What Else Did Sadamn Hide? When Will Corruption End?

As Gomer Pyle liked to say, "Surprise, Surprise, Surprise!".  Who knew that Saddam Hussein hid his air force in Serbia of all places?  Here is a link to a New York Times article about 19 hidden Russian fighter jets.  link  What other weapons did Saddam hide?  If he was able to hide fighter jets, then he certainly might have hidden some of the "weapons of mass destruction" he was known to have.

Was the congress steam rolled into voting for the war in Iraq?...

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Jobs to China

Did you ever wonder why jobs have moved to China?  Perhaps the 400% increase in taxes on labor in the USA has something to do with it.  If our country were actually serious about reducing the amount of fuel that we import and the jobs that we export, we would raise the tax on fuel and lower the tax on labor.

Here is another chart from Professor Perry (His blog is the first one on my economic list bundle).

Natural Gas Price Down 80%!

Mark J. Perry, Professor of Economics at Michigan, is my favorite blogger (top link on my list).  He does a great job of converting economic news into valuable pictures.  Below is his chart showing an 80% decline in the price of natural gas!....

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Personal Consumption Set to Soar

Personal Consumption Expenditures soar right at the end of recessions.  As you can see from the following chart, the move appears to have started.

PCE took a heck of a plunge during this recession and the bounce back will be equally strong.  What do you suppose consumers are going to buy?

Hint: the trend is already in place....

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WiFi Break Out

WiFi is in breakout mode. Cell phone service providers are offloading as much traffic to WiFi as they can, giving them the ability to sell more monthly plans. Investors should take a look at equipment makers. Also at Clearwire, which has zoomed from around $2.50 per share to $7.69 in only 5 months.

Verizon is buying LTE equipment. Motorola, Lucent, and Erickson are getting orders. Cisco purchased the Flip Camcorder company and expects home made video's to swamp the Internet. GLW will benefit and install miles of fiber optic cables. Have a little fun, the market water is warm and, with a little bumps and bruises along the way, the market will double once and double twice over the next 10 years.

Yahoo Bites Microsoft!

As details of Yahoo's deal with Microsoft surface, it becomes clear that Microsoft is desperate. Desperate to gain a decent share of Internet business. Microsoft has agreed to pay Yahoo a bundle, just so Microsoft can post market share for the next ten years.

Under the deal, Microsoft pays the bills but gives Yahoo 85% of revenues. Yahoo will continue to offer search services separate from Microsoft and the hat trick is that the deal did not include Yahoo international mobile search properties. Indeed, Yahoo just made a deal allowing Google to provide search on British Telecom. The new CEO of Yahoo is to be congratulated for making a shrewd deal. Buy Yahoo!

Google is a winner too. Over the next 10 years, the desk top computer is likely to become the equivalent of the land line telephone. The growth is going to be in mobile services. The deal for BT gives Google another place to grow.

Blackberry just joined most other cell service providers in using Google Web Kit for development . The use of GWK, by most mobile developers is a coup for Google. All of the developers are enjoying huge time savings and the only real loser is Microsoft. The consumer wins big!

In related news, Nokia will offer smartbooks that use a Linux based OS. Does Chrome OS give legitimacy to Nokia or does Nokia's OS give legitimacy to Google? I think both win. Together they show the world that Microsoft is not the only game in town. Google is not the only large company gunning to take out a piece of the Microsoft monopoly. Microsoft is like a powerful old Grizzly Bear surrounded by a pack of hungry dogs. Yahoo just brought blood.

Buy Yahoo!

The Big Internet Seven in my book are:

Google

Facebook

Yahoo

Amazon

Apple

EBay

Microsoft

I have listed them in order of investment attractiveness to me. Of course, any guess at what the future holds is always an iffy proposition. There are obvious problems with this list.

1) Facebook is the clear leader in the fastest growing sector of the Internet. It has grown so fast that it has knocked MySpace halfway to the moon, but the shares are not publicly traded.

2) Apple is a heck of a company. It is selling 25% of all music!!! A single Apple store in Manhattan has revenues of 350 million dollars and it sells $35,000 per square foot, compared to the $18,000 per square foot of Tiffany's. Apple is expected to announce a market leading tablet computer soon. It is expected to jump into the lead of the Internet 2.0 mobile computing race. A common problem for Apple and Google is that the market is discounting rapid growth for many years into the future. Apple and Google sell at high price to earnings, sales and cash flow. They both enjoy very high profit margins past growth is huge for Google and off the chart for Apple. The market values Apple more than Google. But give me the choice of owning all of Google or all of Apple and I will take Google, keep the change and be in a safer position. Google has a big ditch to jump in regard to Google Wave. If it is successful, it will give Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and many others a bad case of heart burn. Google's position in regard to reading eyeballs is also a potential huge winner as Youtube is starting to be. Google has been first on my list for four years and I don't see it getting knocked off.

3) Microsoft has all but lost the mobile computing war after just the beginning battles of Internet 2.0. Microsoft's recent successes was the retaking of the netbook Operating System hill, but Google will release its netbook OS next year. Based on the rapid adoption being enjoyed by Android, I believe Chrome OS is going to take a major share of market. Today, Blackberry joined the mobile webkit browser development team. Nokia, Apple, Sprint, Google and many others are on this team. Microsoft continues to offer smart phones but the others have the scale to knock Microsoft out.

4) Picking Amazon over Ebay was a tough call but Amazon is another heck of a company selling at high multiples. Amazon has a big lead in the electronic reader business but, today, details of the new wireless Sony reader came out. The initial price is $399, but I suspect it will be offered with a few hundred dollars worth of best sellers and a few thousand dollars worth of classic books free of charge. One blogger has written about how one would need to buy 30 books to save the reader price. He is missing the boat entirely. The Sony Reader includes the ability to wirelessly check out selected works from selected libraries. The convenience of easy book downloads will make the readers compelling devices to own. Ebay is not just an auction site for household collections. Ebay is an online retailer much like Amazon. I simply like Amazon better than Ebay.

5) Yahoo, in my book, has taken a major leap forward. I believe the new CEO knows what she is doing. I have never stopped liking Google but Yahoo has been favored and unfavored at times. When Microsoft was trying to buy Yahoo, it traded at $43.21 per share. Today, after Microsoft has agreed to do a lot of work for Yahoo free of charge and to give it the bulk of advertising revenues for the next 10 years, Yahoo sells for $15.07! Yahoo is another heck of a company. It has over 100 million email clients! It is the leader in a number of web site markets, including the financial area. During this Bull Market, Yahoo is going to be visited a few zillion times, over and above the times it will be visited as a result of Bing searches.

The businesses of Amazon and Ebay are lower margined businesses than the others. I recommend that you pick two or even three stocks out of the Google, Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft group and one out of the Amazon, Ebay group.

Bookmark this page and comeback a year and five years from now to see how good my educated guess proves to be. My expectations are for rapid growth over the next 5 years. Here are the symbols and prices as of today's close:

Goog 471.37, Yhoo 15.07, AAPL 169.40, AMZN 84.19, Ebay 22.31, Msft 24.64.