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actually, if you go back a year, japan used to diverge from the u.s. during march and september as they did their 'mark-to-market', jammed up the nikkei, and - presumably - sold positions here to repatriate yen.
hmm. so how bullish was the action on, say, intc? volume seems better for an up day. but it still kinda looks like an imperfect 3 black crows 3/18-22, with the last 2 days just retracing that halfway back up.
kinda interesting how they timed dow 10k, nasdaq 1900 and qqq 34 to hit simultaneously ...
yeah i know, that's just accidental.
well europe has been drifting lower, and the cac looks like its about to turn red ....
Equity default swaps offer missing link
By Alex Skorecki
Published: March 22 2004 19:30 / Last Updated: March 22 2004 19:30
Financial innovators, flushed with the success of the credit default swap, have emerged from their workshops with another new product, the equity default swap.
This pays out not when the company defaults but when its shares collapse. This is generally defined as a price fall of 70 per cent, although alternative specifications are also catching on.
The leading proponents of equity default swaps (EDSs) are established derivatives players such as JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank. And there are enough banks now quoting prices for brokerage GFI to offer an inter-dealer broking service. But the EDS is still in the early stages of general recognition.
Selling or trading credit default swaps (CDSs) has proved popular with hedge funds because they can profit heavily from the wide spreads being quoted.
As Simon Harris at consultants Mercer Oliver Wyman says: "CDS was fantastic if you were brave enough or smart enough to sell protection. A lot of the success depended on institutions running scared."
During 2002 when defaults reached a peak, buyers would pay 200-300 basis points or more for protection on an individual company name. Spreads are now down to 50bp or less.
Now some of the initial attraction of the CDS to funds has been played out, there is the hope they will turn to the EDS. As Peter Allen at JP Morgan says: "Equity default swaps typically trade at much higher spreads than credit default swaps, and allow investors to leverage credit views."
For example, last week the EDS for Nestlé was being quoted at a buy/sell range of 70/90 basis points while the CDS was 7bp/10bp, a ratio of about 10 to one. Many other names have similar ratios.
If investors believe a company's bonds are overvalued, say, EDS together with CDS might help them take a bet against the market view.
Although the ultimate target market for such products is wider than hedge funds, in the early stages they tend to play an important role because of their higher technical sophistication.
On the other hand, buyers of straight protection, who paid handsomely for CDSs, might be less eager to start shelling out again. Either way, EDS is a tool to solve problems that are currently in abeyance.
The main wave of collapsing share prices took place during 2001/03. Market recovery has taken the pressure off many of the more vulnerable names.
However, it was clear during the worst of the downturn that there was a missing link for investors. A company in trouble would be subject to both tumbling share prices and a growing threat of default, but the two events were linked in the equity and bond markets in only a very loose and unscientific way. CDS and EDS can bring the two markets together more closely by offering a way to arbitrage such "unscientific" opportunities.
As Martin Bertsch, one of the developers of EDS at JP Morgan, says: "It is a tool to see where the relative value is between the two asset classes."
For example, a hedge fund can both sell EDSs and at the same time buy CDSs in carefully calculated proportions and of differing maturities. These are called relative value trades. If the bet turns out to be correct, the high leverage can produce fat profits.
In the longer run, it is hoped that "normal" bond investors will use EDS in the same way as CDS, to gain exposure to individual names in the credit market either with or without buying the underlying cash bonds - so called asset substitution.
The International Swaps and Derivatives Association, whose standards did so much to help the CDS market take off, says it is still monitoring EDS. "It is on our radar screens," says Richard Metcalf. "But we have not had enough feed-back from a broad enough range of our members yet."
The rating agencies are helping lend credibility. In February both Moody's and Standard & Poor's published methodologies for rating financial products that incorporate EDS. In both cases the product was a collateralised debt obligation, or CDO.
Typically, job growth tends to lag during an economic recovery.
the recession ended a *very* long time ago.
and, of course, the bushman wants to hold onto that office with the jellybean jar. hmmm. well, i guess the jellybean jar is gone.
I thin Mr. Greenspan, whatever you think of him, will knock her out in round one, after Suze finishes talking.
wait! that's not fair. i mean, yeah, announcements from fed meetings are a terse couple of sentences, but we've seen from humphrey hawking or henry higgins or whatever those talks are in front of congress, that sir alan can talk and talk and talk and obfuscate and blow smoke up a whole line of congressional butts in a single afternoon.
so who would win, the straight-shooting suze or the uncle al? hmm. on the issue of ARMs for average folks, i hope its suze.
wasn't there just an article somewhere about late payments hitting a new high?
articles in december said that they were told to wait until market conditions improve ...
so what's up with ge?
7:17am 03/08/04 [GE] GE SAYS STOCK OFFER WORTH $3.8 BLN AT CURRENT SHR PRICE
7:16am 03/08/04 [GE] GE TO OFFER 118 MLN COMMON SHARES
7:12am 03/08/04 GE edges lower, plans to sell shares to raise $3.8 bln - Emily Church
3:51am 03/07/04 [GE] GE SEEN FLOATING 30% GENWORTH ON NYSE - UK BUSINESS
3:50am 03/07/04 [GE] GE PLANS $5 BLN INSURANCE ARM IPO - UK BUSINESS
7:31am 03/02/04 [GE] GE CAPITAL SAYS EXPOSURE $4 BLN TO BANKRUPT AIRLINES
suze takes on the green man
Greenspan's Call to ARMs:
Alan Greenspan's Call to ARMs Could Put You in Great Financial Danger
By Suze Orman
http://biz.yahoo.com/pfg/e03greenspan/
swks seems to have broken all of its supports within the last few days ...
OT "i have reported you to Mr ashcroft!..sans gall bladder"
dunno, asscroft with a bit less bile sounds good to me. more phlegmatic, i suppose ...
Recent Revisions to Corporate Profits:
What We Know and When We Knew It
March 2004 Volume 10, Number 3
7 pages / 135 kb
http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/current_issues/ci10-3/ci10-3.html
Authors: Charles P. Himmelberg, James M. Mahoney, April Bang, and Brian Chernoff
Initial estimates in the National Income and Product Accounts significantly overstated U.S. corporate profits for the 1998-2000 period. Subsequent revisions reveal that the profitability of the nation's corporate sector in the late 1990s was substantially weaker than "real-time" data indicated. An unexpected surge in employee stock options exercisedand perhaps, in some sectors, firms' inflated statements of profitmay help explain the large downward revisions.
Recently revised estimates of aggregate corporate profits show that U.S. corporations were far less profitable at the end of the 1990s than previously thought. Back in July 2000, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), in its Survey of Current Business, estimated that aggregate after-tax corporate profits had totaled $513.6 billion for 1998 and $567.1 billion for 1999. In July 2002, however, the BEA revised these numbers downward by $31 billion and $52.8 billion, respectively. Profits for 2000, too, were revised downward, from $574 billion to $523 billion. As of July 2002, the cumulative downward profit revisions for the years 1998, 1999, and 2000 totaled 11.0 percent, 9.3 percent, and 8.9 percent, respectively.
These large downward revisions raise significant questions about the U.S. economy's recent performance. Corporate profits provide the single best "bottom line" assessment of the current health and future prospects of the corporate sector. Indeed, corporate profits play a central role in determining the attractiveness of business expenditures on fixed capital, research and development, and employee development.
I think marriages will break down at rate higher than ever in history and I think that this is just the begining,
hunh? shouldn't financial hard-times be good for keeping marriages together? or do you mean that gay folks wanting to get married will make straight folks think its kinda icky and seek divorce?
akam sure leaks its helium quickly.
Kind of makes you wonder what exactly would hurt the economy, doesn't it?
honest government statistics?
whoever was shorting DELL yesterday:
here might be the place to try it: if that's a downtrending channel i see on the daily, then its about at the top resistance right about here at 33.35, with the bottom now around 30ish.
is this a gap and crap or?????????
well a bit of evidence in favor of the g&c theory could be the ramp in the dollar, which - at least this winter - has accompanied a falling market here ...
on the other hand, the 90% volume yesterday might vote in favor of the bounce ...
ouch. i am gonna regret that ...
hmm. at least yahoo has no options info available for scox. i dunno, down 50% from the summer, but still up 300% from january. this is so typical for me. i remember 2 years ago, waiting for a rally in akam to go short, but it just kept bleeding and bleeding from $8 to under $2 ....
not sure its a revision: last thurs ppi was delayed from january. this could be the feb numbers. probably good to get all the bad news out at once.
i still feel like i'm gonna regret having covered the rest of my qqq's a.h. on friday. at least i have an intel short position open ... and still some gold. silver is perty perky this a.m.
When I read that IBM was going with Linux a few weeks ago it made a strong impression on me.
!!! ibm has been going with linux for a long time. early versions of linux date from the early 1990's, but it started making inroads into business when ibm took the first step and ported their database to it. and then oracle.
as i've said here forever, i haven't used windows since .... i can't even remember the last time i booted windows. there's almost no need for it ... although, i was struggling with my scanner and ocr program here tonight. but i think that's just the nature of ocr everywhere.
Given the levels of distrust and distaste MSFT has engendered in its field, survival will be a matter of using its enormous cash hoard to find new and leverable technologies.
this has been the story since ... before the debut of IE (bluebird, the aol killer, that was never released). its surprising to me that symc isn't seeing the same sort of flight as msft, since to a large extent their business is parasitic on the rot in windows.
i wish i had had the b@llz to short scox ...
more ppi?
cnn money says more ppi numbers tomorrow? is this true? (i don't see that mentioned elsewhere.)
PPI Mar 22
Core PPI Mar 22
http://money.cnn.com/markets/morning_call/
The shooters must be real amateurs.
or, as others in taiwan have said, they must be really good.
the article you posted actually skips another very damning bit. from the cbsnew site, on pressure to find a connection between iraq and 9/11, on 9/11 and shortly thereafter.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/19/60minutes/main607356.shtml
Clarke says that as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan.
Clarke suggests the idea took him so aback, he initally thought Rumsfeld was joking.
[...]
"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.
"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking.
"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."
Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.
"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.
"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'
"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."
Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'
"I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer."
[...]
"I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years."
Clarke finally got his meeting about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or cabinet. It was with the second-in-command in each relevant department.
For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.
Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'
"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."
Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever."
When Stahl pointed out that some administration officials say it's still an open issue, Clarke responded, "Well, they'll say that until hell freezes over."
[...]
As for the alleged pressure from Mr. Bush to find an Iraq-9/11 link, Hadley says, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred."
When told by Stahl that 60 Minutes has two sources who tell us independently of Clarke that the encounter happened, including "an actual witness," Hadley responded, "Look, I stand on what I said."
[...]
Joe Stocks,
as the french say, chaqu'un a son goute.
nevertheless, i think your logic is highly questionable. i mean, look at your bargain basement indian site:
http://www.pragyanet.com/index.htm
the first words are these. grammatical errors are underlined.
Pragya Net is the Web Designing and Development Company which has built up an impressive list of clients, which pay testimony to the high quality, timeliness and value of our work.
["our"? the sentence doesn't even say who "we" are. "which which which".]
If you are looking for a reliable long-term partner in the areas of e-commerce solutions, Web Development, Web Designing, Web Hosting, Web Marketing (Search engine submission), Domain name registration and Software Development then Pragya Net Technology is your best choice. Please acquaint yourself with the detailed information of our company that is presented through this site or write to us if you wish.
there should also be a comma before "if you wish".
As for outsourcing isnt it funny how kennedy and his bunch dont get that our economic job boom of the 1990's was derived from the outsourcing of germany,japan,england who built their cars and factories in this country!
well not entirely. or even largely.
but on this subject, pat buchanan would note: there's a difference between the situtation where a german company manufactures cars in the u.s. for the u.s. market, and the one where a u.s. company moves it manufacturing operations overseas and to reimport the product.
also note that your analogy implies an economic boom in india and china. we're in the role of europe there, which i recall was seeing high unemployment rates even in the 90's.
dan:
i used to have a link to a page you made up with gold/silver/dollar charts all in one place. but i've lost some data and that with it ... do you happen to have it handy?
thanks,
parker
but back to (1), the outsourcing of programming: sure, there are lots of coding or QA jobs that can be done elsewhere. but these jobs will probably disappear anyway, even without outsourcing. that's the nature of the field. as open source software becomes more mature and acceptable in the enterprise, folks will find that there are plenty of open source alternatives that are just free. why pay big $$ for SourceSafe, for example, when you can go to the mozilla project and get Bonsai and Bugzilla for free? why pay microsoft for windows and pay symantec for virus protection when you can just run linux for free. why build it yourself when its available out there, and probably free? and if you're building it for your company, why not publish it so that others can use it, test it and enhance it for you?
the software industry is maturing, and will continue to change. it shouldn't surprise anyone, because open source has been around for a long time; its only now that business is becoming more comfortable with it, and understanding why a proprietary program for X is actually a disadvantage rather than an advantage. (the microsoft "big lie".) that's why i've been saying forever that microsoft is doomed. and we see that, with the actual value of windows and office decreasing by the day. (they recently had to agree to sell windows for $20 in thailand because of linux.) and, looking at msft stock, everyone else recognizes that too.
but this has more to do with the maturing of the industry than anything else. for non-trivial projects, there's still the huge job of specifying requirements, prototyping, writing specs documents, doing the initial object modelling, etc. everything that "software engineering" is about. that's at least half the time right there, before a single line of code is ever written. ideally, it should work fine, since the specs that come out of that should fully specify the appearance, behavior and performance of the product. but that puts alot of the work up front. you're not going to see companies like mentor, cadency, synopsis, magma, numerical technologies, outsourcing huge chunks of their coding, nor see the same sort of price erosion. sure, maybe they'll outsource QA. i think synopsis does bug fixing in india.
i think it all comes down to complexity. there's a complexity theoritic notion of randomness called kolmogorov complexity (different from the information theoric kind). the whole theory comes from trying to quantify what the smallest description of something is. an object is "random" if its just about as big as its smallest description. (von neumann speculated that the brain is a "random object" in this sense.) so what's the benefit in outsourcing something like magma's router? just specifying what the program does is almost the equivalent of writing the program itself. if you could outsource the project without that level of specification, then you're essentially saying that you've found a company that could build your product without you, and you're just gonna fund it and market it for them. that doesn't sound like a very good business decision ...
when it comes to coding, there's a huge difference in talent from best to worst:
"Within [a fixed experience level] the ratios between the best and worst performances averaged about 10:1 on productivity measurements and an amazing 5:1 on program speed and space measurements!"
The Mythical Man-Month, Addison-Wesley, 1982, p. 30.
so yeah, lots of visual basic programmers will lose their jobs. but we knew that anyway, back when "application servers" and "intranets" became hot topics. and its probably more cost effective to have the best coders in india working on your projects from there, rather than importing them having them do it here, as was the case 5 years ago.
TJ, You seem to be trying very hard to prove my point. Looking at Citymaker.com I think it is a foreign design firm as well.
grr. you remind me of my grampa who thinks he finds a bargain and can't help raving about it. my main point was that (1) your example doesn't really address the problem of outsourcing programming work to india, as you claimed, and as an aside, (2) i don't think you got quite a bargain.
re (2). look, getting a website done is easy and cheap. here's a woman in florida that'll do it for $139.
http://www.cybercompanysolutions.com
http://www.cybercompanysolutions.com/startersites/default.asp?source=google
we're not talking rocket science here. the easy part is the part you seemed to be impressed by - that they can put together a web site that "looks right" to you. if your requirements are minimal, that's the easy part. the citymaker example was just to show that it only requires a bit of text entry into some templates. its not hard to generate a professional look. what you're really paying for here is the web hosting: that's the recurring fee, and that's where you want some guarantees (uptime, bandwidth, peak-performance, etc.)
oh, and i was wrong about one thing: the little mom 'n pop isps didn't all go away. (i guess just the ones i knew from h.s. did ...) there are plenty of them, e.g.
http://www.top10-cheap-web-hosting.com
and any of these should be able to set you up with some simple site designer for cheap.
my real point, way back there, was that you were saying that your experience here had something to do with the outsourcing of programming jobs. first, you're not really "outsourcing", you're hiring a company in india to do a job, rather than hiring an american company. why you'd prefer to work with a company that requires that you wire them cash, rather than taking credit cards, and talks to you on yahoo messenger, i don't know. for all you know, they can be hosting your site off a 486 in their bedroom running off a 28k modem. you get no promises about reliability or security, that they really own the graphics or the code they're using (that quake graphic wasn't theirs). but you're happy with that, okay.
thanks. i'll look into that. your suggestions are most appreciated
you've been on target so often ... you've been added to my pantheon of great traders (all with different talents): zeev, LG, donsew ...
absolutely. that's why i said "simple". the example that Joe Stocks was talking about was a company which does boilerplate html.
The one you're reading is really a database.
indeed. this is a custom job, to some extent. although it needn't be. there are now enough packages out there for sites of this sort that it could be done pretty easily as well.
And if you can buy stuff, then the "shopping cart" has to be programed.
do a google search for "shopping cart" and you'll find cgi, html, javascript, whatever ... endless varieties of shopping carts that use either a database or just simply keep data in cookies. programming is minimal. again, at this point, its all cut-and-paste.
Are they static or dynamic with constantly changing info?
Is there java script or cgi? Sure the simple websites are about the equivlent of powerpoint slides, but the ones where the money is takes programing.
absolutely. that was my point. if you have a non-trivial web site, then you're not gonna contact a little isp in india and comfortably give them all of your requirements over yahoo messenger and get your site done in 2 days. you probably also want to know things like: who owns the site? how reliable is the hardware? what kind of peak traffic can it handle? etc.
but to reiterate my point: sure, alot of the work can be outsourced, even if its non-trivial. but to outsource non-trivial work requires alot of work in design and specification done here. unless you're looking for something that requires no design complexity; and in that case, the components are already pretty well defined, you don't have to specify anything and almost anyone can cobble them together. you just send them a copy of your paper catalog, and they'll do the text entry and use some off-the-shelf software. that could be done anywhere, but its cheaper to do it where labor is cheaper.
anyway, i'd have to guess here, but i'd bet that its the reliability/peak bandwidth issues that drove alot of the little isps out of business in the u.s. (no evidence for this but i'd bet that typical site access for a business is very lumpy. at the extreme would be something like the "slashdot effect", where any mention of a site on http://slashdot.org causes all of the readers to click through and generally brings down the website under heavy load within minutes. not malicious, mind you. just real interest generated by a single event that causes regular readers all to click through at the same time.) and with them went alot of the companies that would build simple web sites for you.
looking forward to the next leg up on the nazdog, does anyone have an opinion here on the wireless and internet sectors? the charts of stocks that i'm watching - e.g. qcom and swks in wireless, yhoo and rsas in internet - seem to have remained pretty bullish during this downturn.
does that mean that your $39 target for intel will be ratched down? or just that the move will be concentrated in the stronger companies? (e.g. klic, brks, pmcs are all back to where they were last summer ... and dang, i missed much of that move, except for daily scalping ...)
I think programming is an easy transfer as you've demonstrated. So what do we do with all the kids going to school right now for programming because they were told they'd get a high paying job? What do we retrain them for?
desiging a simple web site isn't programming. its like having a presentation and hiring someone to do the powerpoint slides for you.
With the one difference the 'rich' in this country won't experience any adjustment in standard of living. My concern is how the middle class deals with it.
i think you're already seeing it begin: politically they all move to the left, class warfare is in vogue again, and social programs the like of europe will be congressional staples. 'the rich' will feel it through taxation.
there's nothing complex about simple web site design. if your customer can deal with a simple web site, then its all boilerplate, and it can be knocked off quickly. the problem is, this is known in india as well as in the u.s., so of course it can be done more cheaply there than here.
its the same sort of issue that comes up in our "illegal immigrant" problem. sure, we need illegals in this country because they do the jobs that "americans don't want to do". and of course americans don't want to do them, because they're nasty and don't pay a living wage, and the wages can be kept low because they can be filled by illegals. crack down on illegals, reduce the supply of willing workers, and voila! demand and salaries should rise.
the kind of company you're pointing to in india used to exist in the u.s.: the mom-and-pop isp. but of course, they're gone now. nowadays, lots of folks do care that their business site is run off a p.c. in someone's bedroom, for example ... (much less a bedroom in india ...)
but still, i wouldn't be too awed by how industrious these folks seem to be. e.g. take a look at
http://www.citymaker.com
($18 a month, an additional $99 to have them do the text entry and make template choices for you.) the "steps to creating your website" gives you some idea of how boilerplate all this stuff can be, if you really want something very generic. (heck, wasn't there an infomercial for this kind of thing a year or two ago?)
corporate logos can be all boilerplate stuff too:
http://www.logoyes.com
anyway, i think what you're talking about could best fit under the category of "productivity enhancement": software is good at automating simple tasks. if its enough for someone to have a logo that "looks like other logos", then sure, you can just provide a palette of all the components and some examples, and most people can cobble something together themselves. if your web site looks like everyone else's web site, then you just need a standard template, into which you can insert all of your graphics and text. if you don't have many requirements beyond "make it look like everyone else's" - so you don't have to sit down with a designer and hash out all your requirements etc - then of course its cheaper to do it in india than here. it would probably still be cheaper if there were small isp's here in the u.s. (e.g. that citymaker site may not even be in the u.s. ....but that approach is probably the best way that you *could* make it profitable in the u.s.: expose all the templates and make the customer do the work.)
------
oh, that web design company i referred to: like i said, the first one i found on google: they're in florida with an office in europe as well. i did check that. didn't want the fiasco of providing an example which is really a counterexample. memories of the bush "manufacturing czar" are still alive ...
lol. now why is it that my distrustful mind says that (1) the whole story was planted just to take iraq off the front page on the anniversary of the war and (2) the timing of the announcement was decided by someone with one eye on the stock market?
what amazed me about the story is how EVERY SINGLE site i checked last night stated that they were pretty sure they had bin laden's #2 cornered (it was in all the headlines), and yet, the original coverage merely stated that they (1) inferred that it was someone important because of the ferocity of their defense and (2) that it could have been him because there were folks captured recently who said he was in the neighborhood 3 months before.
I hope by now you are getting the picture of what a local web site designer is up against if they are competing with someone in India.
sorry, i think you're exaggerating to some extent. i mean, i just did a random search on google and find this, for example:
http://www.cosito.com/
where they'll do 4 pages with 3 graphics per page in 2 business days, and that includes databases and php (dynamically generated web pages) for $399. that was the first one that came up.
see, if i were in your shoes, i would be wary of them, cuz on the example web site at http://www.dubfun.com/reviews.htm, that rotating graphic at the bottom is taken from a quake (the game) website. i know, i used to have it on my own page in high school. so i'd at least be concerned about who owns the copyright to these things, including the javascript etc in the sources.
but really, there isn't much more to web page design than there is to, say, making a word document. when you go out looking for someone to design a "web site", you're including alot of folks who would rather be building you a database with something generating web pages sitting on top.
and about that comparision mentioned here the other days: well sure, its not hard to see why programming quality outsourced to india is qualitativly better than programming in the u.s. projects that are outsourced are going to be fully specified before being sent out: you don't outsource the concept, you do the software engineering first (requirements engineering, requirements spec, functional spec, etc.) and then when all that is done, something very concrete and fully specified is shipped out to be implemented. ideally the same thing should be happening in the u.s., of course (although they'll often cut corners), but in the u.s. the *best* folks on the project are not at the back end of that pipeline: they're doing the thinking and the modelling, because that's the more challenging/interesting work.
anyway, for $150, that's not a huge expense.
dang, i wish i had held my yhoo short to the close ... i'm already kicking myself for covering 1/2 of my qqq and intel too early. (though i covered the rest of the qqq a.h. at 34.69. though i'll probably be kicking myself monday for that too ...)
re island book viewer:
click "book viewer: java" (multiple times if you want)
http://www.island.com/toolsresearch/index.asp
i've seen browsers where it refuses to open more than one instance, and on my IE it doesn't want to size them properly (but then my IE is old).
note, you need java.
i find it useful with very liquid, high volume stocks. other stuff ... its just scary ...