THE HUMOUROUS SIDE OF STOCKS

Well at least we're not losing our sense of humour!

"With more than one in six stocks in the Standard & Poor's 500 index at lows for the year, many people are worried that their investment portfolios might eventually move from the financial pages of newspapers to the comic pages. For investors, it's a scenario that reads a lot more like "Dilbert," the comic strip about the absurdities of cubicle life in Corporate America, than it does like "The Amazing Spider-Man.""

But the not so funny part is the following:

"What's scary is that despite the market's pullback, the price-to-earnings ratio of the S&P 500 remains very pricey at 40. A slump of about 80 percent in stock prices would be needed to bring the P/E ratio to its long-term average of 15. Indeed, it's difficult to be bullish on such a puffed-up market because historically, bullishness has topped out when the P/E ratio has stood at 25 and the bearishness leveled off when it sank to a measly 8"
Source: Yahoo News LINK Discuss Irrational Exuberance, Part Two

So just what should the P/E ratio be?












Andreessen Interviewed on 'browser war dangers'

MacCentral have run an interview with ex-Netscape developer, and current Loudcloud dynamiser, Marc Andressen:

"IDG: Some people are saying that the browser wars are reemerging.

Andreessen: Do you believe it?

IDG: That's my question for you.

Andreessen: Well, let's see. Microsoft is up to what in browser market share? Ninety-three percent?

IDG: Well, do you think if A! OL were able to distribute Netscape to its millions of Internet! subscribers that it would revive the war?

Andreessen: Internally at AOL, they don't think about browser market share. They think about getting AOL out to millions of people, so they'll do whatever is most expeditious in doing that. Now, if Microsoft cuts off Internet Explorer from them then, yeah, clearly they'll be able to switch to Netscape. They just don't have any internal motivation to get browser market share........

IDG: What kind of a role do you think the browser plays these days?

Andreessen: Good news, bad news. The bad news is the browser is kind of done. Essentially, nothing new has happened since it got adopted in the mainstream over the past four years. Microsoft releases a new version of Internet Explorer, and it's like, what exactly are the new features? There's probably three or four new features in there, but who cares? So that's the bad news.

The good news is, it's everywhere now. The concept is everywhere, the implementations are everywhere, everybody uses it, everybody understands the metaphor and the shift in the architecture of computing around the browser is very serious. Ten years ago, client-server (computing) meant having to use a centralized database, and it meant that all the applications were distributed on fat clients, which meant they couldn't change very often. It! meant applications were hard to use and it meant that they only could be really used by a limited number of people -- typically, your own employees. And so companies had no way of building applications that extended out to their customers and partners. The shift in the computing architecture when it went to a Web architecture was very serious, because now you've got a centralized distribution mechanism for applications. Put an application up on a central server or set of servers and anybody with a browser can access it, and it's easy to use. That's really a permanent swing in the industry."

LINK