The Really Useless Thread

1. I read an interesting article on Q1 earnings being up 14% YoY... what productivity really is output per unit of input in macro terms, if we think about work hours. And we measure this pretty conservatively in macro terms and I think its important for us to think about earnings in terms of productivity. There is no reason we couldn't redefine productivity to mean whatever we want, and its important to think about earnings in this way. What exactly are corporate earnings, aggregate earnings are a good surrogate for GDP and productivity. It is amazing that earnings are growing 14%, thats a v.big number... usually we don't see them grow at this rate, so what really is productivity?

1. Software continues to dominate; with Internet up 28.3% YTD, Enterprise software being up 4% last week, 5% on the month and 16% YTD.. all we needed to do was long these sectors and short everything else and we would beat the market. anyway, point is what is going on with companies like salesforce, amazon, facebook etc. is pretty impressive and nothing short of historic. Will this continue? that is anyones guess.. it certainly is amazing to watch!

Elliot who manages Paul Singers fund gave out 5 tips that was attained by a few people.

- No security price is too high (or low) that is cannot go higher (or lower) - 100% true!! point of this is that markets can be very irrational, so you really have to time and size positions as best as we can.

- Turns in markets are impossible to time - mostly agree with this ( i know sisse feels this way as mentioned previously with not being able to catch things to the 'micropippette') I like to avoid beta!!

- Big changes in market prices frequently occur far in advance of when the reasons for the changes become apparent, and by then it is too late to incoroporate the new information into ones trading at the old prices -- self evident! its not too wise or interesting.

- One of the most important reasons to avoid significant losses is to avoid the painful and sometimes terminal effect of severe adversity on the quality of money managers' decision making processes - partial to agree and partial to disagree, pain is a good teacher - avoiding pain because it will hurt your investing ability sounds to me like a bad thing... inevitably investors will have to feel pain and i think that avoiding pain because you don't want to experience pain is a bit fallacious

- a wide and deep education about the world, not just about capital structures, corporate business strategies and industry dynamics, is essential to the long term success of money managers - 100% agree!


My freedom of expression is very much so at risk of wrongly interfering with your freedom of movement, so I move on to some recap comments.

Recap

Softbanks crazy vision fund.. that 150bn fund that they have is really quite weird; finally details on how they will make money on this fund, 20% carry after an 80% hurdle rate really strange!!

and lastly Zuckerbergs Harvard address is a must see, i would recommend highly to listen to this... he seems to have things other than facebook on his mind which will not bode well for Facebook; any founder or CEO taking focus off of centre stage is NEVER a good thing, perhaps he is prepping for presidential race?!

I leave you with this funny image too

Attached Image (click to enlarge)