Flip Its

Contrary to popular belief, I don't simply choose to be contrarian for the sake of contrasting.  I do strive to be contrarian -- I trademarked the term Flip It in large part because the only way to be anything other than average is to make sure you're not part of the consensus...the average.  Extraordinary things only happen when you do something totally extra-ordinary, right? Let's think ... read more

I've long recognized Google as the fastest growing company in the history of capitalism.  I owned the stock from the day it came public until I sold everything to focus on TV.  And Google's certainly blown away every other company on the planet when it comes to building value on the Internet. Indeed for a very long time I used to stay long Google and while shorting Yahoo: Battle of the ... read more

People think I'm crazy, but I mean it when I say that the $120-150 oil is creating a perfect storm of economics that will result in $30-50 oil in the next couple years. Think about how upside down economic principles get turned temporarily as a result of oil spiking 500% in the last five years and more than doubling even at its current quote this year. You know you can ignore those who say that ... read more

Hey all you socialists who call yourselves Republicans and Democrats, can I get something straight here? You created these "government-sponsored enterprises", FRE and FNM (call them Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to make them sound warm and fuzzy), to enable the markets to offer under-market rates on loans to high-risk people (read: use tax-dollars to make cheap loans available to the people in the ... read more

I've always liked Thoreau, even though I associate him with the time my college basketball coach (by title, not by mentorship), Dave Bliss turned to me in the middle of a practice one day and asked me if knew who Thoreau was. We UNM Lobos had lost a couple games in a row and dropped out of a short-lived run in the Top 25, and he was not happy about it. Sure I said and he said, "you know what ... read more

In a while will the smile on my face turn to plaster? Stick around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster For the race of my head and my face is moving much faster Is it strange I should change? I don't know, why don't you ask her? -- Neil Young All day Wednesday at Fox, my right eye was watering and really bothering me. I don't have allergies, but I figured the only ... read more

One of the themes of this blog and of Happy Hour that we covered extensively with Mort Zuckerman on our Wall Street block party last week is that investors should often just focus on the individual stocks and not the broader market. And indeed, I still maintain that caution is king as we now clearly are seeing the down part of the economic cycle. But I still see a stock or three, especially in ... read more

I'm sitting here doing research and looking over some Wall Street analyst notes...lots of flow about Apple this past week. I mean, I've got dozens of notes from analysts and brokers and newsletter writers full of breakdowns, extrapolations and supply chain analysis for the 3G iPhone. And they're all PUMPED about it! And then I remember that on Friday a very bright, but young trader told me ... read more

Well, well, well, here we've just pre-emptively spent darn near every bullet the government thinks its got in its arsenal to prop up this supposedly disastrous economy, yet AIG still has to admit to ridiculous losses and raise more than ten thousands bunches of a million dollars each. Yeah, $12 billion is 12,000 million, you realize!   Picture for a minute how stupid you'd feel if you lost ... read more

Sentiment is a hard thing to measure.  How do you quantify "bullishness"?  Sentiment, as defined by Webster, is an attitude, thought, or judgment prompted by feeling. And as anybody who's ever been in a stupid argument with a lover over who's done more for whom or who's done less to whom, then you know trying to count up and measure feelings is a fool's mission. Alas, sentiment matters when ... read more