Recently in Investing Category

Nice round up of links...

Current Chaos Manor mail

Free world quality self-study courses are available online for anyone wanting to *do* something about 'industrial trades' training. The local educators may not cooperate, or might want too many millions and still not be capable of producing trained students.

We are in a commodities bull market. This ETF allows you to track Silver like a stock without the trouble of physical ownership. That may or may not work in your financial portfolio. I expect silver to continue rising and the requirements of the ETF to actually hold 15% of the available silver on the market will most likely cause a squeeze at some point. Probably not good for photographers using 35MM film.

Silver ETF begins trading - Google News

Dubbed iShares Silver Trust (SLV) , shares of the ETF represent 10 ounces of the metal held in a vault. Bank of New York (BK) is the trustee and J.P. Morgan Chase Bank (JPM) in London is the custodian.

What's the most valuable liquid commodity on the market??? No not oil... would you guess -- Water!
Without it you die... pretty valuable stuff...and I just found out there is a new exchange-trade fund (ETF) based on water stocks.
PowerShares - PHO - Water Resources Portfolio

The PowerShares Water Resources Portfolio is based on the Palisades Water Indexâ„¢. The Index seeks to identify a group of companies that focus on the provision of potable water, the treatment of water and the technology and service that are directly related to water consumption. The modified equal weighted portfolio is rebalanced and reconstituted quarterly.

The Personal MBA - All Discussions
Great idea, points out the most important books you need to read to have good business sense.
Props for 'DIY' !

The Personal MBA: Mastering Business Without Spending a Fortune

FT.com / Home UK - First oil ETF to launch in London
oh wow... this may take take off like a rocket.

The world's first oil-backed exchange traded fund (EFT) is due to be listed on the London Stock Exchange at the end of the month, providing an investment vehicle that closely tracks the oil price without having to trade in the futures market or buy oil company shares. [...]
Each unit of the ETF equates to a barrel of oil, with the price settled in US dollars. Citigroup and UBS have an exclusive arrangement to be the market makers for the ETFs for 12 months. The oil securities are backed by oil contracts sold by Shell Group with an initial supply of 40m barrels.

PBS | I, Cringely . June 23, 2005 - No Flash in the Pan
Cringely points out a forthcoming IPO. His opinon is interesting, and it might be worth a closer look.

NeuStar, which is based in Northern Virginia near Washington, DC, generates telephone numbers and has a monopoly to do so through 2015. This function used to be handled by Telcordia (formerly Bellcore) until Telcordia bought the IntelSat satellite network and was forced to spin off NeuStar. These are all of course (with the exception of IntelSat) remnants of the old AT&T Bell System.

NeuStar is the key to telephone number mobility. If you change phone companies in North America but want to keep your old number, NeuStar enables that. NeuStar also generates new phone numbers for all traditional land and mobile phone companies, and just lately, for VoIP phone companies, too.

VoIP providers like Vonage and Packet8 have, up until now, bought blocks of unused phone numbers from local phone companies, who had, in turn, bought them from NeuStar. VoIP pioneer Pulver, for example, recently was doling out numbers originally assigned to InMarSat. Then someone at NeuStar wondered why their phone company customers should be making a profit arbitraging phone numbers when NeuStar could sell them directly to the VoIP companies? So that's what they did.

The reason I mention this is because NeuStar is almost unknown, and within a couple of months, will be having its IPO, taking the company public. With the exception of Google, this hasn't been such a great decade yet for IPOs, so when I see what's likely to be a good one, I try to point it out. NeuStar, with a 10-year guaranteed monopoly, is a good one. It's the only VoiP company, in fact, that looks like a sure thing.

EETimes.com - House-price bubble set to hit semis, warns analyst
interesting point... but there isn't much that wouldn't be effected by a housing crash.
ugh!

Malcolm Penn, chief executive of market analysis firm Future Horizons, warned that a house-price boom that has taken hold across the developed world is set to be biggest bubble in global economic history. When it bursts it will almost certainly trigger a collapse of the semiconductor market, just as the stock market bubble of 2000 did, Penn said.
[...]
"If the economy slows, however, it WILL take the semiconductor market with it," Penn wrote. "It will cause demand for boxes to drop, and with it chips, which means automatic overcapacity, a collapse in ASPs, and a global market slowdown, the extent of which will be governed by how much the economy slows."

Penn added that current restraint in fab building by the chip makers should allow the industry to accommodate a moderate slowing in demand without a major crash, provided this triggers further conservatism in capital expenditure.

Miami Real Estate Showing No Signs of Slowing Down, Jeff Neal
This is fascinating. Can all the boomers live in Florida?
Update: listsomething hooks in to google maps to provide interactive location pinpointing for this market. wow!

Housing and in particular condo-type housing in the Miami/Dade county area continue to experience surging prices, despite all the talk nationwide about a possible bubble and the likelihood of higher interest rates. For example, just recently a four-storey three bedroom condo overlooking the Atlantic and scenic Biscayne Bay went for upwards of $7 million dollars, which has Miami developers and brokers alike scrambling for profits in what is now one of the hottest real estate markets in the United States.

MSN Money - It's not the hedge funds, it's the Fed
AMD is cool, always has been, most likely always will. My next box, will be AMD based.

Mort Topfer, former vice-chairman of Dell (DELL, news, msgs) and current board member of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, news, msgs), bought 25,000 shares of AMD, adding to the 25,000 shares he previously purchased. I checked the insider filings, and he also has stock options to the tune of roughly 18,750 shares.

Wanna buy this house? Send your resume. | csmonitor.com
easy money will dry up sometime. Investing in a second home right now seems like a bad idea.

Christopher Thornberg, a senior economist with the University of California at Los Angeles Anderson Forecast. "The problem is there is all of this money floating around and something has to break.''

Mr. Thornberg's prognosis: "The whole US is in a bubble right now. And it could go on for another year.''

Or burst in the next six months, according to Harvey Dent Jr., author of "The Next Great Bubble Boom." He bases his prediction on a recent estimate from the National Association of Realtors that 23 percent of last year's home sales were second homes purchased by investors.

That made sense when real estate proved a better investment than poor performing stocks. But as interest rates rise, Mr. Dent says, they will push investors out of real estate and back into stocks or bonds. "That's why I'm renting an apartment in Miami Beach," Dent says. "I don't want to get stuck owning some overvalued piece of property."

MSN Money - GM's woes one more blow to housing bubble

One reason why Japan's bust has been as bad as it has is that Japan has had to endure a sizable real-estate bust and a stock-market bust at the same time. Originally, the United States was only dealing with an equity-market bust. But with the Fed trying to bail that bust out with a housing bubble, we, like Japan, will now experience a housing bust and a market bust at the same time.

Mexico Mulls Silver Lining Against Currency Crash
hm no face value, tied to value of the metal. How do you declare it?

An influential Mexican businessman wants to reintroduce silver coins as legal currency -- as in Mexico's 16th century heyday -- and, far-fetched as it may sound, the idea is winning support. [...]
The 1-ounce silver coin, called the Libertad (Liberty), would have no nominal value engraved upon it, and would circulate alongside the conventional peso currency. Its worth would be stated daily in a central bank quote.

Update:
Here is Hugo's essay advocating this:
HOW TO INTRODUCE THE ONE OUNCE SILVER "LIBERTAD" COIN
INTO CIRCULATION IN MEXICO

Though not the central objective of monetizing silver, undoubtedly the coinage of large amounts of "Libertad" coins, which would be eagerly accepted by all Mexicans, would impact upon the price of silver, and be of great benefit to Mexican mining, which is providing large amounts of silver to the world markets, at ridiculously low prices, to the detriment of Mexican mining and the Mexican economy, which is hungry for a mass means of savings in a medium which will guarantee the conservation of value through the years.

Contains 1 troy oz. of pure (999 fine) silver. Brilliant Uncirculated – just as we received it from the Mexico City Mint. A graceful Angel is depicted; in the background are “Lovers’ Peaks” – two volcanoes that memorialize a prince and princess from different Indian tribes who fell in love, eloped and were eventually exiled. Reverse features the different versions of the national seal of Mexico – an eagle with a snake in its beak, standing on a cactus.