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For the record, the full name for these "points" is "basis points". See Investopedia: basis point and Wikipedia: basis point.

That is not why they go to the pink sheets.

Each exchange (NYSE, Nasdaq, etc) has their own requirements for listing. If you can't meet the requirements (there are many), then you trade on the pink sheets.

It has nothing to do with CPA's signing off or not signing off.

Warrent Buffet calls it a moat.

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/economicmoat.asp

And subscriptions often result in the opposite of lock-in.

For example, if you were able to buy a Zune music subscription there is nothing preventing you from switching to another service. However, if you buy a bunch of songs on iTunes then you lose the ability to play them should you switch from iPod to Zune. Apple gets to charge a premium on iPods partly because of this fact (the fact that they are beautifully designed also helps). Buyng songs on iTunes locks you into Apple. Subscribing to the Zune service does not lock you into Zune.

In fact, if someone else offers a slightly less expensive equivalent service it is really easy to switch subscriptions.

Of course the music companies would not license at a rate that allows a slightly less expensive service.

In the period ended November 3, the company earned a sickening $2 million (1 cent per share). That's far below the $196 million ($1.27 per share) it earned in the same period last year. It's also 49 cents below what analysts had been expecting.

No, write down is the correct term.

If you thought you had $billion worth of widgets in the warehouse, but now you don't expect to sell as many, or expect them to sell at a lower price, then in your end of year accounts you'll write down the value of this asset.

Now you might try to sell the widgets at a marked down (ie. lower) price and thus just take a small loss (a small write down). But you might also just not be able to sell them at all in which case they'll end up in a landfill somewhere.

Rich.

I'd say it's more like a short and distort.

Why does it show up only with SCOX? Most likely because it's quite rare for a wellknown company to become deficent and even more rare to be bankrupt at the same time. Just think about it... it really sends up a big warning flag all over the market if it happens to your company. Better to take the bull by the horns and delist yourself than being rapped over the fingers where everyone can see you. This search: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Afinance.yahoo.com+%22is+deficient%22+-scox+-messages only for me turns up 4 other companies that are also deficent. There's bound to be more since Google doesn't index everything.

The 19th September newsitem is the SEC filing informing that the have recieved the delisting notice but it doesn't go into why they got the notice. Guess they didn't have to give a reason to SEC and didn't want to fan any flames.

The triggering events for delisting notices usually is either that the stock has been trading under $1 for more than 30 days or that their market capitalization is under $5 million. The reason NASDAQ doesn't want that kind of stocks to be traded is that they become easy to manipulate. (see http://www.investopedia.com/articles/02/032002.asp )

So no, I am not a trader and certainly not a quant (which in the UK is an Old English word for the female public region - check out a dictionary).

Dude, I'm sorry someone seems to have pissed in your cornflakes, but don't harsh outside your field. SerpentMage is clearly someone active in the field of finance, as in likely working for a financial services company, apparently on the buy side but possibly also / otherwise on the sell side. In this context, "quant" doesn't have anything at all to do with female anatomy, and your bringing up this unrelated meaning is pedantic and unhelpful (albeit slightly titillating -- and it's a shame that this region of the female anatomy is not indeed more "public" :). The word is short for quantitative analysis, or someone engaged in same.

And yes, as someone else who has been professionally involved in financial services for several years, I too can vouch that many traders, and analysts too, at major financial services firms make extensive use of Excel and its financial formulae and extensibility. Large amounts of number crunching might well be handled by other applications, but the results are often then shown in Excel. There's a reason Microsoft took the trouble to build in a sensible object model with an easy-to-understand API for its VBA. Contrast this with OOo's bizarrely organized API documentation, which really seems much more geared towards showing off the underlying architecture of OOo itself rather than towards usability. I commented on this phenomenon before, and the /. community seemed to agree to some extent.

Cheers,

Short selling is typically a long term(30-90 days or more) option. Its not a day trading option for sure. You really should do some sort of research or reading before you spout off knowing nothing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_selling
http://www.investopedia.com/university/shortselling/shortselling1.asp
Just for a couple examples.

What happens if I maintain a short position in a stock that is delisted and declares bankruptcy? says you have pure profit, basically.

I'm guessing you know about covering dividends, one-time special payments, and the like to the long holder. Short selling is fraught with danger, but boy can't it be handy?

Sigh, this is why we need an "incorrect" moderation.

That is possibly the worst explanation of the money multiplier effect that i have ever heard.

Where I live (Europe) we also have the M3 out of control, that's why the EU central bank is raising the interest rates. I agree with your argument, the money supply is too much high, which is similar to a money devaluation if not backed by real goods. Because most of the liquidity is *artificial*, very distant from the physical money emission (M0), a major part of that volatile liquidity could collapse if housing "negative equity" cases began to became a problem (I expect recession for Spain in Q3-2008, as the housing bubble is bursting *now* and will shock the economy (~18% GDP), and we can not devaluate the currency, as the Spain central bank has no currency control anymore).

The create-and-find-compounds bit was performed by the USDA, as well as the initial trials. BMS took over only at the end, and received funding for that from the government. Are you just pasting drug-industry boilerplate, or did you bother to read about the situation we're discussing? I'm well aware that it's expensive to find and test new drugs, but that was already done by the government (which you handwave away as a bad idea below) rather than by the company that's extracted billions of dollars in profits from people with cancer. You've utterly failed to explain how these record profits are justifiable, or why the normal pricing rules on drugs patented by private companies off of publically-funded research were suspended, apart from greed and corruption.

Something that most people seem to be missing is that, according to Investopedia, the 30-days-below-one-dollar rule means 30 business days and it isn't just the closing price, if the stock trades above $1 in intraday trading, that's enough to satisfy the rule.

As of market closing today, they've traded below $1 for 21 consecutive business days. That means they have almost two full weeks before they could hit that 30-day trigger. The stock has been climbing slowly the last few days and there's at least some chance the interested parties will successfully paint it over $1 before it's too late.

If April 27th arrives and they haven't made it over a dollar, though, a reverse-split is probably their only hope (barring some magical court rulings in their favor) since the stigma of receiving that warning could shake what little confidence investors have left making it all but impossible to get over a buck for the ten consecutive days required.

Aside from rules compliance, and paying the annual listing fee, NASDAQ has three basic rules about staying listed:

• Minimum share price of $1
• at least 750k public shares
• at least $5m market value.

SCO already did a 1:4 split back in 2002; I'm not sure how the exchange will feel about them doing it again, because had they not done that split, their share price would currently be less than a quarter.

Keep in mind how utterly arbitrary (and meaningless) the "price" of a stock is, especially for an IPO. If they want to raise $6 Million, they could theoretically sell 6 shares at $1M each or a million at $1 each--or anything in between/beyond either end. If the stock comes out at $100, it isn't necessarily more expensive than another stock that comes out at $20. (Aside from what follows, think about it this way... You have $500 to invest. Do you really care if you've bought 5 shares at $100, or 50 shares at $10, if its value increases by x%? You make the same amount of money either way.) What will really matter as far as the value of the stock, will be how much money they are earning per share, and what their growth rate has been recently/is estimated to be in the future--all relative to similar companies. Because I'm lazy and it's late, I'll just recommend you read something like this: http://investopedia.com/terms/p/price-earningsrati o.asp

IANASB either but according to my research you're correct. Investopedia.com says if a company trades under the minimum share price ($1) or the minimum market capitalization ($5 million) for 30 business days (i.e. 6 weeks in most cases) the company will get a delisting notice from NASDAQ that they have 90 days to get their stock to comply with the minimum value rules.

Btw, that's not the only way to get a delisting notice. SCOX became SCOXE for a short while after they got a delisting notice because they hadn't filed their 10-K in a timely fashion. SCOX press release from that time at http://ir.sco.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=1561 92.

Link to Investopedia article: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/02/032002.asp

Except that you CANT short pink sheet stocks or OTC stocks.

The same algorithm could be used to classify any news article as good or bad for a particular stock by looking at the direction the stock takes after the news appears. You could even train the classifier automatically by looking a couple of days in the past. Simply classify every single financial announcement against every single stock, eventually it'll get to the point that the classifier will be able to say that an announcement is 80% probably good news for this stock, 92% bad news for that stock.

If you ever tried to build such a system you'd realize the problem is exactly as hard as predicting the motion of the market as a whole. Market participants are working with earning estimation at a higher level than any current generation AI could possibly understand. Read up a bit on whisper numbers to get a feel for the challenges here. You could have an earnings report that says "earnings are up, we just increased sales, and we rule!" that doubles the price of one stock, because no one was expecting that. Meanwhile, the exact same report from another company tanks the price because people had driven the price of the stock up before the news in anticipation of even better numbers.

One trade I went through this with stands out in my memory. I had what I thought was juicy new information about recent sales trends for a company, and I purchased many shares before their earnings report expecting that sales were going to be up 40% from the previous quarter. Sales were actually up 50%. The next morning, as the market opened, instead of counting my profits I discovered the stock had dropped 15% after the announcements. Turns out, people with much better information than me had driven the price up over the previous few weeks in the expectation that sales were actually going to be up 70%. The notion that you can compete with this sort of behavior after the news announcements has come out is at best a wonderful fantasy; at worst, you'll actually try to do it and get crushed.

[Note: the following example is based on my understanding of the stock market, which is most likely wrong]

Completely, but it's good that you know what you don't know--you'd lose a lot less money trading that way. It's impossible to parse stock news and figure out if it's good or bad. Using your example, if Google announces that it will exceed its previously projected earnings, it's just as likely the stock will crash as skyrocket. This is because market participants are working with earning estimation at a higher level than any current generation AI could possibly understand. Read up a bit on whisper numbers to get a feel for the challenges here.

Regardless, the notion that you as an individual could possibly get news and act on it faster than the people that really move the market around is naive anyway. Many of these announcements are made outside of trading hours, and after-hours trading is difficult for an individual to do. By the time the regular market opens up again, the big move is already done.

Is this maybe where you got it?

See here

What you want to ask is .... how do YOU value a business?

Repeat after me: Engineering math and thinking DOES NOT APPLY TO BUSINESS...

If those folks were using CAPM, they were miss using it for it's intended purpose. Or, myabe they were somehow basing a project's value by how it would affect the stock price?

Definition of CAPM

They may have used IRR, ROI, ROA, .... I know, a lot of accronyms.

Price per Earnings

It's Price of the Stock divided by the current Earnings per share (where earnings are calculated similarly to what most of us would call profit). Googling for P/E ratio found http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price-earnings ratio.asp among others.

A company that the market expects to grow about as quickly as the economy as a whole (around 3% per year), will have a P/E ratio in the teens. Google is around 56. This suggests that investors regard the present value of Google's expected future earnings to be around three to four times as large as a more mature company. If they quadrupled in size next year and were stable after that, that would justify those projections.

Btw, I think that one of the reasons why Google keeps spinning off these unprofitable secondary projects is that it gives them a chance to evaluate and train new hires. Further, it helps them keep existing hires motivated and engaged while not losing their historical knowledge. I.e. even if they don't make money from the projects themselves, these projects give them training and retention advantages. This is especially important now, as going public increased the wealth of their engineers. This makes it harder to retain people, especially those who started early, have the most knowledge, and who accumulated the most stock.

As others have said, pay down your loans before attempting to invest. If you must invest, open an IRA and put your money in an S&P 500 index fund, which is almost guaranteed to gain 9% annually on average before inflation. As an IRA the gains will be tax-exempt. But do not attempt picking stocks on your own without at least a year of fantasy investing and constant research. Most mutual funds lose against the S&P 500, and those are run by professional fund managers. As a beginner, you might pick better stocks by getting lucky (if that interests you, consider poker and lottery tickets as well), or by extensive study which will likely bore you and take longer than maintaining linux. For a start, stick to index funds in an IRA, and unlike most people around your age, you might have a chance at retiring comfortably. You'll also outpace most of the pros without the number crunching insanity.

I would strongly recommend reading some books. Two that come to mind are
1) A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Among other things, this provides an overview of places you can put money, starting from a bank account and moving all the way up to stocks, options, and futures.
2)The Intelligent Investor. This is the classic investing book that everyone should read. It focuses more on stocks and bonds, but still I wouldn't invest a single dollar without reading it (because everyone else has read it).

As to your specific situation, I would consider either a CD or some type of money fund from a brokerage. For example, Schwab has a money fund that currently yealds around 5%... Here and Here If you are looking for online information, Investopedia is a good place to start.

A commentor pointed out that this is, in fact, 11.4% of their income in 2005. To which, I suppose, you'd retort by pointing out the difference between income and turnover, which, save from a clinical distinction in definition, is something uniquely ignorant of.

One word: Inflation. You can't compare costs in 1980 to costs today (25 years later) without talking in terms of either 1980 dollars OR 2006 dollars. They are not worth the same . A little education goes a long way - check out http://www.investopedia.com/university/inflation/ . A calculator that is useful - http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi In comparison to income, prices of games have gone down in a dramatic fashion - $40 in 1980 dollars is worth well over one hundred dollars a game today.

It appears that gambling is becoming a key component here in order for getting any real $$$ from selling this stuff..

You may have not heard about and Futures (kind of Derivatives) but they can very well used like gambling. It would be interesting to know if these Derivatives are being traded in the Second Life game.

On another more or less relating thing, I tried to run second life on my notebook (3Ghz, ATI-9100 [128MB], 1.5 GB ram) and it was very very slow, anyone knows if it is possible (any tip or something) to run it faster??

It appears that gambling is becoming a key component here in order for getting any real $$$ from selling this stuff..

You may have not heard about and Futures (kind of Derivatives) but they can very well used like gambling. It would be interesting to know if these Derivatives are being traded in the Second Life game.

On another more or less relating thing, I tried to run second life on my notebook (3Ghz, ATI-9100 [128MB], 1.5 GB ram) and it was very very slow, anyone knows if it is possible (any tip or something) to run it faster??

It appears that gambling is becoming a key component here in order for getting any real $$$ from selling this stuff..

You may have not heard about and Futures (kind of Derivatives) but they can very well used like gambling. It would be interesting to know if these Derivatives are being traded in the Second Life game.

On another more or less relating thing, I tried to run second life on my notebook (3Ghz, ATI-9100 [128MB], 1.5 GB ram) and it was very very slow, anyone knows if it is possible (any tip or something) to run it faster??

"Microsoft isnt making huge amounts of money like you seem to think."

They didn't say that Microsoft had high revenues. They said that Microsoft had high cash reserves. Most companies don't maintain $33 billion cash reserves, both because that would make them takeover targets (the buyer can borrow against the cash reserves when making the purchase) and because share holders generally insist on getting the money in the form of dividends.

Btw, Microsoft has similar profits to Wal-Mart. Some quick googling found

Wal-Mart: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8969481/

Microsoft: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A531 43-2004Oct21.html

Revenue is irrelevant to this discussion which is about companies ability to fund money losing operations. Despite having six times the revenue, Wal-Mart is only about as profitable as Microsoft because their costs are so much higher. Microsoft is considerably more profitable than Target, even with lower revenue. Of course, if the claim is "Microsoft has $33 billion in cash reserves, which it can use to fund years worth of money losing operations in search," then even profits don't enter into it. Although the truth is that it can fund search indefinitely even if the search space is not internally profitable for them.

It's also worth noting that Microsoft is not competing with Wal-Mart here. They're competing with Yahoo (and Google), which is a much smaller company (both combined are smaller than Microsoft; heck throw in Amazon and the three are smaller). See http://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/03/031 703.asp for some relative comparisons. Incidentally, Wal-Mart's market capitalization has dropped since then. They would no longer qualify as a mega cap.

The big-cap stocks get most of Wall Street's attention because that is where the lucrative investment banking business is. These, however, represent a very small minority of publicly traded stocks. The majority of stocks are found in the smaller classifications, and this is where the values are. To prove this we examined Baseline's database of 10,721 stocks and found that 88% of the stocks were in the smaller classifications.

Mega Cap: 10 0.1% (over $200 billion)
Big Cap: 374 3.5%
Mid Cap: 794 7.4%
Small Cap: 1888 17.6%
Micro Cap: 2015 18.8%
Nano Cap: 1699 15.8%

The Dell model based on the "all capital gains, no dividends" business practice pioneered in the 1980s in Silicon Valley is 0xDEADBEEF.

I think that you are sort of right, but only accidentally. I'm talking a little out of my zone, but I think this is right (and Investopedia seems to agree.

If a company is confident that it can take a dollar of profit, invest it in its own operations, and yield a return substantially higher than an investor could by receiving that dollar as a dividend and investing it somewhere else (accouting for risk, task implications and such), the investor is better off if the company re-invests that dollar (which would ultimately lead to a more valuable company and thus capital gains). If a company is mature and/or can't generate a lot of incremental profits from re-investing that dollar, it should kick it out to the shareholders, and let them figure out how to allocate it.

So as Dell's growth slows down, it's ability to generate more profit through re-investment of profits diminishes (yes, it's a lot more complicated than that). So the logic dictating retaining profits vs. paying out dividends may very well change- let's see what Dell does.

Averages are less volatile not because they include low volatility stocks but because they're averages. A similar thing happens with molecules in the air -- their average energy determines the temperature, but there's still some really fast and really slow ones. But just because they exist doesn't mean you're going to burn or freeze to death randomly.

In addition, the S&P 500 aims to track the 500 publically traded largest companies in the US. Currently Google is 40th in terms of market capitalization and while it's currently ranked 541 on the 2005 Fortune 1000 (based on revenue), the Fortune 1000 also includes private companies -- and current analyst revenue expectations place it around 250th place in 2006.

Given the S&P's declared goal, it makes perfect sense to add Google.

Not if it's convertable preferred stock. The VCs are able to prevent their shares from being dilluted, then convert them to sellable shares. Depending on how things are setup, their stock may be split between different types of preferred shares.

Granted, I'm not an expert in the market, so you may know more about some of the dynamics. (Series 7, you say? I'm surprised you didn't get a 63 and break into the market.) But what I do know is that VCs invest money in companies that are bound to fail, because they fully expect to make a profit from them. One avenue that seems to be common in recent years is to sell shortly after IPO.

Yes, because "pro-choice"ers are in favor of taking away the mother's right to choose.

If they are so proud of the practice the demos should say 'pro-abortion' or 'pro-infanticide' and not hide behind a code word that salves their conciences. 'Tax cuts for the rich reflects' the resentment that democrats have for the reality of the Laffer curve that was demonstrated effectively by President Reagan.

...if it weren't for stuff like this:

http://upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060125 -125458-3247r ...and this:

http://www.cleveland.com/ohio/plaindealer/index.ss f?/base/news/113774992055330.xml&coll=2 ...and this:

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/whoops.asp

Come on folks, look at the people in the offices you work in. Do you really think that workers and executives at nuclear power companies are any different? No, they aren't. Do you want a responsibility like that in the hands of a PHB?

Wind is closing in on nuclear -- it costs just about the same to install. Use that for peak load, adding solar as it becomes more economical. Develop tidal/wave and geothermal for baseload. At least that way the worst thing that's going to happen when a doofus takes hold of the wheel is a few chemical explosions and maybe some high-velocity icicles.

Both companies have market capitalizations of about $250 billion. Walmart, Microsoft. The microsoft article also shows that IBM has a market capitalization of about $60 billion. Realize, however, that market capitalization is only a measure of estimated company earning power not actual worth. People have insane expectations for Microsoft's continued earning power in a competitive market that contains zero cost competitors, so their small propaganda might work out soon.

breeder reactors solve the fuel problem (U-235 isn't found too many places, and the mining for it is pretty destructive). They don't solve the waste problem. Waste fuel, while drawing most of the attention, just isn't that big a problem. Pick one spot on each continent and put the next several thousand years of nuclear fuel waste there. The quantities just aren't all that high, compared to millions of tons of greenhouse gasses, sulphur, and radioisotopes found in coal.

The big problem with nuclear reactors is they throw off neutrons. That's where all the energy is. The plant absorbs the neutrons, turning a large part of that energy into heat that turns turbines. What isn't heat though is transmuting the elements of the reactor. After about 25 years, the whole reactor has changed enough of the material into hot, fragile radioisotopes that the plant has to be shut down and abandoned. And then you go build another one somewhere else. The land the original plant stood on is off limits - too dangerous to reuse for some other purpose.

Nuclear electricity is pretty expensive when you account for the long term costs. Even in short term, it's usually more expensive than budgeted for (see WPPSS).

Off-Balance Sheet Entities:
http://executivecaliber.ws/sys-tmpl/offbalanceshee tfinancing/

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/analyst/02200 2.asp

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/04/102 004.asp

Off-Balance Sheet Entities:
http://executivecaliber.ws/sys-tmpl/offbalanceshee tfinancing/

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/analyst/02200 2.asp

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/04/102 004.asp

Someone in the PR field once commented on the over usage of the word 'leverage' in the tech world, and how much she disliked the word.

In a technology sense I think of leverage as using something or someone to make it easier to reach a goal. This is analogous to using a lever to make it easier to lift something. Utilizing a particular technology may make it easier to create or develop something, just as a lever makes it easier to lift a large rock.

The calculation that the DOJ and FTC releaseed in their merger guidelines is called the HHI (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hhi.asp). If AFTER the merger the resulting value is more than 2100 and the change in value from before the merger to after the merger is more than 100 then the agencies take a VERY careful look at the anticompetitive effects. It seems to me like this merger will likely get shot down.

Of course, if you believe in the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, then these future expectations of growth are already built into the price of RedHat. In other words, people already expect RedHat to outperform the market over the next six months, and therefore RedHat's price has already risen to account for that. And although the company itself might perform well, the stock has the same expected return over the next six months as the rest of the market.

On the other hand, if you don't believe markets are efficient... you might have an argument here. :)

No, I believe it is illegal. Check out this article about people who were charged for using Pump and Dump tactics, which I believe are illegal. (I am not a lawyer, but if it sounds sleazy, it could be illegal.)

Or this one...

http://simulator.investopedia.com/

from:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economicprofit .asp

"In calculating economic profit, opportunity costs are deducted from revenues earned. Opportunity costs are the alternative returns foregone by using the chosen inputs. As a result, you can have a significant accounting profit with little to no economic profit."

Actually any officer of a corporation that is acting to increase their wealth instead of the wealth of the stockholders is a textbook example of the Agency Problem.

I didn't mean to suggest you were not being clear, but rather that you had put the cart before the horse in terms of strategy and tactics (cause and effect.) Executives are merely acting as agents for the stockholders, who are "owners".

Seems to me like this company is going to tank within the next 2 years. Might be a good time to short their stock and hope for a delisting/bankruptcy. What happens to a short position when a company is delisted: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/03/082803. asp