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Dam, lost another pair of socks last night.
That Barbera is going to drive me to drink.
Why do you say that?
First proposed Internet review following the appearance of the first US Corporate shareholders’ advert on U-tube:
As a rose is a rose, so a laptop is a laptop, unless it is one of the latest models containing the new TPM chip and software from Wave Systems Inc., in which case the computer becomes a brick when picked up by a thief. Thus the latest in contemporary advertising as posted on U-tube by shareholders of Wave Systems: http://www.youtube.com/WAVX/
Good one. Shoot a demo and put it on U-Tube.
Not yet.
Employee retention is certainly a legitimate concern, but it needs to have a very finely balanced edge. Excessive compensation could well backfire and allow employees to cash in years before normal retirement, regardless of external offers, to just pursue personal desires. With some 100 current employees in a cutting edge field, I would estimate that at least half are very bright and trained to company needs; another quarter, also very bright, perform standard corporate chores; this leaves perhaps 25 “significant others” creating, updating and maintaining the defining WAVX technology. The proposed issue on options, if focused on retaining 25 or even 50 people, really points to extravagance. As an approximate guess of current staffing I see:
Senior Management – 10
Mid-level management – 10
Tech development – 10
SW code – 20
Field support – 10
Phone support – 10
Human resources - 5
General office staff – 10
Misc – 15
Future growth will of course require bright people, many of whom will be trainable to WAVX needs. There is no school out there in TPM applications, WAVX is the school. As to gathering in high quality management to handle “Australia” and other countries around the world, a small expansion of the human resources dept. should suffice to handle that.
Dam
I can't find my socks.
I did find that MonteVina Barbera at Cost Plus World Market for 7.99, just one dollar over my budget, and like you predicted my socks are gone. I will compensate tomorrow with something for 5.99 and then break the bank with a case of the Barbera. Great call. With this recommendation you have IMHO legitimized your worldly presence. I now need to figure out a way to make the loss of my socks tax deductable. Any suggestions?
Hi 'fats,
Thanks for the recommendation. I will keep an eye out for it even though it is $3 dollars above my normal price range, which I just bumped up from $5, as I have discovered that wine quality significantly improves in this range. The weather has turned very nice and for the last 2 months the wild flowers have been dazzling. I now page through pictures of wildflowers as I sip my new "hi-end" wines, following afternoon walks in the local hills.
Great contribution to the options issue. Weather or not it directly applies to WAVX, the background info is very informative:
1988 Frederic W. Cook, head of his executive compensation consulting firm, came up with a new type of stock option, the reload, that put him and his firm on the map. Reloads were awards that were automatically replaced each time they were exercised.
http://donmihaihai.wordpress.com/2006/10/16/agency-problem-at-its-darkest/
George Gilder made a lot of money for himself during the dot.com era with his book “Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World” (2000). He touted internet infrastructure and companies that included Global Crossing, and the adjunct Asia Global Crossing. Global Crossing went bust and cost investors massive amounts of money. It later restructured and is now at $28.96 per share using the infrastructure that many initial investors and readers of Gilder’s book, including myself, paid for. Gary Winnick of Global Crossing took in $735 million while the company was blowing through $15 billion in investor money, eventually ending up as the fourth-largest bankruptcy case in US history. My worst dream is that something similar could take place with Wave Systems. I get shivers every time I see Gilder’s name associated with WAVX.
(www.amazon.com/Broadbandits-Inside-Billion-Telecom-Heist/dp/0471434051)(http://tinyurl.com/3735j7)
Re: Seagate CC
I was astonished that there was no mention of FDE drives by management and similarly no questions on FDE by analysts.
The only remark that bode well was the last sentence by the CEO:
"Trust me, I look forward to speaking to you next quarter."
After 59 1/2 you can take funds out of your IRA with no penalty.
You will be liable for income taxes at your current tax scale.
Note today's drop. Now is the time to start accumulating more.
Nanogen represents a great opportunity for accumulation, but on days like this you can expect a pullback to follow.
Please do not yell. I am a longtime holder of nanogen and was just expressing my thoughts on the current activity. I still hold my opinion that the price will drop soon and provide a better buying opportunity.
The contract only allows them to sell to the government and does not really tranlate into sales right away. I think there will be a pull back as soon as tomorrow. This will provide a good opportunity to buy more.
2006 Jan 30, Wave Systems Corp. has signed a license agreement with Gateway companies, Inc. (“Gateway”) permitting the distribution of a custom version of Wave’s Embassy® Trust Suite security software technology with Gateway’s personal computer products equipped with trusted computing security chips known as Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs). Wave will receive a per-unit royalty based on Gateway’s shipment volumes of products that are equipped with or include the custom Embassy technology.
(IHub #107557, 1/30/06)
That's Grrrreat
We should soon see ice-cream flavored wine... chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla; to be quickly followed by wine flavored coffee by Starbucks...
Can't wait...
2 million short shares, if this is correct, even at $3 per share is only $6 million. This short share sqeeze is now falling into the realm of non-event (i.e. irrelevant).
WAVX will continue to climb as positive news accumulates, and at this juncture such news could strike very frequently, i.e. monthly if not weekly (IMHO).
Thank you for that link. The short side of the market is not well understood by the average investor and Cramer does a great job here unveiling the professional game.
This is particularly apropos to recent posts here on capitulating with WAVX holdings. The shorts can only make this work on low priced stocks. WAVX will not be low priced for very long.
Good tip on the Australian chards. Will give em try.
BEIJING - China's legislature approved a law Friday to end three decades of blanket tax breaks for foreign investors, raising their rates to match those of Chinese companies.
The law would set tax rates for most companies at 25 percent of their profits. Until now, Chinese companies have paid 33 percent, while foreign investors were exempt from taxes for their first two years in China and later got breaks that kept rates as low as 10 percent.
The new measure was approved by the National People's Congress on the final day of its annual session. The vote was 2,826 in favor, with 37 opposed and 22 abstentions.
China's tax breaks helped to attract nearly $700 billion in investment that fueled its rise to become the world's fourth-largest economy. But Chinese companies complained about unequal treatment compared with foreign competitors.
The change was under discussion for years, and foreign business groups say companies were willing to accept the new tax system so long as it is applied equally to foreign and Chinese companies.
Under the new measure, foreign companies that already qualify for tax breaks would be allowed to keep them for up to five years.
The measure also offers lower tax rates for investment in technology development. Experts say they expect the government to offer deductions for investments in environmental protection.
The new measure would raise the total annual tax bill for foreign investors by about $5.5 billion, Finance Minister Jin Renqing said last week.
The government would lose about $12.5 billion in total annual tax revenues due to lower payments from Chinese companies, he said.
But Jin said the government does not expect the changes to affect China's levels of foreign investment.
Although there was some mention of a possible PP, perhaps in May, to maintain liquidity, I do not think that will happen. Watching this pot get ready to boil we can see the pressure building and the stage is nicely set for those dots at the bottom of the pot to bubble up sooner than later. I see a blue light special tomorrow and am making sure my cart wheels are well-oiled.
Speaking of tapeworms, I had one as a child, age 3. I was later told that it exited my body while flying to the US in 1950. As an aside my 1st memory of being alive took place on that same flight as I awoke to engine noise and looked out a window to see below me a very large woman. Of course it was the Statue of Liberty. I cannot guarantee that the two events are unrelated.
As a 2nd aside I've liked big women ever since.
Buy a pearl and crush it in a glass of wine?
Cleopatra supposedly crushed an astronomically expensive pearl in a glass of wine and drank it just to prove how rich Egypt was. These days, depending on the wine, you can leave the pearl out and still drink something like Egypt's GDP. The most sought-after wines are getting remarkably expensive. Some 2005 red Burgundies are selling for double and even triple the prices they commanded in other recent, highly regarded vintages. The 2003 versions of E. Guigal's fabled single-vineyard Côte-Rôties have been offered at $800 per bottle, nearly quadruple what the firm's 2000s and 2001s are selling for and a third more than its equally lauded 1999s are currently fetching. Prices for the 2000 Bordeaux First Growths and their Right Bank equivalents have about doubled in just the last two and a half years, several 2003s have done likewise, and prices for the still-unreleased 2005s are already vertiginous. Lots of lesser (though still excellent) Bordeauxs have also seen substantial price increases. Ditto top Barolos, Barbarescos, and Châteauneuf-du-Papes. The hits—to the wallet—just keep on coming.
Why the dramatic run-up? It's chiefly a function of supply and demand—as newly enriched Americans, Russians, and Asians are embracing oenophilia, the increased demand is pushing prices for the most desired wines skyward (with an assist, in the U.S. market anyway, from the weak dollar). But while the overall trend is irreversible, prices are also getting a fairly big pop from speculators and trophy hunters. These groups have different motives—speculators buy wine for investment purposes; trophy hunters want bragging rights—but they have at least two things in common: They are making the fine-wine market a lot frothier than it might otherwise be, and their purchases are almost entirely dictated by the scores doled out by Robert Parker and a few other critics. Parker, who pioneered the 100-point rating scale, has long railed against using wine for either investment or show-and-tell purposes. Yet, through no fault of his, the 100-point system is now the engine driving these very activities. Is it time for him to deep-six the points?
Despite its glaring illogic, the 100-point system endures because it has made selling and buying wines very easy. Merchants don't have to peddle their wares—the scores do it for them. Likewise, consumers can simply shop by the numbers. Points have become such an entrenched facet of the wine business that to call attention to the many flaws inherent in this approach to wine criticism, or to note the homogenization of wine styles that it has caused in some regions, or to point out that it is actually possible to find good wines without relying on scores, is just whistling past the checkout counter. And if the wine-buying public is satisfied with the 100-point scale—and evidently it is—that's all that matters.
However, even the most ardent defenders of numerical ratings must be a little distressed at what they are seeing these days. The current issue of International Wine Cellar reports that Laurence Feraud of Domaine du Pégaü has decided to halt production of her celebrated Cuvée da Capo Châteauneuf-du-Pape because she can longer stomach the hype surrounding the wine—hype that can be attributed entirely to points. Parker awarded 100 points to the 1998 and 2000 versions of the Capo; he unofficially gave 100+ to the 2003 (the plus was likely meant to be tongue-in-cheek; nonetheless, the off-the-charts rating produced a Spinal Tap moment among some of his more literal-minded devotees). But the trio of perfect scores has yielded only grief for Feraud. "Her experience dealing with obsessive trophy-hunters chasing her 2003 Capo has clearly weirded her out," IWC reported. Feraud told the newsletter: "I had people who I've done business with for years … saying the most incredibly mean things when they couldn't get more."
Such point-driven unpleasantness is merely one byproduct of the billionaire boom. Another one, with more far-reaching consequences, is the surge in wine investing. The fine-wine market is now seen as a legitimate and very attractive place to park one's money—an alternative asset class, to use Wall Street parlance. The wine world now has its own benchmark index, the Liv-Ex 100, which is administered by the London International Vintners Exchange. Business is good: The index finished 2006 up nearly 50 percent, an impressive performance that seems certain to bring millions in additional investment money pouring into the market this year. Also in 2006, the Liv-Ex 100 was added to Bloomberg's list of financial indices, which is perhaps the clearest indication of wine's newfound status as an investment vehicle.
The Liv-Ex 100 is composed of 100 top wines and is 91 percent weighted to Bordeaux; the balance are Rhones, Burgundies, Champagnes, and Italian wines. Managing director James Miles says that Liv-Ex determines a wine's investment-grade status almost entirely on the basis of Parker points, and the index includes only wines that have earned at least 95 points. "He is the Standard & Poor's or Moody's of the wine market," says Miles. "Liv-Ex is effectively benchmarked around Parker." He says it is no different for wine investment funds; their portfolios are largely built on Parker points. That's no surprise: Over the last 25 years or so, wines with high scores from Parker, particularly Bordeauxs, have tended to produce the fattest returns, so investors are naturally putting their chips on the highest-scoring wines—and the demand ups the prices. According to Miles, there are now three major wine investment funds registered in the U.K. He says the largest, Vintage Wine Fund, has just under $80 million under management and that the three funds combined have pumped a total of nearly $100 million into the market over the last three years, which, as fine wine goes, is a not-insubstantial sum. (By way of comparison, total wine auction sales worldwide last year amounted to $240.5 million.) Miles thinks the stampede for investment-grade wines has only just begun. "An astonishing amount of wealth has been created in the last three years," he says, "and fine wine is a warrant on wealth creation."
Fine wine is a warrant on wealth creation—the idea ought to freeze the taste buds of any wine lover. Certainly, it is antithetical to everything Parker has preached. He has always scorned the idea of using wine as an investment vehicle; in The Emperor of Wine, her excellent biography of Parker, Elin McCoy reports that he spurned repeated invitations to appear on Wall $treet Week because he knew that host Louis Rukeyser wanted to talk about how to make a buck off of wine. It surely gives him no joy to see his scores used as credit ratings.
Of course, Parker isn't the only critic using the 100-point scale, and his influence has waned in several important regions, notably Burgundy. His huge scores for certain Australian wines have had little effect on the market, and even in Bordeaux, Parker's authority isn't as absolute as it once was. But as the critic who conceived the 100-point system, Parker has a special obligation to recognize that it's now serving some very regrettable purposes, and given his reputation and his success, he is uniquely positioned to do something about it.
What might he do? He could stop issuing ratings entirely—or just drop them for Bordeaux, where they have the greatest impact. In other regions, he might consider forgoing scores on wines produced in particularly small quantities, such as the Cuvée da Capo. Alternatively, he might switch from points to letter grades. Because these correlate to a range of scores, they are slightly more defensible than single-number ratings, which suggest a level of precision that simply doesn't exist when it comes to evaluating wines. Equally important, single-number ratings—particularly numbers between 95 and 100—lend themselves to speculation and trophy hunting in a way that a range of scores, or its alphabetic equivalent, probably would not.
None of these changes would reverse the overall trend—fine wine is becoming a luxury good, and that cork can't be put back in the bottle. However, they might make a difference at the margins. When I asked James Miles what would happen to Liv-Ex if Parker stopped issuing scores, he was unequivocal: "It would definitely cause us some problems if he did that." No offense to Miles, who seems very likeable, but that ought to be reason enough for Parker to stop rating the Latours and Ausones—wines that, anyway, are now well beyond the reach of the ordinary consumers whose interests he has always claimed to champion. Doing this would, at the very least, carry enormous symbolic weight: What better way of reproaching speculators and trophy hunters than to deprive them of the all-important number? And who knows: Scrapping some ratings might even convince retailers and consumers that ratings can be dispensed with entirely. True, asking wine lovers to imagine a world without the 100-point scale is like asking them to imagine a world without the Gregorian calendar or the QWERTY keyboard. Thanks mainly to Parker, a generation of oenophiles has been nurtured on the point system; if he were to now start weaning the public of its dependence on scores, it might be his greatest contribution yet.
http://www.slate.com/id/2161442/
I would have guessed that the recent WAVX-Seagate news would have favorably impacted Seagate shares also, but STX continues to fall on the news. Does anybody have any thoughts on this?
Thank goodness I do not buy my wine at Christie's!
Try this:
http://www.geni.com/
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Monday pledged hefty spending increases on education and other key concerns for ordinary Chinese as top leaders move toward renewing their mandate at a Communist Party congress later this year.
Yet, appealing to core nationalist sentiments, Wen also promised the sprawling but largely backward military a technological upgrade and said China would resist efforts by self-governing Taiwan to formalize its independence from the mainland.
"We must put people first, promote faster progress in social programs, work energetically to solve the most practical problems that are of greatest concern to the people ... and ensure that all of the people share in the fruits of reform and development," Wen said in a speech to China's legislature, the National People's Congress.
The annual 12-day session offers a rare opportunity for leaders to meet with nearly 3,000 delegates drawn from around the country who this year are expected to approve a toughly contested property rights bill and less controversial corporate tax bill.
This year's session comes just months ahead of the party's expected year-end 17th congress, at which Wen and president and party leader
Hu Jintao are expected to entrench their five-year rule by appointing allies to top posts.
While the two face no electoral tests, China's authoritarian communist system is based on obtaining broad consensus and Hu and Wen have focussed on fundamental issues that were long-neglected while the government pushed for speedy growth in the economy and trade.
In 2007 budget plans unveiled to the legislature, Wen called for spending increases of 42 percent in education, 87 percent for medical care, 15 percent for rural areas and 14 percent for social security.
Tuition and other fees for all rural students will be eliminated, easing financial burdens on 150 million rural households, the premier said. The education program and an expansion of a subsidized rural health insurance system would complete in two years projects originally scheduled to be fazed in over five years.
"Education is the bedrock of China's development, and fairness in education is an important form of social fairness," Wen said in a 2 hour and 15 minute speech at the cavernous Great Hall of the People in central Beijing
Total spending by the central government is scheduled to rise 14.4 percent to $335 billion, according to a budget outline released by the Finance Ministry. It projected an annual deficit of $31 billion, nearly 17 percent less than 2006 due to robust tax revenue collections.
Wen announced the government's usual, low economic growth target of 8 percent, well below last year's rate of 10.7 percent, the fourth straight year of double-digit growth.
In the countryside, where most Chinese live, spending on agriculture, schools, medical clinics and other programs will rise 15 percent to $51 billion, Wen announced.
Another $27 billion is earmarked for a "social safety net" to protect China's elderly and migrant workers, according to a National Development and Reform Commission report distributed along with Wen's speech. It said that will include old-age pensions, experimental pension accounts and basic medical and other social insurance.
Wen and other Chinese leaders have promised repeatedly to close a growing gap between China's rich and poor, which they worry threatens political stability and the ruling party's hold on power.
"We're very happy because we're finally seeing some breakthroughs in rural education and that's going to have a major effect on improving fairness in society," said delegate Sun Pengjun, a teacher representing the northeastern province of Jilin.
Wen's speech dwelled on China's fouled rivers and polluted air, called on banks to limit lending to energy-guzzling and highly polluting industries and said small coal-burning plants and "backward iron foundries and steel mills" would be shut.
However, Wen drew his biggest applause when renewing Beijing's pledge not to tolerate any moves by Taiwan toward formal independence, a reminder of the key importance for Chinese leaders not to be seen as soft on issues of national sovereignty.
OT
I am finding that IHub service this morning is not working with my Netscape Browser but flies fine with Internet Explorer.
OT
I am finding that IHub service this morning is not working with my Netscape Browser but flies fine with Internet Explorer.
OT on naked shorts:
I picked this up on another board. It is an extensive analysis of short selling and its effect on the marketplace. The presentation is long, about an hour, but extremely interesting. You can take it piecemeal, as it gives you the option to return where you left off.
http://www.businessjive.com/nss/darkside.html
Have you tried ice fishing?
I hope that you didn't drink with your designated driver.
Today is Friday.
Tomorrow is Saturday.
Let us know if you have more insight on the current issues. You are fast approaching the wonderful IHUB ignore button.
I ask myself that same question every night.
"De Nile is not just a river in Egypt."
Lost it and found it again with interest.
Dr Hu said Yucai was also a done deal, but I do not recall the % of ownership. Perhaps someone else does.
If the deal is structured that way. Clearly Dr. Hu would like to get as much control as possible of each school. 51% is just an example for a case of minimum control.