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For Whom the Bell TollsBob Moriarty I’ve heard it said that they don’t ring a bell at the top. That’s bullshit, of course. In March of 2000 I read that inmates in a jail in Baltimore were holding stock picking contests. If you wanted to pick the very last group who would ever be likely to participate in a stock market bubble, it would probably have to be inmates in a jail in Baltimore. Ding, ding, ding. Luckily for the poor prisoners in Baltimore, they can go back to doing drugs, extortion and getting correctional officers pregnant, they don’t have to waste any more time on the stock market. They did ring a bell at that top on March 10, 2000. They just rang another bell. Only time will tell if it’s a top but I can clearly hear the clanging of a bell. There are times that you know intuitively that some people have way too many dollars and way too little cents. Ten days or so ago, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook offered $3 billion in cash for an application named Snapchat. Snapchat was co-founded by a 23-year-old named Evan Spiegel. Snapchat is an interesting app that provides a 14-year-old young lady the opportunity to send her 15-year-old boyfriend a nice picture of her budding boobs. She can be secure in knowing that the competitive advantage of Snapchat is that the picture disappears in 1-10 seconds depending on the option of the person using it. Luckily for her boyfriend, he can do an instant save and pass the “sext” around to all his friends. This is known as “sexting” and is a lot more fun than anything I ever did in high school. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel promptly rejected the $3 billion offer despite having no revenues and no business plan but runs a handy application for every 14-year-old. Somebody is being really flipping stupid. It’s a tossup as to whether it’s Zuckerberg for offering to overpay for an application that anyone could duplicate in a month, or Spiegel for not taking the cash and running for the nearest French beach where all the women will show you their boobs and you don’t need a cellphone to look at them. You don’t have to be the mayor of Toronto to smoke crack and do really stupid things. Applications come and go. Computers come and go. I can remember when the Trash 80 from Tandy Radio Shack was the hottest computer in the market. Then the IBM PC and AT and PCJr and now Apple. All things change. Actually I think they are both being dumber than a brick. Any investor that hasn’t learned about what happens to markets when they go curvilinear will soon find out. Ding, ding, ding, ding. ### Bob Moriarty 321gold Ltd |
