J. Michels Video Game Index 1/31/08

+$765.00 +1.96%

J. Michels Uranium Index 1/31/08

+$2,470.01 +4.66%

Interesting Story About Patriots Football Guru Ernie Adams

This is a very interesting story about a guy that helps Bill Belichick become the genius coach that he is. He is Belichick's lifelong friend from high school and is a true football scholar.

So, every week, the Patriots get the kind of analysis that only
high-powered hedge funds or, say, NASA can afford. "Nine times out of 10,"
Bissinger says, "Ernie sees something nobody else sees."
That memory and those hours of studying film make him an unparalleled resource for assistant coaches. Want to know what a team does, and why? Want to know what a team has done on third-and-short in the red zone in the past 10 years on the road? Ask Adams. He'll know.

This article really makes this Ernie Adams seem like the secret weapon that will get the Patriots their undefeated season.

I'm still hoping the Giants keep the game close but I am backing the Pats just so they can shut up those fools on that 1972 Dolphins team. There has been no bigger bunch of full-of-themselves-asses in professional sports as this story attests. I would just love for them to keep that champagne that they pop whenever the last undefeated team loses on ice forever. If the Pats win this game then in 5 years only football historians and Dolphins fans will even remember these annoying losers.

Spears Taken to Hospital in Motorcade

Now this is a waste of taxpayer money.

Hours earlier, shortly after 1 a.m., a motorcade nearly the length of a
football field pulled away from Spears' residence. Along with the ambulance, it
included police on nearly a dozen motorcycles, in two cruisers, and two
helicopters following overhead.

So we have uniformed officers, motorcycle cops, and helicopters trying to keep Spears safe from paparazzi? Are there any crimes in LA that they would rather be investigating instead of guarding this same person over and over? Maybe they were there to protect the EMTs and other bystanders from the stupid-assed stalkerazzi. In any case I really hope that LA County bills Spears for this kind of special treatment. Also they need some laws in place so these vultures don't circle Spears and cause a nuisance.

Weird "Spider" Found on Mercury

Now this is one funny shaped crater that the MESSENGER probe was able to find on Mercury. Scientists are baffled on why those weird channels formed after this impact. Maybe the force of the Suns gravity was pulling on the damaged area (which probably turned molten for a time) formed those lines like that. Or maybe it had something to do with magnetism because it kind of looks like what happens when a magnet spreads out iron filings.

Yahoo to Cut 1000 employees; Yang is mum

Now Jerry Yang is trying to ramp up the spending at a time when everything else at the company is lagging.

He intends to spend an extra $300m this year to try to revive the
company, according to estimates by Mark Mahaney at Citi - but he has done
little to date to explain how the money will be spent.
If investors have lost patience, it is easy to see why. Former chief executive
Terry Semel asked for Wall Street's understanding three years ago as he set out
on Project Panama, an expensive fix for Yahoo's search advertising system that
was meant to close the gap with
Google.

There are still rumors that MSFT might buy them out. If I were MSFT I would build up Live and wait to see if this turnaround effort bears any fruit. I have a feeling it might be a dismal failure. This is a climate where the price of search advertising has been dropping like a stone and people are going to social networks instead of to the internet portals.

I think Yahoo needs an injection of Web 2.0 ASAP. Maybe Yahoo should float an acquisition of Facebook or something. A bold move like that could really get their stock price back up and pull them into the Web 2.0 world. Also they *really* need to cut back on the stock photos on their pages. It looks pretty bush league for a company that has a 25 billion market cap. In the meantime the stock will languish as Google keeps eating their lunch.

FED cuts rates again BNI has good numbers

I would be willing to bet that if they didn't cut rates or cut them by only a quarter point we would see a 300 point or more drop today.

The bold, half-point reduction approved by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke
and all but one of his colleagues came as President Bush and Congress raced to
enact a separate rescue package -- including tax rebates for individuals and tax
breaks for companies -- to help energize an economy in danger of
stalling.

Also the recession tell that is Burlington Northern earnings seems to be okay for the moment. They beat earnings estimates by 7 cents a share and beat on the revenue side as well. They also came out with pretty decent estimates with a low single digit growth for the 1st quarter and low double digit EPS growth for the year. There might be some slowing because they did have fewer carloads for the quarter but not as much as you might think if there was a recession on. Could this mean a soft landing for the economy?

Martians Breath Sigh of Relief

It looks like there was a near miss of Mars by a 164 foot astroid earlier. My guess is that Martian Manhunter whacked the thing out of the way.

Astronomers had hoped the fleet of spacecraft orbiting Mars would get a
chance to observe the asteroid plowing into the Martian surface. The subsequent
crater would have roughly equaled the size of the Meteor
Crater that formed in northern Arizona 50,000 years ago, with a
0.5-mile diameter. Such an impact would have also allowed scientists to study
the dust cloud from the impact.

J. Michels Video Game Index 1/30/08

-$307.00 -0.78%

J. Michels Uranium Index 1/30/08

+$595.98 +1.14%

Solar Thermal with Molten Salt?

Now this seems like a pretty cool idea in renewable energy. I was recently doing some research on what solar thermal energy companies are out there and came across this article. The idea of storing energy in molten salt kind of sounds like what a Bond villain would do.

The technology solves the problem of solar power’s intermittent
power-generation ability by storing energy in the form of heat in molten salt.
Mirrors reflect and concentrate sunlight onto a central receiver that uses
Rocketdyne’s heat transfer technology, which was originally developed for use in
liquid-fuel rockets. The extremely hot salt is then piped through another heat
exchanger, making steam that in turn powers traditional steam turbines.

This Earth2Tech site is great for reading about new green initiatives and how to make money from them. After I did well in ESLR a while back I watched as these stocks cooled down a bit and and are offering a great reentry point. I really like solar's future if Obama gets in there as well.

Take-Two Jumps after Upgrade

It seems that their turn-around is going along apace.

The analyst said he is "incrementally positive" on the stock and called
Take-Two's recent announcement of a release date for "Grand Theft Auto IV" a
"major plus." The company is launching the latest installment of its most
popular game on April 29.

Handler said the game could ship 6 million units in fiscal
2008, which ends in October, and add $1.25 to the year's adjusted earnings per
share.

I think I will be near the top of that 6 million units because the more I see of GTA4 the more I want to buy that game. Mark my words it will be the game of the year for 2008.

J. Michels Video Game Index 1/29/08

+$190.00 +0.49%

J. Michels Uranium Index 1/29/08

+$768.50 +1.49%

VMWare Gets Clubbed After Hours

I think the sheer number of deep pocketed competitors who are offering this product for free is what is getting to VMWare. It is hard to pay a PE of 166 for a company that sells a product that other companies (HP, Sun, MSFT) essentially bundle with their servers. I think VMWare might become the next Netscape if they aren't really careful.

Why Vista Failed

This is a very interesting article on why Vista has disappointed MSFT and why people are not upgrading to it in the numbers that MSFT wants.

Windows XP's end is nowhere soon, either. OEMs can ship Windows XP
through June 30, and possibly later if Microsoft grants another extension.
System builders can ship XP through the end of January 2009. There are plenty of
very good XP applications, too, and not enough native Vista apps. XP will be
competing with Vista for a long time yet, and stalling the Vista conversion
process.

Could Credit Default Swaps Tank the Market?

They just might according to this observation. So I decided to check out what the hell these CDSs were and they found out that it could be quite scary if they failed.

Credit Default Swaps, or CDS, offer financial firms a quick way to offload
part or all their exposure to debt backed by state and municipal governments,
corporations, or structured debt tied to consumer loans. ‘Wrapping’ is a
technique securities underwriters use to increase the credit ratings of lower
rated debt to make it easier to sell to investors.

So if these CDSs are tied to subprime mortgages and they start to fail then the rug will actually be pulled out from under these derivatives. It is kind of like owning Call Options in a company that suddenly went bankrupt. The options suddenly become worthless pieces of paper but these things are worse because other layers of derivatives are based on these.

Also they may be "wrapped" into bundles of debt as also described in that article and stamped with a AAA rating because they were insured by MBIC and Ambac. Now that those companies might lose that AAA rating the debt they insured might also lose that rating. So essentially the "wrapped" securities could go from AAA to junk overnight. And that would be bad for every holder of one of these wrapped securities and the market as a whole.

Remember there is a $500 trillion dollars worth of these various derivatives floating around. If what they are derived from fails then a recession might turn into a depression real fast.

I think Goldman is Heavily Short this Market

Here is an interesting article that says that Goldman thinks a bailout of the bond insurers won't be much of a benefit.

"New York state insurance regulators are pushing Wall Street banks to
provide as much as $15 billion to strengthen credit-weary financial guarantors,"
James Fotheringham, Monica Gabel and Daniel Zimmerman, equity analysts at
Goldman, wrote in a note to clients on Thursday.

"The discussions are preliminary and, like their predecessors
(recall: 'SuperSIV' and The Hope Now Alliance), unlikely to produce meaningful
results," they added.

Well, one meaningful result is that companies and municipalities will be able to issue debt and 2.4 trillion might be at risk of downgrades. It might also save Wamu and Countrywide, and a few other banks from going bankrupt. Perhaps it would allow this market to avoid a massive drop as well. I think this kind of naked self-interest proves that Goldman might be heavily short this market and any significant rally might be bad for their bottom line.

Is Wilbur Ross the "Rich Dude" that Bond Insurers Need?

Wilbur Ross was buying those steel companies when they were crap, then he was into auto parts companies when they were almost bankrupt, and now maybe he might pick up those distressed Bond insurers for cents on the dollar.

But I believe what was even bigger than the rate cut for some of these banks
was the possibility that we would not have another round of big losses, this
time from a lack of insurance, because the grave dancing Wilbur Ross indicated
he is choosing a bond insurer -- or bond insurers? -- to save with a big
investment or takeover.

I think he might be after that muni insurance business because it looks like pretty easy money since municipal bond default rates are like 1.93% since 1970. It would be interesting to look under the hood at Ambac and MBIA and see just how much bad debt is on their books and how much they would have to write down. Perhaps, Ross has done this already and likes what he sees. Cramer talks about the prior bailouts failing in his article above but this bailout needs to happen or we might see some big banks going out of business since they could no longer raise debt or keep themselves in AAA status.

Why Rock Star and Guitar Hero Appeals

This is an interesting article on bars starting to have Rock Band nights so people can come and play the game as a member of a fake band. And this guy nailed the appeal that these games seem to have:

"Rock Band" and its "Guitar Hero" forebears are attracting non-gamers
as well, says Brian Crecente, editor of the gaming blog Kotaku.com and a judge
at the Spike TV Video Game Awards. He hosted a charity event in Denver where
"Rock Band" was the featured entertainer.

"It's so big because it gives people a chance who do not have musical
talent to play like they have musical talent," Crecente says. "It tricks you
into thinking you're pulling off that amazing solo."

It really does feel like you are playing the song since you are hitting the buttons and the sound comes out just like a regular song. I couldn't play a guitar to save my life but I can still play a song that I love and feel kind of like a real musician.