Tech Articles 7/30/2010

Goldman and J & J announce before open today with Apple and Yahoo to announce at the close.  This could well determine if the market gets legs and makes a charge back to 11,000 as summer winds down.  We still believe in this bull market despite the best efforts of the world’s silly leaders to destroy it though a one-time charge off for SEC fines for GS and UK taxes on bank bonus may cause earnings to fall short of analysts’ numbers.  Yesterday’s rally was based largely on movement in the tech sector so there may be a bit of profit taking early today. 

The Fed is beginning to wield a larger amount of relative control over the direction of the market than is healthy.  The Philly Fed coming out with such dire CCI numbers put a dent in the broad based rally we were enjoying.  Of course we are not suggesting that financial data is ever modified to create an artificial outcome just that perhaps the Fed if properly doing its job would be knowledgeable that 52-week low numbers were coming and perhaps make a proactive statement to allow the markets to price in a down turn instead of creating a panic sell off driven by trading programs based on opportunistic manipulation of weakness in new trading legislation.  We already have S & P, Fitch’s and Moody’s to rely on for coerced analysts opinions delivered at suspicious times in relative trading periods.   Greenspan was a perfect example of the devastation one corrupt megalomaniac could unleash on the world’s economies.  No conspiracy theory we’re just saying his suspected ties to Lehman and ML, if in fact they existed, destroyed 100’s of years of financial empires in weeks.  We’d love to see all the time and date stamped trades on the currency and exotic derivatives during that interesting period as the trades were just big enough and surprisingly targeted some vulnerable positions creating some enormous margin calls.  We just hope that the current Fed demigods check their egos at the door (along with their briefcases). 

Asia traded up huge and Europe looked fairly strong today though the action will start with GS and JJ earnings hitting the wires followed by speculation related to Apple and Yahoo.  We’ve just begun to take a serious look at the tech sector again along with mining.  Great numbers are coming out around the world for DRAM and Chips in general.  There is a nice little recovery in tech manufacturing in Asia with Japan and Taiwan putting out great numbers.  Apple is sticking it to MSFT passing them likely forever in Market Cap.  Steve Jobs has just done a very impressive job with branding Apple across so many media forms from computers, software, music, phones, and advertising platforms. 

Yahoo deserves equal accolades for reinventing themselves and created an impressive search engines.  From our tech departments research into the algorithms utilized by yahoo for search we have seen trends that suggest some levels of complexity that rival or even surpass Google.  Additionally, Yahoo pulled a brilliant move aligning themselves with Twitter, Facebook and Zynga as the Social Network addicts grow in rank every second.  With Google operating like the borg and making a brilliant move with youtube and China, Yahoo is depending on Facebook’s addictive nature and that people grow progressively more ignorant entrusting so much of their personal data on a public platform.  We shudder at the thought. 

We also speculate that there is going to shortly be another flurry of M & A/IPO/Fundraising in the Social Media space especially as it manifests on mobile platforms.  This is a department our R & D department is in overdrive to keep up with.  The game is new and the players are jockeying for position so we’ll keep well abreast of developments.