About five blocks from my house is the residence of Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo who is famous for being employee #7 at Google, very smart, very vain, and (mildly) good-looking. At the midpoint between our two houses is a funeral home which, oddly, she decided to buy a couple of years ago………
After reading the “0.1% Problems” post on ZeroHedge (which was about a snippet from a local paper about a fellow complaining that billionaires can get whatever they want, whereas ‘average millionaires’ in Palo Alto cannot), I thought I’d share a property listing with you good people in case you want to join me here in my fair city (my house, mercifully, I bought into back in 1991 when prices were merely above-average, and not insane).
May I present to you 258 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto, California, which is located within walking distance from my house and is a mere $1,800,000 (well, that’s the asking price, but it’ll probably go for more). The property features ample storage in the back…….. (more…)
It’s 7:10 p.m. as I begin typing this, which means it’s beddy-bye time for a lot of folks on the East Coast already, and here I am just beginning my end-of-day wrap-up. The time is just slipping away from me lately, largely due to the sheer quantity of positions I am managing (one hundred and sixty equity shorts). Mojave has also gotten into the habit of getting me up at 4 in the morning, but I’ll try to make use of this tonight by looking at the lunar eclipse. When life gives you lemons, right?
I was originally going to do a video for this post, which is about one-fifth the work of a typed post, but I ran out of time at home and now, a la Dick Cheney, and am in a remote, undisclosed location. (more…)
Wall Street Analysts, surely some of the most overpaid souls on the planet (with the exception of Palo Alto firefighters……….) once again prove their utter worthlessness by way of GT Advanced Technologies, which this fine morning is quoted down 85% due to declaring bankruptcy (which tends to have a deleterious effect on security prices). You will note that in this entire swarm of analysts, only one of them bothered to have a Sell rating (versus the ten who thought buying GTAT was a swell idea). The chart doesn’t reflect today’s price drop, since I don’t want to put up a two-foot high post.
I worked at Apple Computer from April 1987 until February 1990 (a story unto itself), and I left Apple after having a falling-out with a boss over some, shall we say, ethical lapses on his part (yet another story unto itself). Happily, I had a job offer waiting for me which had three big things going for it: (a) it was a startup; (b) it was financial technology; (c) I would have a cool title – Vice President of Technology. All at the age of 24!
Cooler still, it was located in San Francisco’s financial district in the city’s most iconic building, 
the Transamerica Pyramid. Since my working life has been spent in jeans, khakis, and polo shirts, I was excited at the prospect of being a honest-to-God grown-up, putting on a suit, getting on a train, and heading to the big city each morning.
And that, my friends, was the high point of my entire stint with this new company, TriStar Market Data. The prospects were exciting, the (inflated) title was impressive, the pay was (at the time) excellent, and I had finally left the big corporation of Apple for a startup. This was no garage, however. TriStar was a seven-person outfit that had been put together by Montgomery Securities, a regional investment bank, based on technology it had bought from a firm in Chicago. (For those deeply in-the-know, Avram Grey was the original creator of this aforementioned system).
The product that TriStar owned was a Macintosh-based trader’s platform called MarketMax. Take note of that critical phrase: Macintosh-based. In 1990, approximately nobody on Wall Street used the Macintosh. That computer was the domain of desktop publishers, graphic artists, and other weirdos. It isn’t something you had on your desk at JP Morgan. Anyone who traded used Sun. Period. (more…)
