Posts from ‘January, 2007’

At $21.80 per share, RadioShack stock (symbol: RSH) is resting close to its 52 week high today.  Goldman Sachs upgraded it on the fact that the “powerful” turnaround effort is going well.  While my belief back in December was that the stock would decline on heavy competition from its competitiors, I’m starting to believe that the stock is [...]

This week’s Business Week has an interesting article about the Ethanol-based fuel boom and how it is affecting the world economy. I had heard through other sources about the limitations and drawbacks of shifting to a more ethanol based fuel supply, but hadn’t thought of all the ramifications.
According to the Business Week article, the ethanol [...]

I starting thinking about Google’s sources of revenue tonight, specifically their AdSense program, and decided to do a little research. What got me interested was understanding how their AdSense program, which pays content providers when a user clicks on a Google-provided text ad on their site, relates to their bottom line.
Logically, the Google’s [...]

I’ve been investing in the stock market for many years but, for a variety of reasons, I never traded any stock options. I had always had a high level of interest in options as they have limited risk with an extremely high amount of leverage, but I hadn’t gotten around to actually pulling the [...]

I recently watched Who Killed the Electric Car? and found it quite interesting from a business perspective. Narrated by Martin
GM’s main reasoning to kill the car was that there was insufficient demand for the automobile. Chelsea Sexton says this argument is unconvincing because she, as a lead marketing employee for GM during the time [...]

If you haven’t heard of Prosper.com yet, you may hear about it very soon. The company was started by E-Loan cofounder Chris Larsen and, according to their website, they have 140,000 members and have funded $27,000,000 in loans in the past year. Their platform allows individual borrowers and lenders to come together to [...]

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Google for the last few years.
While I love their ability to innovate rapidly and bring some valuable tools to the user (Google Search, Google Gmail, Google Toolbar, Google AdSense, etc), I have this thought in the back of my mind that they have the ability to become really nasty [...]

I just finished reading a copy of Jim Cramer’s new Mad Money book that I got for Christmas. I haven’t watched Jim Cramer’s show on CNBC in quite a while, but I know he is high energy, knowledgable, and eclectic. I had high hopes for the book, but I have to say I found it [...]

Calculating compound interest without a calculator can be difficult. Thinking back to my business school days, I remember the formula is something like:
present_value * (1 + interest_per_period) ^ number_of_periods] = future_value
Even if you can remember the formula, calculating 1.08 to the power of 9 is not an easy task to do in your head.
If you [...]

Its often difficult for people to track their economic progress. There is, generally a lot going on in one’s economic life. People have auto loans, credit card debt, student loans, home mortgage debt, stock accounts, retirement accounts, cash in savings and often other types of investments that may be a bit less mainstream. [...]