January 29, 2007: Intelligent Enterprise Blog: Three New BI-Style Tools for Investment Managers
Three New BI-Style Tools for Investment Managers, by Penny Crosman
Three New BI-Style Tools for Investment Managers, by Penny Crosman
On Jan 11th, Collective Intellect reported that Industry expert Michael Mace (former VP at Palm and former Director at Apple) believes the drop in RIMM’s stock yesterday in response to the iPhone announcement is an overreaction:
“RIMM’s stock was hammered today, but I think that’s a mistake. Yes in the long term there’s a risk to RIMM from any new competitor, but stock market valuations are not generally driven by multi-year trends. The iPhone as currently designed is a lousy device for RIMM’s communication-centric users because it doesn’t have a keyboard and because it can’t handle Outlook attachments. It has a lot of features those communication-focused users don’t care about and won’t pay extra for.” Maven Source
Today, Jan 29th, James Faucette, Pacific Crest analyst published the following research piece:
RESEARCH IN MOTION, RIMM, Outperform
Checks show BlackBerry sales steady through Jan
Represents upside vs expectations of post-holiday slowdown
Could result in $0.03-$0.05 of EPS upside to Feb-q
Also, no signs of pending iPhone launch slowing smartphone sales
Recent concerns about retail Pearl price cuts are unfounded
With estimates likely to go higher, view RIMM as attractive.
Just another example of how ideas are presented by Mavens in the blogesphere long before traditional analysts publish research.
From the Boulder County Business Report: Company searches new media, culls money-making info
Blogs, message boards and other new media can be a source of information that causes a stock price to jump. Read full story
In our work for institutional investors and traders, we filter and track information relevant to stocks or sectors, sometimes significantly before the information makes it into a traditional news media outlet. But, like anything, not all information is good information, and some of those posts don’t cause stock movement or predict stock movement, some only cause minor changes or are part of an overall pattern that causes movement.
However, we regularly find blog or message board posts or other online conversations that suggest a potential price movement for a stock. This data are based on credible opinions of the blogger, or some kind of company or product information that just hasn’t circulated into the general consciousness. (Of course, some of the information we surface also doesn’t pan out.)
The posts below were picked up by our New Media Intelligence Service long before they appeared in traditional media outlets, and long before they would have surfaced by running a Google or Technorati search.
Here are the top three stock-moving New Media scoops found here at Collective Intellect in the 4th quarter of 2006:
1.Taser secures contract with French government to beat Street estimates
Post found by Collective Intellect Aug 8th
Stock price: $7.07
News breaks in Forbes Oct 5th
Stock price: $8.54
On August 8th, we uncovered a French blogger discussing Taser, the US manufacturer of stun-guns. The French Ministry of the Interior had apparently been investigating purchasing stun-guns for the French police forces and gendarmerie. The translation of the post found by our algorithms: “Presented at the ministry for the Interior as the weapon “antibavure” par excellence, it was the subject since April 24 last of an invitation to tender relating to 5,000 specimens for the police force and the gendarmerie. The contract should be awarded to the American manufacturer Taser for his model X26…”
The story was finally picked up in Forbes on October 5th, based on a report directly from Taser: “The stun-gun manufacturer said its 3Q profit should beat the Street’s forecast after receiving orders from the French Ministry of Interior.”
When Taser released their quarterly earnings on November 8th, 2006, they highlighted that 12% of their revenue for the quarter was from this international deal with the French Interior Ministry. Also, the French Ministry has only purchased 40% of the contract options for total number of units, portending to a higher value of this deal then closed in the previous quarter.
2. Boeing capitalizes on Airbus delays
Posts found by Collective Intellect
Oct 25th — Stock price: $80.57
Oct 26th — Stock price: $78.86
Oct 31st — Stock price: $79.58
News breaks on Reuters Nov 7th
Stock price: $84.55
On Oct 25th, Collective Intellect uncovered the first of three New Media scoops discussing Boeing’s ability to step in as Airbus hit delays and problems with its Airbus 380 super-jumbo jet. Over the next few days, we found additional posts that supported the position that investors were not considering Airbus’ failures when projecting Boeing’s future earnings. In fact, Boeing’s stock continued to drop until news broke on CNN Money, when it rose $4.97per share.
Oct 25th blog post: “Boeing looking to capitalize on Airbus’ delays.”
Oct 26th blog post: “Boeing is flogging Airbus, and that is likely to continue with the success of Boeing’s Dreamliner and the delays in the Airbus 380 super-jumbo.”
Oct 30st blog post: “24/7 Wall St. argues that investors haven’t figured Airbus’ losses into Beoing’s future earnings.”
Nov 7th new report on Reuters: “FedEx cancels Airbus A380 order, switches to Boeing…”
3. AMD CPU shortages cause big stock price drop
Post found by Collective Intellect Oct 12th
Stock price: $24.69
News breaks in Forbes Oct 19th
Stock price: $21.01
On October 12, Collective Intellect picked up a blog post discussing reports about shortages of AMD CPUs: “AMD HAS TO SUPPLY millions of its products to Dell, as it was written (probably in blood) in that AMD-Dell contract signed in Mikey Dell’s house a while ago. However, it seems that channel is getting the wrong end of the stick, since we are hearing reports about shortages of AMD CPUs.”
Not until October 19th did Bloomberg get word of AMD’s inability to meet demand. “Shares of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. plunged as much as 12 percent…Advanced Micro wasn’t able to meet demand because of supply issues caused by a transition to new memory technology in its processors…”
Here’s an interview on Wallstrip from 1/18 with the founder of StockPickr, James Altucher. Interestingly he’s short on Digg and long on blogs and blogging. Obviously he likes social networking and crowd sourcing since that’s the basis for StockPickr. It will be interesting to watch the adoption rate of this type of services and others like it including Motley Fool Caps, BullPoo, and SocialPicks.
We’ve noticed a major increase in blogosphere chatter over the past couple weeks about space tourism. This isn’t just a simple case of a few over-anxious techno-geeks lamenting that our recent rollover into 2007 hasn’t yet produced the flying cars and robot servants promised to them as kids. No longer a vague, pie-in-the-sky dream, this is indeed a very real phenomenon— and a new space race has begun, not between world superpowers, but between private companies.
Several companies are planning to offer commercial space flights to private customers beginning next year. The first flights will reach sub-orbital altitudes of about 80 miles, and will last a couple hours with a few minutes of true zero gravity.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is on track to be the first company to offer commercial spaceflight in 2008, but Benson Space Company and Rocketplane are close behind. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has had recent success with his Blue Origin company, and PayPal tycoon Elon Musk has left cyberspace for SpaceX A slew of other companies have cropped up as well, including Space Adventures, XCOR, Armadillo Aerospace, and Starchaser. And to celebrate the introduction of Windows Vista, Microsoft and AMD have sponsored an online puzzle game with a grand prize of a seat on the Rocketplane. Bigelow Aerospace has even launched the first inflatable space habitat (from an abandoned NASA design) in 2006, and is planning to launch a prototype space station/hotel by 2010.
According to a recent NASA study, 10 million people would want to travel to space if it could be done with reasonable safety, comfort and reliability, and at an acceptable price. Safety issues in the U.S. were recently placed under the jurisdiction of the FAA. Prices are currently anything but “acceptable” to most people (tickets currently range from $200,000 to $300,000), but might we be able to expect that eventually, after an initial rush of wealthy travelers, the quickly-burgeoning free market would eventually lower the price to be within grasp of a bigger demographic.
These companies realized that somewhere along the line, NASA accidentally or intentionally fumbled the ball, and this left room for both a potentially huge commercial market, and a new opportunity for private companies to help further the loftiest dreams of mankind. Financially speaking, space technology companies previously had primarily one customer— the U.S. government. Now the field is widening. Public companies like SpaceDev have already made a killing selling components and technologies to these new start-up companies. The question is, will these new companies take off and be able to expand enough to maintain a stable, permanent, and exciting economic sector? We will soon see.
I attended the DaVinci institute’s, “Night with a Futurist” meeting last night featuring Stephen Keating. Mr. Keating is currently the business editor of The Denver Post. While I think he had some good insights into what newspapers can do to extend their lives into the next generation of news creation and delivery, he failed to acknowledge that news organizations will be replaced as intermediary (both from a filtering and delivery sense) by smart filtering and personalization technology that began with Yahoo and has been taken over more recently by Google. News organizations could end up becoming purely content creation and distribution into multiple (smart filter) channels. This is similar role that recording companies play in the record industry, or movie studios to the film industry.
Mr. Keating began the evening by reviewing the EPIC 2014 flash video, that predicts the death of the New York Times out in 2014, replaced by a behemoth organization labeled “Googlezon” (resulting from the merger of Google and Amazon in 2008) and begins to seize control of distribution, filtering, and personalization of all information in the universe.
He then went on to describe the size of the advertising market ($424 billion globally) and that newspapers have roughly 30% of this market. So newspapers still own a major chunk of this market and new media is whittling away at this chunk every year. What news papers have going for them are three things: authority, brand, and content as well as an organization that knows how to manage all three components.
Perhaps I’m being unfair in my opinion of the talk. Mr. Keating does believe that the delivery of news is undergoing transformation on a major scale, but stops short of declaring the model broken and proposing a completely new solution. I agree with his main thesis that the three important components that get people to pay attention (in our attention economy): authority, brand, and content. However I would argue that “authority” equates to “people we trust”. I get the majority of pointers to information today from emails and the blogs I read, and podcasts I subscribe to. These are my personal brands and authorities all rolled into one. I listen to NPR on the way in to work, look through digg, and scan a news widget that sits on my desktop during the day as my second tier of news and news pointers. My third and local tier is my local television media. As for content, this is your personal aggregation point on the desktop. Right now that is a mishmash of web apps, RSS readers, and podcast tuners.
The talent management and content distribution (indexing) should resolve itself in the current dead tree media shake out. The content filtering and desktop delivery are dead center in the attention economy problem space and I believe will be solved by a number of targeted vertical filters and some general search engines strung together with a much smarter reader/listener/writer than current RSS readers are capable of. These Content Tuners will act as proxies to the various filtering services and provide personalization and collaborative filtering on the front-end to learn the tastes and preferences of their masters.
The content king is dead, long live the personalized information filter and aggregator.
my .02,
-Tim
Analysts and book lovers alike are predicting a new wave of book-related technology will have much more success and staying power then previous attempts, such as the e-book.
At Collective Intelligence, we recently uncovered a blog post which revealed Microsoft has created a beta version of a book search service, which allows you to read or download the complete text of many out-of-copyright books. Google set up their own book search in August. Despite having to read on a screen, or to print out the pages, this is a dream come true for many book lovers.
The biggest book news making the rounds on the blogosphere is the introduction of the Espresso machine from On Demand books. The Espresso can best be described as an ATM for books. It’s a whole printing press in one machine– you select a book and get a custom-printed version in about five minutes. It will debut in 10-25 libraries and bookstores beginning in early 2007. Most of the buzz and speculation CI finds in the blogosphere is quite excited and positive.
Endgadget said, “Is there a way to upgrade paper books, to somehow make them easier to get in this technological age? Not the books themselves, but the way they’re made and distributed? Totally, dude… With prices supposed to be hovering around a penny a page, this seems like a pretty sweet setup.”
And for a more thoughtful, bookworm-ish perspective, we can turn to the Mike Et Cetera blog. “Of course, eco-friendliness is only one of the advantages of the machine. The machine is extremely versatile, able to publish in any language and can even print the book for right-to-left and back-to-front reading cultures. The potential to publish any book no longer under copyright restrictions allows unfettered access to a multitude of books–and it costs under a penny per page. This initiative has a correlation to the e-books movement, where the publishing industry is not hampered by traditional production methods–but it also trumps the movement, where the machine central to the product is not owned individually, rather collectively.”
So, is it time for books to join the digital age? While the online book searches might merely push up Google or Microsoft’s market share a little, and make a small segment of the book reading population happy, the Espresso machine has the potential to fundamentally change and even personalize the entire process of book publishing, printing and retail.