Finance Trends Letter

Have you ever wanted to spend a month hitchhiking your way across country, or see the American landscape pass by from the inside of a freight train boxcar?  In the Vice documentary series, How to Hitchhike Across America: Thumbs Up , artist David Choe and his friend/nephew Harry Kim show us how to do just that.    Note : You can watch the full series by clicking through to the next episode link at the end of each clip. I started watching this series on YouTube without any real expectations and was sucked in. The two start off hopping a freight train out of Los Angeles. As they make their way, slowly, to Las Vegas, we hear a bit of back story on David's life and their immediate plans for the trip.  While I won't give away all the details of their trip, I will say this: only in America can you hop out of a freight train boxcar and walk right over to your comped room at the Venetian. Now, what I didn't know until after I started watching is that David Choe ...

  High profile Valley startup founders Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman (of Paypal/Facebook and LinkedIn, respectively) discuss innovation in Silicon Valley, the coming mobile economy, and their greatest hits and misses in this Forbes video interview. Related posts : 1. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel on entrepreneurship and creativity . 2. Mark Cuban: How to Get Rich + Success and Motivation .  3. Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy (BBC documentary) .

Steve Jobs' brilliant life and entrepreneurial career are profiled in this BBC documentary, " Steve Jobs - Billion Dollar Hippy ".  Today is a big media day for Apple, given the hype surrounding the release of the new iPhone 5. A fine time to look back on the Silicon Valley landscape of the 1970s and the counterculture and tech hobbyist environments which inspired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to start their own little computer company (now valued at over $600 billion dollars , market cap).  This is a great overview of Jobs' rise and fall at Apple, his entries into the realms of interpersonal computing and filmmaking at NeXT and Pixar, and his triumphant return to Apple that kickstarted its reinvention as a design-focused electronics company.  Enjoy the video, and check out our related items below for more on Steve Jobs and the tech revolution. Related posts :  1. Steve Jobs PBS interview from 1990, rarely seen . 2. Interview: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates a...

All anyone wanted to talk about today, it seems, was the LinkedIn (LNKD) I PO and whether or not there is a bubble in social media and tech startup valuations. It was interesting to see the strength in LinkedIn spread to some of the other names in the social networking arena, such as SINA and QPSA, today. We'll let you decide whether the LinkedIn IPO marks a Netscape-type event (1995) for social web or a fin de siecle reminiscent of the 1999-2000 dot com bubble peak. One thing is certain, easy money policies did a great deal to fuel deals and share prices in both cycles. Meanwhile, I decided to look at some of the charts in the beaten down energy and resource sectors. Here are a couple names that caught my eye (no current positions in highlighted names and no personal investing/trading recommendations are intended. Do your own research & manage your own trades wisely). Hathor Exploration (HAT.TO) is one of the only uranium names in my watchlist showing any strength. The sector...

Speculation, in all its forms, is what drives human progress. This is the core message behind Michael Bigger's recent post, "The Desire to Speculate" . An excerpt from Michael's essay: " It is said that the desire to speculate is very strong in the American people. That is why our country has made greater progress than any other country in the world, because progress is the result of speculation . We are not referring merely to stock speculations, but to the word in its broadest sense. Every new undertaking is a speculation. An inventor speculates on what he is going to invent. Often such speculations result in losses, because many inventors, or would-be-inventors, never accomplish very much. They spend their money, time, and efforts, and probably live years in poverty, and then if the invention is not profitable, they are heavy losers. It is the same thing with every new business. It is purely a speculation... " This is a great point, and one that...

Last Friday, StockTwits announced they would partner with SecondMarket , an independent marketplace for private company stock and illiquid assets, to provide an expanded new commentary stream for discussion on private companies . Some thoughts from Howard Lindzon on the new partnership: " I love stocks and I LOVE investing in startups. About 8 months ago I started calling Facebook $ fbook and Twitter $ twit when I tweeted. I felt the IPO market was struggling and it would be cool if Private Companies had a lightweight exchange or center of conversation to point people too to learn about them in real-time. A place where employees and investors could get a pulse of what people were saying about private companies. It would be cool for the Companies and REALLY COOL for STOCKTWITS is we could own all the company conversations on twitter. When I had the idea and Fred Wilson noticed me doing it, at least he thought so and his hunches are better than mine. Through a partn...

Here's a fun piece from Bloomberg columnist Mark Gilbert which takes its cue from Jeremy Grantham's recent remarks about the world's "first truly global bubble" . In, "Champagne Cheaper Than Vinegar = Bubble" , Gilbert lists his seven signs that the world has gone bubblicious and completely off its rocker. The world of contemporary art provides us with one prime example: Skullduggery? Take a life-sized platinum skull that looks eerily like Hedge-Fund Guy. Stud it with 8,601 diamonds weighing 1,106.18 carats. Give it a snappy title such as ``For the Love of God'' and, as long as your name is Damien Hirst, you have a recipe for turning $20 million of materials into a $100 million windfall. ``You have to get the price right, or it will come back into the market,'' Hirst told Bloomberg News reporter Linda Sandler. ``A lot of people buy things and flip them.'' You know there's a bubble when artists are trying to set their prices s...

Reports from the Wall St. Journal indicate Google is looking to acquire YouTube for $1.6 billion dollars. The talks have been described as tentative, and the deal could disolve at any time. Here's CIO.com on Google's bid to buy the leading online video community: In September, YouTube nabbed almost 46 percent of all U.S. visits to video Web sites, while the video section of News Corp.’s MySpace.com came in second with 21.2 percent, according to Hitwise. Google Video came in third with 11 percent, followed by Microsoft’s MSN Video with 6.8 percent and Yahoo’s Yahoo Video with 5.6 percent. YouTube, in typical startup fashion, approached the market aggressively, opening up their service to anyone wanting to upload their videos, and quickly became a phenomenon. It embraced tagging and sharing features, creating the most popular online video community. Meanwhile, Google took a much more conservative approach, at first only featuring videos obtained through formal agreements with p...

Today we’ll be talking with energy analyst and hedge fund manager Bill Powers, of Powers Asset Management. Bill has published two successful energy investment newsletters, Canadian Energy Viewpoint and US Energy Investor , and has been a contributor and guest to Financial Sense Online and the Financial Sense Newshour. In 2005, he decided to focus his full attention and energy to running his investment fund, Powers Asset Management. Mr. Powers originally came from a background in technology, and had thoughts of becoming a tech analyst. After working in the securities business and technology related work, he set his sights on finding a field that was inversely correlated to the overcrowded tech sector of the late 1990s. His growing involvement in the energy sector showed him that oil and gas fit that description. A magazine cover supplied the contrary indicator that signaled an end to the downtrend in oil prices. The appearance of The Economist ’s now famous “Drowning in Oil” issue was ...