Vegas & The Aftermath - Diary

[tikay]

I actually quite like Yahoo......

I just read that Yahoo link to "owls turing their head 360 degrees".

And unless you are saying you meant 180, or even 270, degress, EACH WAY, then no, they can't. They can easily manage 180 degrees each way, but in the context quoted, that's not really 360 degrees, now is it?......Trick questions, tsk, tsk.

OK, now someone find proof that cows can't walk downstairs, because I just don't buy that. And I've never had a cow upstairs in my house. Cue dodgy bird jokes. Been there, done them.

Oh, & I'll reply to your latest PM's tomorrow Jim, bear with me please.

[RED-DOG]

I actually quite like Yahoo......

I just read that Yahoo link to "owls turing their head 360 degrees".

And unless you are saying you meant 180, or even 270, degress, EACH WAY, then no, they can't. They can easily manage 180 degrees each way, but in the context quoted, that's not really 360 degrees, now is it?......Trick questions, tsk, tsk.

OK, now someone find proof that cows can't walk downstairs, because I just don't buy that. And I've never had a cow upstairs in my house. Cue dodgy bird jokes. Been there, done them.

Oh, & I'll reply to your latest PM's tomorrow Jim, bear with me please.

I already answered the cows walking downstairs one a few weeks ago, but the search facility isn't working, so I can't find it at the moment

[tikay]

but of course greed continues unabated in the modern city

At the height of the dot.com boom 1999-2000 my firm was making fortunes, my funds were doing well (a rising tide lifts all ships) and every tom dick and new economy larry was touting for funds in the city

One such company was Baltimore technologies, an Irish based software company and its shares had gone from 30p to £26 in 9 months

Their CEO, Chairman was a man called Fran Rooney. He owned 90% of this thing and was planning to sell some to "increase liquidity"

He wanted £26 a pop to sell 39%,leaving him with 51%

The proceeds..if he raised what he wanted? £1.2bn

The fella is sitting in front of me. The firm is valued at £4bn or so and the annual profits? ZERO

So my first question I think is the best one I ever asked in hundreds of meetings with companies

"Mr Rooney, if this succeeds and you get to bank £1.2bn tell me why you'll still get up in the morning to make your business thrive?"

Six months later, he having raised his money (greater fool throery at work), the firm went into liquidation



Meanwhile a plane load of City scribblers were taken on a trip to see a London quoted Israeli company GEO Interactive, a real darling stock

One scribbler missed the plane and got the next one..got into a taxi and headed for the registered office he found the address of in the annual report

He arrived, to find a brass plate on a derelict building

Asking around he popped into the cafe across the road to be told

I paraphrase

" LOL Madeupcompanyaments and you mugs value it at £1.5bn"

by the end of the night the shares had lost 90% of their value.

Lovely Post Rich. What a thing the dotcom boom was, eh? Good, solid, REAL companies like Rolly Royce, or British Airways, GEC, were around for decades, doing real things, & there Shares had PE's of about 6. Along came these tom-fool whizz kids, the internet is great, & somehow, somehow, everyone got caught up in the frenzy, & Companies with no earnings at ALL were worth billions on paper. It was bound to end in tears, & many of my friends lost fortunes in the Market at the time. I'm pleased to say I never invested a penny in a dotcom Share. Instead, my money went into Ladbrokes (God Bless Cyril Stein), Rolls & BA Shares, in Lord King's days. Which all remain worth about the same as when I bought them, 20 odd years ago....St Modwen did well, I have 4,000, & they rose from 40p originally to £7 a few months ago, but I dare not look now, I bet they are about 3 bloody quid again. Safe & cautious me, like my poker. I shall draw a discrete veil over Regentcrest plc, run by the Richardson Twins from the Black Country, Burns-Anderson, Morceau - almost the only Share to rise on Black Monday, & yet it was in liquidation within a year -  & so many other dodgy Shares I've owned.  

Try a book entitled "boohoo" for a lovely expose of the dotcom boom. The cleverly named boohoo.com was one of those fledgling dotcom outfits, they burned money like it's hard to imagine. And blamed the institutions for their inevitable demise. "You never gave us enough money". There was not enough cash in the world for those idiots. They somehow raised over £100 million without ever turning a single penny piece in profit. And got away with it. Yet the Train Robbers, a dozen guys, who nicked £2.2 million, got a collective 900 years in jail. The world is mad.

PS - boohoo Book Review is here.

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2001/11/48470

[Bongo]

Boo did everything badly though, others at least did something well!

[ariston]

but of course greed continues unabated in the modern city

At the height of the dot.com boom 1999-2000 my firm was making fortunes, my funds were doing well (a rising tide lifts all ships) and every tom dick and new economy larry was touting for funds in the city

One such company was Baltimore technologies, an Irish based software company and its shares had gone from 30p to £26 in 9 months

Their CEO, Chairman was a man called Fran Rooney. He owned 90% of this thing and was planning to sell some to "increase liquidity"

He wanted £26 a pop to sell 39%,leaving him with 51%

The proceeds..if he raised what he wanted? £1.2bn

The fella is sitting in front of me. The firm is valued at £4bn or so and the annual profits? ZERO

So my first question I think is the best one I ever asked in hundreds of meetings with companies

"Mr Rooney, if this succeeds and you get to bank £1.2bn tell me why you'll still get up in the morning to make your business thrive?"

Six months later, he having raised his money (greater fool throery at work), the firm went into liquidation



Meanwhile a plane load of City scribblers were taken on a trip to see a London quoted Israeli company GEO Interactive, a real darling stock

One scribbler missed the plane and got the next one..got into a taxi and headed for the registered office he found the address of in the annual report

He arrived, to find a brass plate on a derelict building

Asking around he popped into the cafe across the road to be told

I paraphrase

" LOL Madeupcompanyaments and you mugs value it at £1.5bn"

by the end of the night the shares had lost 90% of their value.

Lovely Post Rich. What a thing the dotcom boom was, eh? Good, solid, REAL companies like Rolly Royce, or British Airways, GEC, were around for decades, doing real things, & there Shares had PE's of about 6. Along came these tom-fool whizz kids, the internet is great, & somehow, somehow, everyone got caught up in the frenzy, & Companies with no earnings at ALL were worth billions on paper. It was bound to end in tears, & many of my friends lost fortunes in the Market at the time. I'm pleased to say I never invested a penny in a dotcom Share. Instead, my money went into Ladbrokes (God Bless Cyril Stein), Rolls & BA Shares, in Lord King's days. Which all remain worth about the same as when I bought them, 20 odd years ago....St Modwen did well, I have 4,000, & they rose from 40p originally to £7 a few months ago, but I dare not look now, I bet they are about 3 bloody quid again. Safe & cautious me, like my poker. I shall draw a discrete veil over Regentcrest plc, run by the Richardson Twins from the Black Country, Burns-Anderson, Morceau - almost the only Share to rise on Black Monday, & yet it was in liquidation within a year -  & so many other dodgy Shares I've owned.  

Try a book entitled "boohoo" for a lovely expose of the dotcom boom. The cleverly named boohoo.com was one of those fledgling dotcom outfits, they burned money like it's hard to imagine. And blamed the institutions for their inevitable demise. "You never gave us enough money". There was not enough cash in the world for those idiots. They somehow raised over £100 million without ever turning a single penny piece in profit. And got away with it. Yet the Train Robbers, a dozen guys, who nicked £2.2 million, got a collective 900 years in jail. The world is mad.

PS - boohoo Book Review is here.

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2001/11/48470

at the height of the dotcom boom my brother was making more than a premiership footballer. He told me to buy shares in a company which was just about to be the next big thing. He put me into his stockbroker and I told him to buy me £4ks worth of shares in this company at 13.5p (they were 7.5p the day before when he told me but i was busy- doh). I asked where I transfered my money to and was told no these are T20 shares ( I think thats what they were called) and I only paid for them after 20 trading days. 2 weeks later my brother told me to get rid at 96p and I infromed all my mates and work collegues to do the same (everyone had ploughed in who I told about it, some a lot bigger than me). A week later some software they were developing went all tits up and the shares crashed to around 1p each. I had made a packet without having to even pay for them yet my mates all gave me earache coz they were now stuck with shares that were worthless.

Human greed is a very strange thing.

A couple of months later there was a story in one of the sunday papers about the company and how the software was now fixed and it was gonna be great. My brother did some research and said it was a standard ramp and just rumours but we could still make a few quid. The shares opened on Monday morning and immediately went from 1p to 5p at which point my brother said we should sell x shares. I did as I was told and the announcement came from the company the day after saying we don't know where that story came from we are still trying to fix the software and are still potless. The shares went straight back down to a penny and we bought back the shares we had sold the day before. Again we made a killing but it still enforced the thing about human nature and greed.

I carried on for a while buying and selling when I was told to as I hadn't got a clue but the boom soon stopped and it was harder and harder to make the "easy" money we had done before so I quit after losing a couple of grand on some other stupid company I had never heard of and had no idea what they did. My brother quit soon after when one moring he lost around 100k  before he even had breakfast and figured out he had enough to live comfortably for the rest of his life and never need to "gamble" or have the stress of it all. He has since spoken to me about poker and admits he used to have the same rushes of adreneline when making a big trade as we do when we win a big pot.

[Tonji]

Did you know an owl can turn it's head 360 degrees?

Why would they want to do that Tom?

Elephants can walk off cliffs, doesn't mean to say they want to.

Yes but cows cant go downstairs

Do you have hard evidence to that effect? I think you'll struggle.

You probably got it out of one of those Trivia Question Books. And here's a trivia question for you. Which much-maligned Celeb researched, wrote & published many, many "trivia lists" books? And I'm talkinjg BEFORE google came along to make it so damn easy.

That'll be Mr Jeremy Beadle.

I sold him many books over the years. His research for those trivia books came from his own library of tens of thousands of books. He was one clever chap, had a photographic memory.

[kinboshi]

Talking of dot-coms and buy-outs, Microsoft has placed an offer to buy Yahoo! for $44 billion.  The same Yahoo! that had the opportunity to buy Google a few years back for a mere $1 billion.  Instead it decided that search wasn't the place to be, and being a  'portal' was the correct strategy.  Then it changed its mind and bought the search engine company inktomi for $2 billion in order to create it's own search engine.  But it was too late.  It wasn't a patch on Google, who have continued to grow and are now worth a gazillion dollars (at least).

Microsoft is probably the only company around at the moment that can possibly challenge Google in the search market.  The purchase of Yahoo! if it goes ahead will give them a platform from which to mount an assault.  They'll probably continue to develop the Live Search and introduce this on Yahoo! as well.  Microsoft has big plans in search, and the next few years are going to be very interesting.

More on the history and the possible future here (an interesting read):
http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/archives/2008/02/01/microsoft-offers-to-buy-yahoo/

[byronkincaid]

Yahoo installed Jerry Yang as the new CEO

ah, wondered what he had been up to since winning the WSOP

[tikay]

Did you know an owl can turn it's head 360 degrees?

Why would they want to do that Tom?

Elephants can walk off cliffs, doesn't mean to say they want to.

Yes but cows cant go downstairs

Do you have hard evidence to that effect? I think you'll struggle.

You probably got it out of one of those Trivia Question Books. And here's a trivia question for you. Which much-maligned Celeb researched, wrote & published many, many "trivia lists" books? And I'm talkinjg BEFORE google came along to make it so damn easy.

That'll be Mr Jeremy Beadle.

I sold him many books over the years. His research for those trivia books came from his own library of tens of thousands of books. He was one clever chap, had a photographic memory.

Correct. These days, anyone could do it, via google, but Jeremy had a huge library of reference books, & produced & researched the lists himself. He had many other strings to his bow, too. As you say, a very clever man.

[Jon MW]

Is anybody around here interested in trains?

[AndrewT]

Is anybody around here interested in trains?

Bottom right -  world's biggest pair of binoculars.

[tikay]

Faced with certain death, on the 4th floor of a burning building in Germany yesterday, a Father drops his little boy out of the window. The boy was caught by a Fireman, & is doing well in Hossie. There were multiple deaths in the fire, as the external Fire Escape staircase had burned down - it was made of wood, ffs.

[tikay]

.

[tikay]

A comment on the AP website said......


"wow. One can but imagine the father's thoughts".

While another wag chimed in.....

"I feel like Michael Jackson was somehow involved..."

[The_nun]

I feel sickend for him  at the decision he had to make there. One can only imagine his thoughts as he let go.