Phew! What a weekend. I got a lot done on my total revamp of the landscaping around our house, but with that work comes a price, apparently. My hands are falling asleep at night. No, that is not an accurate description. My hands are tingling so much I feel a sensation of heat. My hands feel hot. Has anyone experienced this?
The market is in China mode today, or so it seems. The factory data from the land of the Han family shows another contraction. Oh, and as long as China is the topic, how about that announced retirement?
- The CEO of JPMorgan’s China investment bank operations, Fang Fang, is reportedly retiring after over 12 1/2 years at the firm.
Mr. Fang Fang retiring has no bearing on the overall market whatsoever, but just writing his name is fun. Go ahead. Say it in your head. Now, imagine his child if he grew up here in the US. Brutal, just brutal …
Well, it is Monday after all. Opening the week is always hard. The market is just waking up to the week of economic news coming. We got a bunch coming our way and this week, the market will be watching to see what corroborates (or doesn’t) the China contraction news. We might be in for a minor market correction if the data is weak or otherwise not overly positive.
I am okay if this happens. I have been building cash to buy on the next dip, so bring it on market. Gimme your best shot.
- Apple and Comcast are reportedly in discussions about a service that would enable users to stream live and/or on-demand TV, and digital-video recordings stored in the cloud.
The above is more info on the evolution of TV entertainment. Young folks (and me too!) are moving away from traditional cable to streaming their entertainment, no doubt about it and to make the point clearer, the shift is now in the realm of corporate giants. This evolution has been clear to me for some time; it is only obvious.
The anachronistic cable-business model has for some time now dissatisfied cable customers. Folks don’t want so many choices they don’t want; they want choices they want. Paying for 250 channels doesn’t make sense when you can pay nothing for way more choices and you pay only for what you choose, which is exactly what you want to watch when you want to watch it.
- Cisco Systems plans to invest $1B over the next two years on a new cloud-computing service similar to Amazon Web Services. Cisco Cloud Service has already snagged partners, including Australian telecom operator Telstra and Canada’s Allstream. The introduction of the cloud service comes as Cisco looks to revive falling revenues.
Although Cisco has not been tradable for some time (it has been flat) it does appear it might soon become tradable on its way to investable. Corporate turn arounds are common these days, so keep an eye on it.
- Nokia’s sale of its handset business to Microsoft will be completed in April rather than at the end of this month, as initially expected.
Nokia, though, is much more to my liking as a trade. I like what it is doing – getting out of the phone business and evolving into developing and selling proprietary technology. It will use the money from the Microsoft sale to launch this, so watch the stock price as the sale gets closer, meaning, watch what the cost of the sale will eventually be.
- SeaMicro’s Freedom Fabric IP is so good that it reduces full server computers into card-size dimensions using its proprietary ASIC technology. SeaMicro then stacks these (10u) micro server PCs (up to 768 SoC) together to make a high density server machine which offers the same computing power of a more expensive 82u size conventional server rack.
I was a network administrator some years back, and I have been involved in technology for over three decades, so when I see geek speak, I take it for what it is – geek speak. I don’t expect many folks will get it, so here is a takeaway from the above information, one which might make you some money if you play AMD for both the nearer and longer term.
- SeaMicro microservers are not only 8 times smaller than traditional server racks, they also uses 3x or 4x lower energy.
The corporate evolutions these days are many, but one really big one is the movement to “the cloud.” Server farms are energy and space hogs right now, so expect the movement toward SeaMicro, the company AMD owns, to be real and sustained. Verizon has made the transition to the new generation of microservers and others will follow soon enough.
Trade in the day; Invest in your life …
