Posted by Tom Blue on November 18, 2008 under Companies, Executives, Investing | 
Mark Cuban has been served with insider trading charges. By the looks of it, I don’t think think the SEC has a strong case and who knows if he is innocent or not, but I find it ironic that he is the majority owner of sharesleuth.com. A company whose about us page states “Sharesleuth.com is an independent Web-based reporting aimed at exposing securities fraud and corporate chicanery.” Quite funny. I am impressed at the hardline stance Techcrunch gave Cuban as I know they have worked together in the past.
Posted by Tom Blue on November 17, 2008 under Companies, Funding, Technology |
Techcrunch wrote a post about infoaxe today. They have a plugin that tracks all of the sites you have been to and then allows you to search those pages like a normal search engine at a later date. I think this is a great idea because I constantly am digging through my history searching for a page I went to before. Sometimes I am able to find it, but many times I am not. In addition, the reason why it has so much more value than a normal bookmarking service is that you deep search it more. I don’t have time to bookmark every single site I go to, but I might remember some text that I want to search for later. I am looking forward to infoaxe’s success so that they will later build a Google Chrome plugin…
Posted by Tom Blue on November 12, 2008 under Companies, Funding, Technology |
I noticed on TechCrunch that Flipswap just got $14M in funding. The company’s model stood out for me because I just saw a special on 60 Minutes on electronic waste coined “eWaste.” Apparently 100 million cell phones are thrown out every year. The problem is that our electronics like cellphones, laptops, and monitors are shipped to other countries to be decomposed and melted down and the regulations in these countries can be extremely poor. Meaning when these products are broken down they are just releasing this pollution in the sky and many of the workers can get sick from this process.
It looks like Flipswap can not only help the environment but also help your pocketbook.
Posted by Tom Blue on November 11, 2008 under Companies, Technology |
I don’t know why there isn’t a website in which people can list their company in order to find similar partners. For example, we are looking for CRM companies to partner with. It would be nice to have a list of CRM companies, a link to their website, and their VP of Marketing’s name, number, and email. Why hasn’t this already been built? Was there a 1.0 version of this? If so, please let me know…
Posted by Tom Blue on November 10, 2008 under Companies, Investing |
I was just doing some research and found the following;
The S&P 500 has grown on average 7% a year since it inception in 1970
Berkshire Hathaway has grown on average 26.5% a year since going public in 1977. The median home price has grown on average 6.5% a year since 1972.The median California home and San Francisco home price has grown on average 8% a year since 1972.I took a look at 3 of the oldest and most well known Mutual Funds; Putnam(PINVX), Vanguard Wellington (VWELX), and Fidelity(FFIDX). None of them averaged more than 3% a year.Currently a AAA Insured Tax Free Municipal Bond in Florida gets 4.5% a year.
Conclusions:
I am sure that over the long haul the right thing to do is buy a home. If you got a fixed loan of 6.5% on $1M home you would end up paying $2.3M over the course of 30 years. At the end of that 30 years your house should be worth $6.2M. After you figure out how much you would pay to rent somewhere over 30 years and the write offs you will end up getting about 6.5% on average over the 30 years. If you have over $4M to invest, a tax free muni bond would earn you more than investing in the S&P.
New Questions:
How much can you put back in your IRA? E.G. If you made $500K a year how much can you put back tax free?When someone takes over for Buffett is there any way Berkshire could do half as well(13%) as they have the past 30 years? That is great question.Like “they” say, it seems that the ideal situation would be to have some diversity in bonds, stocks, and real estat
