The NotMakingThisUp ‘Pilgrimage to Omaha’ Top Ten List
Well, the polls have closed, the questions are in, and we will be passing along the following Ten Questions We’d Like to Hear Warren Buffett Asked to ace New York Times reporter (and “Too Big to Fail,” a NMTU recommended read author) Andrew Ross Sorkin, who will be one of three reporters asking questions...
Questions We’d Like to Hear: The NotMakingThisUp ‘Pilgrimage to Omaha’ Top Ten List
Well it’s that time of year again.
In a few days something like 35,000 people from literally all around the world will begin suffering United Airlines connections in Chicago, Minneapolis and elsewhere, for Omaha, where the only for-profit annual shareholder meeting among New York Stock Exchange-listed companies is about to take place: the...
Letting Go of Goldman: Here Comes Inflation
You may never have heard of Leggett & Platt, but chances are good you’ve used their products—if, say, you ever slept on a bed, or sat in a chair or drove a car.
After all, it is precisely those basic but essential products that utilize pieces of metal, foam or plastic shaped at...
From BACCHUS to ABACUS: Exhibit A in Defense of Goldman Sachs
Let’s start by making one thing clear: we here at NotMakingThisUp harbor no particular good will towards Goldman Sachs.
In fact, not long ago we published in these virtual pages a column titled “Goldman 8, Public Zero…the Teachable Moment of Bare Escentuals (January 15).” It was a minor but explicit illumination of Goldman’s...
Stotlar to Buffett: “Your Burlington Deal is Working Already: Stuff is Moving Again”
UPS upgraded to Overweight at Piper Jaffray; tgt $79
Piper Jaffray upgrades UPS to Overweight from Neutral and sets target price at $79 following UPS's strong upside 1Q10 pre-report. They believe the report, and operating leverage / margin implications, exhibits UPS has finally taken drastic enough past measures to improve its global network cost...
Meet the “New-Normal,” Same as the “Old-Normal”
It wasn’t merely yesterday’s headlines by which a cross-section of America’s retailers announced the return to vibrancy of the not-long-ago-dead-and-buried consumer that we here at NotMakingThisUp found so striking.
Oh, sure, Kohl’s, Gap, Ross Stores, Aeropostale, Limited, Cato, Bon-Ton, TJX, Stage and Dillard’s each reported comp sales gains anywhere from double to quadruple...
The End of Wall Street, Sort Of
“The End of Wall Street,” Roger Lowenstein’s grandly titled account of the collapse of Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and pretty much everything else in the fall of 2008, is instructive in more ways than merely reminding us of just how close to the edge we came in those few dark months.
Written in...
A Sign of the Times…and of the Future
So it is that a bank office in what was close by (but not in) Ground Zero of the Housing Bubble no longer advertises itself as the place to go for Alt-A, No-Doc, Liar-Loan mortgages.Instead, as the photographic evidence (courtesy of sharp-eyed reader Chris Wagner)demonstrates, the Novato,...
The Most Dangerous Call You Will Hear Today
Today we here at NotMakingThisUp break with a longstanding tradition of identifying “The Least Helpful Call You Will Hear Today” in order to identify a new category of Wall Street research.
We call it “The Most Dangerous Call You Will Hear Today,” and until today it has not existed for the simple reason...
Book Review: The Trouble with Harry
Harry Markopolos has an important story to tell in No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
Markopolos, if you don’t recall the name or where you’ve heard it already, happens to be the guy who figured out—early enough in the process to mean something—that Bernard Madoff was...
What Hamlet Could Have Taught Day-Traders About FedEx
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
—Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
Breathless headlines hit the tape yesterday morning before the market open: FedEx was reporting a better-than-expected quarter, but what looked like disappointing guidance.
According to our Briefing.com, in fact, FedEx shares were “gapping down” more...
How Not to Manage Microsoft…Like a Car Company
As far back as April, 2006 we here at NotMakingThisUp reported on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s refusal to spring for iPods for his children, and his insistence that they not use Google.In “Over-Share from Dr. Evil’s Hideaway,” we quoted Ballme...
