not at all.

I only worked one or two stocks where I could play close attention to the nuances of the particular business, and the market that they were in (think Apple). I found that even with this detailed focus, I still couldn’t keep track of all the important metrics that could have a significant impact on the stock (like exchange rate trends, short position, the macro market trend).  I could never put in a sufficient amount of money in to create the gains that would justify my time. For example, even though I kept buying AAPL from $120, all the way down to $80, and all the way back up to sale at $185, I still didn’t make any money due to interest charges, trading charges, and exchange rate fluctuation! I was so surprised come tax time that I had to perform the calculations 5 times to convince myself the net was $0!

4) Analysts are a flaming pile of crap.

I think only meteorologists are paid for being so consistently wrong, and compared to stock analysts, they are oracles.

That is why I was planning on getting out of the market for good, and focussing on low risk money market funds, guaranteed funds, or bricks of cash under the mattress. Now I have to wait and see if the stock can dig itself back out of its hole.

*^#&^#)

Will Carriers Finally Get Their Piece of the Apple Pie?

“Better coverage… fastest network… fewest dropped calls…” Which mobile carrier am I talking about?

ALL OF THEM

There is a huge gap in the current capacity and the demand that is being created by new high-bandwidth mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, RIM smart-phones, Androids, Nokia Nxxx’s, MiFi/RocketStick 3.5G/4G devices used with laptops/netbooks, and Kindles. This capacity gap is inspiring another internet arms-race, just like the catastrophic that contributed to the ‘.com bubble burst’ of 2000/1. All of these competing wireless carriers are upgrading their wireless network capacity many-times over (10-100x+). The main difference –this time– is that demand exceeds supply… for now.

Right now, customers are very much choosing carriers based on the phones available, but this will soon change as cachet devices like the iPhone are made available on multiple networks. Then people will start switching from one to another because they are dissatisfied with the service (probably because a carrier is picking up high bandwidth users faster than their network engineers can deploy capacity). Then we will reach an equilibrium…

Then What?

Well, until recently, the answer would be –like any commodity market– a race to the bottom. The raging ‘red ocean’ of the wireless market would lead to the survival of the cost-cutting fittest. Just like pork-bellies, barrels of oil & even computer RAM, the winners will be those that produce a common unit for the lowest cost. The only people making real money (margin anyway) in this scenario will be those who can create differentiated products: handset makers & those that own the content (Apple and Apple respectively – I kid).

But then ‘net neutrality’ & the FCC got a big kick in the nuts courtesy of Comcast.

People who don’t care about FCC regulations (probably 99.99999% of you) may have missed the recent ruling in favour of Comcast on their ability to control how their customers use the internet (whether they were ‘neutral’ or could treat data from different sources differently).

Comcast, by challenging the FCC’s right to control neutrality, has now set a precedent that would allow carriers to be less ‘neutral’ when providing these over-the-top services (particularly those that make it hard to identify the source of all the bandwidth, like BitTorrent, etc.). This could potentially mean that they can have more control over the internet experience the user has. They could treat websites preferentially (higher speed) that agree to do revenue sharing, or block/restrict the bandwidth to those they don’t like.

The wireless and wireline carriers now have another way to differentiate from each other, aside from the “Better coverage… fastest network… fewest dropped calls…” mantra they all currently drone.

The internet experience could end up being VERY different from one carrier to the next, with an infinite combination of content/carrier/geography relationships possible. A very basic example would be a carrier winning business based on allowing BitTorrent traffic to your cell phone vs. one that does not allow it.

Things just got a whole lot more complicated… will carriers finally get a piece of the Apple pie?