Stock Blog

I have just bought a machine from rackspace cloud hosting and moved my blog there. The new address is http://sapessi.com

See you there

Not really.

I do get it. It is a filtered version of the internet.
More than that. A real-time-filtered version of the internet. You’ll get links from people you chose to follow almost real time.

Brilliant. In fact, I keep twittering here.

Will it scale? Is it “monetizable” as it scales? That’s the 500 million dollar question… Which, I believe, Facebook never bothered to ask before making its alleged  bid for Twitter.

As far as I can see it doesn’t. A real time search on the messages posted on... [Read More]

As the news of ITV’s financial troubles shakes the London stock exchange the only thing, so far as I can see, that is saving us from the easy protectionism, oh so dear to populist politicians, is greed.

Let me elaborate. Both Gordon Brown and Barack Obama have been calling for countries all over the world to avoid resorting to protectionist measures while restricting or closing altogether their own high skilled migrants program.

So why am I saying that greed will save us? Very simple. There’s... [Read More]

I’m not quite sure what’s happening here.
Government intervention seem to have turned the rules of the Market upside down.

Lloyds TSB just reported profits for the year of roughly 300 million pounds. Guess where the shares are going, that’s right, down. Admittedly this is a big drop in profits compared to last year, however it’s a brilliant result compared to RBS’s 30 billion loss. Guess how rbs shares fared. They went up. That’s because the UK government promised additional money.

This is not... [Read More]

This definitely goes in the “Did you ever think” series.

Wired has compiled a list of the technological breakthroughs of 2008. Apparently one of them is edible chips (as in computer chips).

Did you ever think that one day you were going to say “Mate, I’m sh***ing chips. Literally”. I wonder what else the future holds for us.

Very soon we’ll need archeologist to tell us what was going on just last year. Flying donkeys or pigs would already be a reality if only scientists thought they could be... [Read More]

Yes.

The question is, for how long?

In an article in today’s International Herald Tribune Thomas L. Friedman discusses the prospect for China now that western markets have woken up and are “on the credit wagon”.

From the article - Stephen Roach, the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, Americans

“the most overextended consumer in world history” - can no longer buy so many Chinese exports. We need to save more, invest more, consume less and throw out most of our credit cards. But as that happens, we... [Read More]

Central bankers have been saying for a while that the blunt instruments they have been provided with to regulate are not enough in this day and age. Globalization has made the instruments available to policy makers antiquate.
A change in interest rate will not get us out of this recession.

Japan is the classic example.
As the country slides in a deeper recession its biggest companies are slashing their forcast and already announcing losses - See Toyota and Honda.

Had the internal market been... [Read More]

Italy with the third biggest national debt in the world and ratings for its bonds at an all time low looks set for a tough time.

Italy, like many other countries, is having considerable difficulties in raising capital. IOU are not what they used to be with the credit markets in this conditions. Furthermore the low ratings mean that Italy’s bonds offer much higher yield than other countries’.
This coupled with high national debt and a deep and long recession looming over our heads is the... [Read More]

As another chapter of this financial crisis unfolds I decided to chime in again with some random and mostly unproductive thoughts.

Britain’s stock market regulator on Thursday banned short selling in financial companies and said it might extend the ban to other sectors. The move followed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s curbs on the practice that went into effect Thursday morning. [MarketWatch]

Yes indeed. Regulators are moving to temporarily ban short-selling. This sparked a heated... [Read More]