The World is NOT Ending…Just Mahalo AND Sarbanes-Oxley Must Die!

Posted by Howard
on October 22nd, 2008

NOTHING is working.

Put/Call ratio…Bunk!

VIX at 80…why not infinity?

Cramer says Dow 4,700 and he’s right. Suze Orman is appearing on Fast Money talking about short selling and the dangers of tanning booths (not really).

It is surely death by 1,000 cuts and there is no reason to be optimistic, yet I am. My longs are blitzkrieged, but I am adding names. My itsy bitsy shorts are printing money (RTH, COF and SRS), but I want to cover them. Today I added some more Salesforce.com and Electronic Arts.

Tomorrow I will continue to nibble because I can, but you don’t have to. You should focus on sales and customer care. If you try and time the bottom, you might get rich, but you might not survive for the inevitable boom that follows.

There are many things that are starting to make sense in the chaos:

1. Mahalo is dead and CalacANUS exposed as a punk.

2. TechCrunch is finished. It does not matter that Arrington is rich or may survive, but his brand is kaput. If you think he is not, you are running a bad web business so who cares what you think.

3. Ebay, RIMM, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo have lost. They will survive and even thrive, but they are longshots and that makes them dumb investments. Google, Apple and Amazon have won the first 10 years of the internet.

4. Commodities are just that…Commodities. The biggest made up numbers of all time may just be the growth numbers manufactured out of China the last 10 years. Take a look at the semiconductor index. That’s your likely scenario for years to come.

So…..quit dwelling on the past I just summed it up for you.

More important is what lies ahead.

The next web is about Discovery and Filtering. That’s pretty exciting. To be successful discovering and filtering you will have to leave the old web completely behind (see points 1, 2 and 3).

The next energy is not alternative, it’s just more of the same. We do need inventing, not just drilling though.

What keeps me up at night despite my optimism…the confidence in our Public Markets! We f@*#king need them. It is quite evident that you can’t have public markets with Sarbanes-Oxley . It’s bullshit. It never worked. If it did, it’s time came and went.

We are just going to have to take a leap of faith and trust that people will behave. I think they will. The greater good is more important right now.

With no public markets all you get is giant rollups. All rollups fail.

We can’t be America without IPO’s and public markets. All the indicators of the past are not working because our confidence in the public markets has been shaken to the core. We must focus on fixing the confidence to fix the stock markets because nothing else will work. You fix confidence by dealing with issues plaguing it. Roger starts things off in awesome fashion with this post .

There are no shortcuts when it comes to confidence.

The information in this blog post represents my own opinions and does not contain a recommendation for any particular security or investment. I or my affiliates may hold positions or other interests in securities mentioned in the Blog, please see my Disclaimer page for my full disclaimer.