No.

i have a question about copywriting, not sure if this is the right place but it only requires a simple answer.

my friend and i have an idea which is basically selling items of clothing with a university name/logo on it. is this illegal? if so, is there anyway around it?

I'm no expert, but that has to be illegal. You would probably have to get the schools' permission, most likely by giving them a cut of the profits.

i know it would seem illegal, but the university isnt a brand its just a name. its a public institution as far as i know. not sure how that affects it.

They still own the rights to their own identity. In addition they generally contract with a company like Hanes - so its likely that company would come after you also.

So I have a website that exclusively sells a specific product line. I also wholesale this product line to some local stores. A situation is coming up where the manufacturer might give me an unreasonable ultimatum, where if I don't comply they will stop selling to me. If I do refuse, do they have any way of stopping me from selling out of my current inventory either online or to the stores? I own this stuff outright and we don't have any kind of legal agreement between us.

Kerrisdale Partners had a good year.

http://kerrisdalecap.com/wp-content/...r-12-31-10.pdf

The fund was up 41.7% in the quarter ended 12/31/10 net of fees, ...

For the full year 2010, the fund was up 66.3% net of fees and 81.5% gross of fees. In comparison, the S&P 500 was up 15.1%.

Since inception in July 2009, the fund is up 130.6% net of fees and 167.1% gross of fees. In comparison, the S&P 500 is up 41.1%.

Our outperformance this quarter was driven by our investment in a fraudulent U.S.-listed Chinese company: China Education Alliance, Inc. (CEU). We analyzed the company, determined that it is falsifying its SEC financial statements, and shared our research with the broader investment community. We also benefited from equity declines in other Chinese companies that in our opinion are also falsifying their SEC financial statements, including RINO International, Inc. (RINO). During the quarter, RINO was de-listed and its stock fell from $14 at the beginning of the quarter to approximately $2.50 today.

Aside from fraudulent U.S-listed Chinese companies, our portfolio roughly tracked the market.

I currently own a Vanguard fund but I would like to start managing my own portfolio. After researching a bit I decided to open an account with Interactive Brokers because their fees were low and reviews seemed positive. After getting halfway through the process I discovered that they will not approve me unless I have made at least 100 trades in the past. So I can either lie or find another broker.

While continuing to look at comparisons (From Barron's) I began to wonder why the brokers that charge the lowest commissions are considered to be for high volume traders while the others are considered better for low volume traders. I'd prefer to pay as little as possible regardless of whether I make 1 trade or 1000. Why should I pay more for something like Fidelity? I don't understand what it is that I'm paying extra for that is so worthwhile.

You actually point out exactly why IB caters to high volume, but are missing the critical component of size and commission minimums.

Go over IB's website or call them up to have it better explained - or maybe one of the IB users here can explain it better if the website and doing the math doesn't help make it a bit more clear.

My friend's turning 30 in a few days and he's always been interested in the market (but never got around to investing) so his brother is going to open an account for him and fund it with a few hundred bucks as a gift.

With an account that small commissions are gonna kill him, so...

-Are there any incentive deals right now offering x free trades for small accounts? I couldn't find anything without a minimum.
-Any ideas for a simple interface, no minimums, and a simple interface? Right now I'm leaning towards Zecco but I'm hoping there's something better.

I'm not sure what you're saying but just to be clear, I'm referring to volume as number of trades and not the size (number of shares) of the trades. IB charges per share while the others that I looked at charged a flat rate per transaction so making a direct comparison between IB and others isn't entirely straightforward. My question was more geared towards comparisons of the others. For example, I've seen Fidelity recommended in several places as the best for long-term investing despite the fact that as far as I can tell, it's significantly more expensive (which is why other brokers are recommended for people who trade a lot and thus rack up the most expenses). I'm trying to understand what they offer to justify the higher prices.

This is one of the pages I'm referring to: http://webreprints.djreprints.com/2394891078553.pdf

There is no overlap between their recommendations for frequent traders and long-term investors. Am I misunderstanding the pricing structures or something?

If you don't trade often, commissions costs aren't much different, and they aren't as important as breadth of product offerings and service. For example, you can setup a 401k for your small business or sole proprietorship at Fidelity, you can't at IB. And customer service is far better at Fidelity than it is at IB, much easier to talk to a person, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I love IB for my needs, but it's pretty bad for newbs.

OK, thanks. The customer service was something I wondered about but I wanted to hear someone actually say it.

Not an investment question, but something that came up in discussion of a business idea I and others have been considering launching; figured this was a good place to ask.

Do you think your average non-internet savvy small business owner has heard of the phrase "Web 2.0"? Not necessarily know what it means, but the level of understanding of "oh yeah I've hear of it, like youtube and junk"

what info can be gleaned from Short Interest? Beyond if the short interest is very high it could lead to a pop due to short cover.

Does it say anything if for example a co. has a S.I of 2% when it peers are 10-30%?

When considering a stock, how much weight should be given to the board of directors or officers of the company purchasing their own stock on the open market?

If the company's fundamentals are all bad and everything else seems to indicate that it's a bad buy, then what reasons would the board and/or the officers do that, if there appears to be no upside?

It depends. They either

A) know good things are happening, or.

B) they don't know how to value stocks, even their own, or

C) they are buying trivial amounts to convince suckers to buy it.

The real answer is that if you don't like the fundamentals of the company It doesn't matter what the insiders do. In poker you shouldn't chase every draw no matter the pot odds for fear you'll fold a winner. same in investing.

definitely not

we can do better than that.

there's general rules for assessing margin size. in a commoditized space where there is little to no differentiation of products and relatively high costs of production, you can expect margins to be small. where there is a great deal of value added and service/technological/or personal value to a given product, you can expect margins to be far higher. it's a scale and you can think of all business (i think) along that spectrum.

the inputs to the analysis (in very very general terms) are just:
1. commoditization (how easily product A is exchanged for product B in the same industry without any loss of utility to the consumer)
2. cost of production or cost of goods sold (variable/fixed...obv you can also include other income statement items as you see fit)

the "value to the customer" would go into commoditization since, for instance, apple is distinct clearly from pc products and offers almost unimitable service and products (almost b/c there are a few 'replacements' but it's FAR from commoditized). AAPL has a 40% gross margin and a 27% net margin.

on closer to the other side of the spectrum, ford has about a 15% gross margin and 3% net margin.

an example using one that has super high gross margins but has to advertise a LOT to try to differentiate (i.e. closer to commoditized) would be abercrombie and fitch. it has a 62% gross margin but only a 4% net margin (selling/general/administrative costs are such a huge portion of how they draw consumers to the store).

so that's how i would frame an analysis of "company margin"

DC, please feel free to chime in here if i've missed something.

I was definitely being tongue in cheek to some extent, but for example my company runs around 50% net in the technology space and very high gross depending on what you include in COGS vs. SG&A, so 'good net income' is all over the board depending on industry.

The company my dad works for is much more similar to your Ford example and that's in the retail space.

It just depends, so I made the crack like people do about the same question in poker: 'what's a good winrate?'

I don't have much to add, other than a LOL worthy link to an article on Bruce Greenwald, who thinks apple is on it's way to being commoditized.

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2011/01/1...KEYWORDS=apple

Yep, we all know what the margins are like in the PC business, and over the last 20 years, Apple's PC margins have been crushed because, whaaaaaa!?

honestly, his resume looks impressive so i'd wanna give this more thought than "LOL", lol.

so there's gotta be something he sees here. maybe aapl is currently on a peak of differentiation/commoditization on a time series chart (imagine a cosine wave over time where the x-axis is the midpoint between commoditization and differentiation/value added)?

i mean only a decade and a half ago, aapl was FAR from where it is today on that spectrum and perhaps greenwald sees aapl not being able to sustain that level of differentiation for an extended period of time and, as the line falls back from the peak towards commoditazation, aapl's cash hoard would go towards R&D (unsuccessfully i think he presumes) to rebuilding the differentiation.

that said, i think brand name has a lot to do w/ it. they'd need to spend a TON on R&D *AND* come up with unsuccessful products that hurt the brand to move it back towards commoditization to a large enough degree to really hurt it.

i just have a hard time believing somebody with that resume would say something that outlandish by current standards (which it appears he is)...so maybe there's something to it that i'm (we're) missing...

whattya think?

Saying outlandish things gets people to talk about you. I have one of his books on value investing that is very boring, very academic and not insightful or useful, so I was starting there.

My problem with his opinion is that it's clearly rebutted by Apple's performance in PCs, which is the market most directly comparable to consumer electronics, and is de facto part of it. Apple has by far the highest margins in personal computers, has almost always had the highest margins in personal computers from 1980 until now, even in the dark days between Steves when management tried to commoditize their own product.

And if anything, it's market share AND margins are growing substantially right now, clearly they have the most valuable PC business in the world given it's significant market share combined with it's substantial profitability.

And it's not brand name, it's functionality. The windows operating system and commodity PC functionality have improved constantly and substantially over time, but Apple's R&D efforts have more than kept pace. In fact, Job's performance in the PC market is IMHO more impressive than his accomplishments with the iPhone/iPad/iPod. When he rejoined the company he pulled the plug on licensing the hardware, causing market share to plummet from nearly 10% all the way down to 2% world-wide. They re-engineered the product substantially, moving it from PowerPC (where it had just been ported) to Intel, and upgraded the operating system with a Unix core.

Today market share has grown to over 10% in the U.S., and 5% world-wide, numbers Apple hasn't seen in at least a decade, or longer.

If Greenwald said in the long run we, and Apple are both dead, I couldn't dispute it. If he said that Apple would become a niche player because it's products would remain too expensive and margins to high as commodity technologies like Android become widespread, I'd shrug and consider he might be right.

But when he says the economics of this business are lousy, while Apple has successfully rebutted that truism for 30 years in PCs, it's pretty clear he doesn't understand the business. Focus on this.

First, they aren't "losing" in software, they give away almost all of their software.

What he doesn't understand is that consumer electronics can't be a commodity when it's dependent on software, and in many applications Apple has the best software, and the only way to get it to buy Apple hardware.

Second, he claims Open always wins, then says Android is going to the biggest winner like Windows was on PCs, yet Windows ISN'T OPEN.

What made Windows successful wasn't that it was Open, it was that it provided a consistent platform for developers to distribute graphical applications that ran on the vast majority of personal computer hardware, they brought the value of graphical interfaces to the masses. The Macintosh never became the dominant hardware platform because it never had the broad range of necessary software or hardware that the PC market had.

And no phone user cares about Open, they care about applications. The only benefit of Android's "open-ness" is that handset manufactures and service providers can modify it at their whim because they get the source code for free. But that's not an end user benefit, in fact it's a negative. Every Android phone can work differently and have different user interface features and organization, and being inconsistent in a UI is the fastest way to degrade it's value.

And even worse Google is giving away the OS so they can bombard Android phones with advertisements, and that's not a plus for users either.

Apple's platform is open almost as much as it needs to be, developers can write software for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc. And today the tables are turned, the majority of the best mobile apps are on iPhone/iPad, not Android, and that's one of biggest drivers of the iPhone/iPad success. And the Mac actually now has more software than Windows, because you can run every Windows app on a Mac, and a bunch of apps for specific niches (DTP, Music, Video) that run better natively on the Mac than they do on Windows.

What wins in the consumer space isn't technodweeb commoditized processors, memory cards, Open OSs. It's ease of use, features, value. No one wants to reboot their phone to install a new Linux kernel.

And I'm not claiming that Apple is going to win in the phone space, the tablet space or anywhere else, or that they won't eventually be commoditized. What I'm saying is that these are new markets and there is a great deal of facts that make the outcome very uncertain. In fact I believe Android will be the dominant phone platform of the future. But I'd be shocked, if at worst Apple isn't' a very profitable market player with a very substantial niche for a long time to come.

The fact that this pompous academic can spout off black and white pronunciations and backing them up solely with backwards looking generalities pretty much tells the tale.

He might as well have said, Sony couldn't do it, and Steve Jobs, I knew Akio Morita, and you're no Akio Morita. That about sums up his argument in a single sentence.

awesome. thanks dc! very solid post and def brought up the key points there that i didn't see re: aapl and greenwald specificaly.

It is more correct to say that because business use computers in the early days was basically IBM and DOS, the transition to Microsoft products happened first in the business and then at home simply because that is what people were familiar with so that is what they sought out to use at home.

If Apple had been the first in the business door...we'd all be on Macs today and Apple wouldn't look anything like it does today.