Do It, Invest - investing blog, investment tools, financial analysis, portfolio management. The money road.

Yesterday a piece of news from the Wall Street Journal hit the markets - Google intends to launch a tablet simillar to the Apple IPad as functionalities. And of course, its stock increased a bit.
Whilst this is good news for Google and bad news for Apple, I wonder why people are surprised at the news. After all, Google is the larges internet player on the planet Earth and it should go on that direction. What surprises me is why Google is trying to launch such a device so late…
…which brings my thoughts to the idea that in gadget terms, Google is an Apple follower. But not in the bad sense of the word. Surprisingly enough, Google might have the ability to take a newly launched product and make it better than its no.1 competitors. It is the old strategy of the largest FMCG producer in the World, Procter & Gamble. But whilst |P&G does this since forever and has some associated risks, Google seems to have found a nice recipy to overcome the issues.

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I think I said this before, here on doitinvest.com: banking is a trust business. And when the trust is lost, you can bet that half of your clients are almost gone for the emergency exit.

The reason for this is quite simple - in banking a customer buys your ability to deliver a promise. He/she wants your financing for the long term (mostly desirable for the seller), your ability to generate revenue for the customer, your superior investment yields.  It is all about the money.

In their book “The Trusted Advisor”, the Harvard professors who authored it argued that a counselor of any king must strive in essence to do 2 things:

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The answer is - hardly yes. As much as Google would like to argue against it, the Nexus phone looks too much as an IPhone to be so different.
It is true, Nexus has what IPhone does not have - an open platform operating software (the famous Android revamped), the possibility to write your own software applications if you like, the fact that it comes unlocked. But if you really want an IPhone, you can unlock it one way or another, everybody knows this. And Apple takes advantage of this in order to justify its outrageously high prices for its mobile handsets. Yes, Google is honest in this respect. You do not pay indirectly for the mobile phone via your mobile phone subscription. By the wway, did you know that the mobile phone operators (AT&T, Orange etc) which enter into agreements with Apple pay 10% of the subscription fees to the computer hardware producer?

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A comment today from FED delicately said that the US economy seemed to improve “modestly”. Well folks we all read the famous Alan Greenspan book “The Age of Unreason” and we know what this means in the FED jargon - that the economy is performing below expectations.

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The recent news on the retail sales on the Black Friday, deemed by most analysts to be the most important indicator of the sector for the whole year, advanced by 0.5% versus last year (2008),according to ShopperTrak RCT Corp.  Should this be enough to lift the retail stocks?

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I was recently thinking that buying a website is a form of investing too. And some of our competing investing blogs say that investing is an art. Does this mean that you should pay on a website the value asked by the artist owner? No way!

A search on Google using the keywords “web site valuation method” shows that there are almost 11 million search results.

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Well, we are back. And not in any conditions - actually we are back with our investment blogging in the middle of an apparent market recovery.
Futures for the DJIA, the Nasadaq and the Standard and Poor’s 500 have risen today 0.5 to 1%. This indicates that further increases on the US stocks are expected.
Is this optimism justified?

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It is a matter of public knowledge how envious is Google on Microsoft’s success with the X-Box game console. After all, Microsoft managed to diversify itself very successfully in the hardware sector via a single, yet very desirable product. Google’s forrayal into the hardware software has led to the creation of the Android mobile phone, which was not by any means a success (nor a failure, since it brought some profit to the company). Yet, Google has its own standards for the success - and anything below the number one position in a market seems to be unacceptable.

This is probably the reason why Gogle has embarked on a dangerous journey. Google is planning to attack the Microsoft corporation on its very core turf 0 the operating system market.

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Two weeks later after the previous update on our portfolio and the news are not so good. From the very beginning we decided to go for a buy and hold approach. This is something very simillar to what a normal investor would do. After all, not everybody (including our doitinvest.com team, the authors of this blog) has enough time to watch the market and place the deals. And as the technical analyst Martin Pring mentioned in one his latest books, trading often can eat a lot of your profits due to the high percentage of commmissions you pay. In other words, most of your profit can go to the broker, not to your pocket.

Coming back to our Doitinvest US portfolio of shares, the matters are quite simple. After the rally we experienced two weeks ago (see our post on June 9th), the hopes that the recession was over did not materialize. Therefore, some of the big investors marked their profits and sold some of the shares. This of course puched the price down - actually it stopped the rally. Nevertherless, in hindsight it is alaways easy to manage an investing portfolio, but in practice we have to live with our decisions. Which we do.

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You might have heard of this already - Ely Lilly has been actively marketing drugs supposed to counteract the Alzheimer disease for older people, which did not work. And this is more than a $6.8 billion suit already - the prosecutors have lots of documents to prove it, according to the media.

Insurers and other so-called third-party payers evaluated that Lilly could pay as much as $6.8 billion in damages for downplaying Zyprexa’s health risks, including excessive weight gain and the risk of contracting diabetes, and marketing the drug for unapproved uses to pump up profits, says Bloomberg.

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