Google: Seeking Alpha-bet

Google’s new parent company, Alphabet:

For Sergey and me this is a very exciting new chapter in the life of Google—the birth of Alphabet. We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for! I should add that we are not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with related products—the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands.

→ Google Investor Relations

HTC Trading Below Cash on Hand

From Daring Fireball :

Things move fast in this industry. In 2009 HTC was responsible for 80 percent of Windows Mobile handset sales. Two years later they were flying high as the best Android handset maker. Now their entire company is worthless.

→ Bloomberg

Trump Solo

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Remembering my early years as a Trump appreciator :

A securities analyst who has studied Trump’s peregrinations for many years believes, “Deep down, he wants to be Madonna.” In other words, to ask how the gods could have permitted Trump’s resurrection is to mistake profound superficiality for profundity, performance art for serious drama. A prime example of superficiality at its most rewarding: the Trump International Hotel & Tower, a fifty-two-story hotel-condominium conversion of the former Gulf & Western Building, on Columbus Circle, which opened last January. The Trump name on the skyscraper belies the fact that his ownership is limited to his penthouse apartment and a stake in the hotel’s restaurant and garage, which he received as part of his development fee. During the grand-opening ceremonies, however, such details seemed not to matter as he gave this assessment: “One of the great buildings anywhere in New York, anywhere in the world.”

→ The New Yorker

Hairy Days as New Bond Shops Struggle to Dent $8 Trillion Market

In mid-July, Amar Kuchinad, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker turned bond entrepreneur, was sporting a thick beard. He refused to shave, he said, until his new company, Electronifie Inc., turned a profit.

As Electronifie competed among the dozen or more new electronic bond-trading systems to come on the scene in the last year, Kuchinad’s beard was growing conspicuously bushy. The new trading venues face the unenviable challenge of changing the behavior of bankers and investors who for decades have bought and sold corporate bonds over the telephone or by instant message.

→ Traders Magazine

American Woman : The Life Of Kim Kardashian

 

And as much as her thoughts and actions on this Earth may be quotidian, the way she looks is out of this world. As she strides into the meeting precisely on time and in an outfit made up of colors found exclusively in nature — dark-green ankle-length dress, sand-colored lace-up sandals and tree-bark Céline purse — the effect is like a photorealistic painting, meaning that the Kardashian on the TV screen feels more real than the Kardashian in the room. She’s a jungle Aphrodite escaped from a forest of big-booty nymphs, with a mane as thick as a horse’s and as black as volcanic rock. Her eyelashes flutter like teeny-tiny go-go dancers’ fans. Her nails are small, elegant talons, painted a color that manages to be both onyx and the bloodiest red. But it is Kardashian’s body that is the thing, of course, and today, as always, her clothing is so tight it feels transgressive, clinging in particular to that strange, glorious butt, a formerly taboo body part that is now not only an inescapable part of the American erotic but also our best and most welcome distraction from climate change, income inequality and ISIS.

→ Rolling Stone