Disqus - Friends of danbloom

Re: I’m Going Long Right Now

Dave Pinsen — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:56:55 -0000

Mark,

Any chance you'll look at royalty trusts as well? There are some healthy dividends there too, though they can fluctuate with commodity prices and production rates of course.

Re: Help?

Dave Pinsen — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 04:01:53 -0000

Gotham Gal,

It has to do with incentives. If you go to a store and the proprietress waits on you, I'm sure you'd get good service. But most retail workers don't own the business and they don't really care. They're just trying to go a good enough job to avoid getting fired.

Chris Rock made the key distinction in his last HBO special: there are jobs and there are careers. Chris Rock has a career now. Your husband has a career. But when Chris Rock was scraping shrimp off of plates in a Red Lobster kitchen, he had a job. As Rock says, when you have a career, your time flies; when you have a job, it crawls. The retail workers have jobs. Jobs suck.

The business question that raises -- and if your husband figures out how to solve it, maybe there's another successful business in it for him -- is to make more customer-facing jobs into careers.

Re: When Greed Is Good

Dave Pinsen — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:33:59 -0000

"It's time for America to get up off its ass and start looking for some "good licks".

Some Americans already are. I wrote about two groups of them months ago, "Profiting from the Credit Crunch/Real Estate Bust".

Re: When Greed Is Good

Dave Pinsen — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:08:58 -0000

Here's the link to that post: "Profiting from the Credit Crunch/Real Estate Bust"

Re: Does Obama Believe in Big, Government-Directed Breakthroughs?

Dave Pinsen — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 13:26:07 -0000

"an investment that will spur not only new discoveries in energy, but breakthroughs in medicine and science and technology."

I'm not an Obama supporter, but to play devil's advocate here, hasn't government investment in basic research (e.g., through NIH or Defense Department grants) led to breakthroughs in these areas already (e.g., the Internet, advances in robotic medicine technology, etc.)?

In your previous post on Atlas Shrugged, you claimed that you were afraid of too much government investment in "Project Xes" stifling innovation. It seems to me that the larger threat to innovation would be President Obama's plans to nationalize health care, which would invariably lead to de jure or de facto price controls, thus reducing funds for private sector medical R&D.

Re: 'Green' Energy Needs a Big Leap

Dave Pinsen — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:23:10 -0000

There's also no shortage of private capital investing in green tech (e.g., Al Gore's employer, Kleiner Perkins).

You can't legislate the pace of technological change.

Re: Powerpoint for Peter Singer

Dave Pinsen — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:34:25 -0000

Unskilled immigration lowers wages for unskilled natives, and drains government resources, because unskilled immigrants tend to consume more in government resources than they pay in taxes. Remittances from unskilled immigrants to their home countries have also had dysfunctional effects -- creating a culture of dependency, stifling local economic growth, etc.

Poverty and poor living conditions in the developing world are due mainly to bad government. If, for example, the tens of millions of Mexican nationals living in the U.S. illegally had stayed in Mexico, they might have exerted some political pressure on their government to improve the economic situation there.

Re: A Second Market Is Emerging

Dave Pinsen — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:53:07 -0000

The FT had an article on SecondMarket back in December. I posted about it at the time.

Re: Whitney Tilson On The Housing Mirage

Dave Pinsen — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:35:18 -0000

With his savvy about the problems in the housing market, why didn't Tilson position his mutual fund to profit from it?

Re: The Internet Is Alive And Well (As An Investment)

Dave Pinsen — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:16:29 -0000

Internet business may not be nearly as capital intensive as manufacturing businesses such as auto companies, but, from the perspective of a small-time entrepreneur in the process of building an Internet business or two, this obscures a subtler barrier to entry.

You can profitably offer digital products and services online if your users are willing to pay a modest amount for them. But the venture-funded businesses with a lot of capital can often afford to make the same product or service free, in the hopes that when they get enough users, they can profit from advertising. That's a less viable model for the rest of us.

Re: The Internet Is Alive And Well (As An Investment)

Dave Pinsen — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:11:50 -0000

James,

What are your favorite infrastructure stocks now?

Also, when's the next time you'll be having "office hours" at your friend's burger place in Manhattan?

Re: The Internet Is Alive And Well (As An Investment)

Dave Pinsen — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:24:23 -0000

Along these lines but more broadly speaking, an investment manager named Aaron Edelheit made a similar point: just because you see a large macro trend doesn't necessary mean it will represent an investable opportunity.

This reminds me also of something I read when I worked in business development for a financial Internet start-up. My company was one of a handful that sought to leverage the cost savings of the web to profitably provide recordkeeping services to small 401(k) plans. The idea was that there was this vast market out there that wasn't cost effective for the big players to consider. Then one day someone in an industry newsletter made an interesting analogy: the small 401(k) plan market was like the China market. The writer dug up quotes from American companies in the 19th century, talking about the huge potential China's enormous market represented for the matchbooks or whatever they were selling.

Re: The Internet Is Alive And Well (As An Investment)

Dave Pinsen — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:28:22 -0000

Terry,

Are there a lot of opportunities to make money investing in bicycles and skateboards? Are these examples of wildly popular inventions where the bulk of the rewards didn't flow to the inventors or initial investors?

Re: The Internet Is Alive And Well (As An Investment)

Dave Pinsen — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:10:18 -0000

Mark,

I'd be curious to hear your opinion of this microcap: Alloy Steel (AYSI.OB). The CEO might not be Hank Reardon, but he seems to have created a sort of better mousetrap: a new process for making the wear plates that protect mining and infrastructure equipment. Sales have declined from last year to break even over the last couple of quarters, but I'll be interested to see if the company has started earning money again next time it reports.

Re: The Internet Is Alive And Well (As An Investment)

Dave Pinsen — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:17:19 -0000

Terry,

I understand your point, but see my comment above about how macro trends don't always represent investable opportunities. You're absolutely right that, like bicycles, we'll probably be using the Internet in the future in ways we can't imagine today. But James's point was about whether there are investment opportunities in this. The examples of skateboards and bikes don't seem to be promising ones, since, as you agree, it appears that the bulk of the benefits of these inventions didn't accrue to their initial inventors and investors.

Re: The Internet Is Alive And Well (As An Investment)

Dave Pinsen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:27:31 -0000

Not to be picayune, but those statements both have four words each.

Re: Monetize The Audience, Not The Content

Dave Pinsen — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 13:02:32 -0000

"If they roll it out, I'll gladly sign up because I visit the NY Times at least ten times a month and I would like to help pay the costs of the people who create it."

Fred, if you want to pay the costs but you eschew print editions for some reason, why not subscribe to the print edition but ask the Times to send your paper to a local school instead of your home? If memory serves, the Times offers that option for subscribers going on vacation, so I assume they'd be willing to let you donate every print edition to a classroom too.

Re: Monetize The Audience, Not The Content

Dave Pinsen — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 16:55:42 -0000

Re 3), Plenty of people wrote letters to the editor of the NY Times and other newspapers before their content was made available free online.

Re: Monetize The Audience, Not The Content

Dave Pinsen — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:00:08 -0000

I made this related point elsewhere yesterday ("An Undiscovered Gem from Barron's"),

When journalists lament the decline of the print business, they ought to consider that the Google- and Craig's List-powered disruption of the advertising model isn't the only reason for print's decline; so is the decline of journalism itself. A lot of what passes for journalism today simply isn't worth paying for in any medium.

I gave a couple of examples at the link, but I'm sure most of you can think of similar examples.

Re: Monetize The Audience, Not The Content

Dave Pinsen — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:20:39 -0000

Another thing the FT does is give those who attend classes at the NY Institute of Finance complementary six month subscriptions (Pearson owns both the FT and the school).

Re: Comments - A Follow Up

Dave Pinsen — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:52:45 -0000

A similar conversation took place recently on Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic blog. Coates has vibrant comment threads, and he frequently participates in them, but some commenters were asking why his Atlantic colleague Andrew Sullivan didn't allow comments on his blog. Coates's answer was that Sullivan simply had too many readers, but I agree with Fred here that there are ways to manage scale, either by using interns or technology.

Re: Hearing the Voice from Cisco’s Chambers

Dave Pinsen — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:58:45 -0000

Probably a more important factor in Cisco surviving the downturn is the $23 billion in net cash on its balance sheet.

Re: Alinea

Dave Pinsen — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:30:52 -0000

I remember reading an article a few years back (in the WSJ?) about Achatz's battle with mouth cancer, and was pleasantly surprised to see him looking well when he appeared as a guest judge on Top Chef. It's great that he is not only still alive but still has his tongue and his sense of taste. We're fortunate to have some excellent hospitals for cancer care in this country.

Re: Techstars

Dave Pinsen — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:35:10 -0000

The Y-Combinator sounds like a great idea. It seems that so many people are eager to help those who have already had a measure of success, so it's nice to see investors and mentors willing to help entrepreneurs at the creation ex nihilo stage.

Re: Alinea

Dave Pinsen — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 15:14:28 -0000

Shana,

The Ridgewood Coffee Company in Ridgewood, NJ sells Intelligentsia. They also have a Clover machine, and when I asked about it, they got so excited by my interest that they invited me behind the counter to watch them use it. Interesting ritual that involves.

More generally, Starbucks has been a tailwind, not a headwind, for higher-end coffee places, as a history professor named Robert Thurston noted in a letter to the FT last December. I alluded to his letter in a recent post in which I mentioned my visit to a high-end indie coffee place in Manhattan, "Your Ideas as an Asset Class".