41–50 of 52 posts
I can't understand why the big players like Facebook and Google are not building somewhere like South San Francisco. Most of the employees either live in San Francisco or want to, and the difference in real estate pricing could easily be offset by eliminating half the bus fleet.
My only fear when I read about these campuses (Apple's 'spaceship' in particular) is the old adage about the 'curse of the new HQ'. See: http://www.businessinsider.com/poorly-timed-headquarters-200... I know it's a bit superstitious, but the basic idea is that when a company starts building temples to itself and its employees, that means their focus has shifted and their eye is getting off the ball. I hope it's not t…
Interesting. Apple is doing 'great' but the stock market (1) disagrees so almost by definition it isn't doing good. Investors see clouds in the horizon and don't want to look at the $50 billion they might make in profit this year. Is Apple going to grow by 10 to 20% a year? Google reported huge revenue increases and the stock is on fire but not because of new ventures or customers, they just added even more ads to th…
I wonder if it will have flood doors to contain the rising sea waters :-) This is a pretty cool concept drawing. At one time there was a suggestion for Google to run a hovercraft or hydrofoil type ferry from the GooglePlex to San Francisco. This will make that easier! That said I was expecting something to happen, I mean Apple has a spaceship, these guys needed to pupate out of the dead husk of SGI and spread their w…
My only fear when I read about these campuses (Apple's 'spaceship' in particular) is the old adage about the 'curse of the new HQ'. See: http://www.businessinsider.com/poorly-timed-headquarters-200... I know it's a bit superstitious, but the basic idea is that when a company starts building temples to itself and its employees, that means their focus has shifted and their eye is getting off the ball. I hope it's not t…
Interesting. Apple is doing 'great' but the stock market (1) disagrees so almost by definition it isn't doing good. Investors see clouds in the horizon and don't want to look at the $50 billion they might make in profit this year. Is Apple going to grow by 10 to 20% a year? Google reported huge revenue increases and the stock is on fire but not because of new ventures or customers, they just added even more ads to th…
Also, every stock has some degree of volatility. Take any stock and you'll find periods that the stock went up or down. In the case of Apple, if you look at the 5-year period finishing the increase has been 270%, way over the Nasdaq average.
> I think all this hype on stocks is a pump-and-dump operation, played by the big investment banks. "They" buy lots of shares, start the fire with $1000 price targets from their own analysts and when the price is high enough, they dump it, leaving some retail investor holding the bag.
Sorry, but this is naive. It's not feasible to manipulate the market over several months that way.
In most cases, the biggest shareholders are the company's founders and management, mutual and pension funds, and hedge funds. They would need to do a lot of (very illegal) conspiring in order to pull out that sort of thing. E.g. they would have to agree not to start selling off until a certain date.
Although illegal trading certainly does happen, that's usually via insider information (e.g. the investment banking division obtains secret information from Apple, and leaks it to the prop trading division). In this case, retail investors can get screwed, but so do all the banks and funds who aren't in the know.
If you're a retail investor, the way you lose money to brokers and market makers is typically by trading too much and thereby paying too many fees, and paying the spread too many times. Another way you lose money is when the company board & management screws you (e.g. by overpaying management, or by liberally issuing too much stock thereby diluting yours).
I can't understand why the big players like Facebook and Google are not building somewhere like South San Francisco. Most of the employees either live in San Francisco or want to, and the difference in real estate pricing could easily be offset by eliminating half the bus fleet.
I disagree, they're in an ideal location for people from both SF and down to San Jose and Fremont. That gives their employees a whole lot more choice for housing and makes it more attractive. Every time I see a company that's in SF offering jobs I shudder at the travel time from the valley. It's wonderful if you've already got a place in SF but makes anyone think twice about joining a company when they consider the c…
For a minute I thought they might be revitalizing one of the poorer neighborhoods of SF; but no, 'Bay View' does not reference Bayview.
I don't think that would have been well received. Locals would have decried that SF gov 'gives in' to big corp at the expense of the local population (i.e. not creating jobs many locals could fill and that land that could be used for affordable housing was being bid up by big corp) and probably would have added that not many from the Bayview would have benefitted directly. That's SF politics. People want the clean ba…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. Apple is doing 'great' but the stock market (1) disagrees so almost by definition it isn't doing good. Investors see clouds in the horizon and don't want to look at the $50 billion they might make in profit this year. Is Apple going to grow by 10 to 20% a year? Google reported huge revenue increases and the stock is on fire but not because of new ventures or customers, they just added even more ads to th…
Regarding your pump-and-dump theory, you lack understanding of some fundamental things about stocks. The huge stockholders are mutual funds and huge institutional investors who rarely sell their shares. Retail investors barely move the needle and own a very small % of outstanding shares.
If what you say was the case, why would investment banks spend all that money for researchers? Sure big financial investors and mutual funds do their own research up to a point? Do you think Citibank would buy based on Henry Blodget's 'research' http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2003-56.htm ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. Apple is doing 'great' but the stock market (1) disagrees so almost by definition it isn't doing good. Investors see clouds in the horizon and don't want to look at the $50 billion they might make in profit this year. Is Apple going to grow by 10 to 20% a year? Google reported huge revenue increases and the stock is on fire but not because of new ventures or customers, they just added even more ads to th…
I don't think it's true that "the stock market disagrees that Apple is doing great". Apple is valued at over 400 billion dollars by the stock market. Maybe you mean that the price of Apple stock fell in some period t0 to t1, but that certainly doesn't mean the stock market is saying Apple is doing badly. That might simply mean the stock market updated its predictions on how Apple is going to do in the future. Also, e…
Exactly my point, Apple (PE of 10) is not going to do that well in the future, unlike Google with a PE of 24. At least that's how the market sees it right now. When AAPL was heading to $700 and many analysts got in line to call AAPL $1000 /share the market thought differently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that would have been well received. Locals would have decried that SF gov 'gives in' to big corp at the expense of the local population (i.e. not creating jobs many locals could fill and that land that could be used for affordable housing was being bid up by big corp) and probably would have added that not many from the Bayview would have benefitted directly. That's SF politics. People want the clean ba…
Offtopic, but is there any sane reason plastic bags are outlawed here. It really annoys me because it seems like a victory of naive idealism over common sense. Plastic bags are really useful.