Slope Of Hope with Tim Knight

I Made the ZH Home Page....Umm....Bitchez!

Zuck's World

Since I'm kind of tied up for the trading day, I figured I'd write a post about Facebook's headquarters as an interesting anecdote post. After all, FB's founder lives just a few blocks from me, and the headquarters of his firm is just a short bike ride from here. What lies between here and there is kind of interesting.

Look at the map below. The blue arrow denotes where Mark lives. It's a nice house, but I imagine many of you reading this live in something nicer (here in the Silicon Valley, we try to be understated - - even 27-year old zillionaires). Crescent Park is one of the two "rich" neighborhoods in Palo Alto (the other being Old Palo Alto, not shown here). Another nice zone is Lindenwood, marked with the purple arrow (it's kind of obviously a nice part of town - in this case, Menlo Park - because the distance between the streets is much greater). 

Not This Time

There is hardly anything different about the experience we're going through right now than what we went thorugh late last June - - - the tear gas, the pledges that this austerity would solve everything, the declarations that everything was fixed - - it's all exactly the same.

But there's one thing that's going to be different. I'm not getting sucked into believing it. Last summer, I spent almost all my free time at Stanford Sierra Camp - - the time I should have been hiking, exploring, and enjoying myself - - - plopped in front of a laptop and sweating out the Greek vote drama. It was a complete and total waste of time. I was stupid to worry; I was stupid to think anything would get solved with another band-aid; and I was stupid to spend my time watcing politicians instead of enjoying life.

Apple at $1000/share? Oh, at LEAST!

Most of you have probably already seen the bullgasm happening over at Barron's. Here's their cover for the week:

Some Agonizing AAPL Facts

(1) The stock's lifetime low was on July 13,1982 at $1.43 per share;

(2) It is up about 34,500% since then;

(3) More recently, it is up 7,300% since April 17, 2003, not even nine years ago;

(4) $14 million invested in AAPL in 2003 would be worth a cool billion now. So what did you do with your $14 million instead, huh?

Hurts, don't it?

Slick Slack

I didn't watch the Superbowl yesterday (are you kidding me? I was firing off my custom-made model rocket). I did hear about the guy in the toga, however. He's actually pretty awesome. I present to you - Sketchy Andy:

Jealousy, Perspective, and Peace

I am a middle-aged man, but in the years I have lived, I have at least amassed enough wisdom to know intuitively that I am still naive. We're always learning and, hopefully, getting wiser, so in an absolute sense, I'll die a naive man.

But I'm not as dim as I was as a teenaged-Tim, so allow me to start this essay with a couple of background facts.

The Trickle-Down Effect

I am already looking forward to about a week after the Facebook IPO. The onslaught of press at the time of the IPO is going to be stomach-churning. If you're not sick of Zuckerberg's face already, by God, you will be by then. So once they are public, give it about a week, and we can all get back to our lives.

It will also stamp out all this horniness for tech stocks that's running rampant. This Valley has gone into bubble-mode again, and it's hard to take.

Zuck lives three blocks from my house, and the only benefit I'm personally going to get out of the thousands of newly-minted zillionaires is that the value of my house will go up. Indeed, I just took this photo of an advertisement in my local paper showing what Palo Alto home prices have been doing lately (the most recent year is in black; the year prior is in orange).

So asset appreciation of something I actually own is something I can "Like."

Heh.

We Have Entered the Twilight Zone

Why I Shorted Devry

As most of you know, I am a dyed-in-the-wool chartist. I base my decisions on charts and very little else.

There are rare occasions, however, when an investing idea is based on something more than just the chart. Such was the case with Devry, which is one of those for-profit education outfits.

Simply stated, I don't think I've ever seen a group of "customers" as unhappy with a given service as I have with the field of for-profit education. I'm not picking on Devry in particular - - there are many firms out there (ITT Institute, etc.) But as one surveys the landscape of the "graduates" from these "schools" (I am not accidentally using all these quotation marks....) it seems to be a bunch of folks that feel very ripped-off.