Mehul's thoughts on stocks & technology
Palm: A stock that I missed? (NASDAQ: PALM) 05/16/2009
There’s no way to know and track the thousands of stocks that trade on Wall Street every day. However, every once in a while you come face to face with a stock that you have been watching from time to time, but it suddenly starts galloping and you are just left staring at it thinking it has already gone out of reach…  Palm Centro I first looked at Palm’s stock when Centro was selling like hot cakes in 2008. The phone was launched in 2007 exclusively with Sprint, and it had all the features of Treo and was only half as expensive. At that time, I really thought that the stock will go up (because of Centro’s success), but it turned out that Palm was cannibalizing its profit margin by selling the phone for dirt cheap. With dropping profit margins, aging OS, failed products (Foleo), and tough economic environment, Palm’s stocks rapid decline didn’t come as a surprise. After trading for as high as 17 dollars in October 2007, the stock hit a rock bottom of 1.14 within a year or so.  Palm Foleo At that time, 1.14 sounded very cheap, but Palm had too many problems so I decided to stay away from the stock. That is exactly when Palm took the world by surprise. At CES 2009, Palm announced the Palm Pre, a phone based on their brand new webOS featuring improved web 2.0 tools and social networking applications. It is very true that Palm had been trying to sell the next generation OS story to investors and media for quite some time, but after the Foleo debacle, investors didn’t really know how much to trust the company. Personally, I wasn’t expecting much from the company either. At the very maximum, I was expecting a tweaked OS with improved touch screen performance. It did not take Palm Pre (and the webOS) much time to become the new tech darling, and thanks to the more than positive first impressions, Investors handsomely rewarded Palm, and the stock price steadily climbed up from 2-3 dollars to more than 6-7 dollars. At that time, it felt like an opportunity missed. When a company from your ‘knowledge backyard’ that you have already written off manages to suddenly become a top contender to the throne, you are just left dumbfounded! Both Palm and Sprint have been managing the media rather well and keeping information under tight wraps. This combined with the apparent awesomeness of the product has helped push the stock prices to as high as 11.80 as of close of business today. If I had put in about five/six hundred dollars in the stock at that time, I would have been sitting on about five/six thousand dollars by now! That is some serious return on investment! The stock no doubt would have made a more than perfect short term investment. However, looking at long term, it’s still hard to predict if Palm’s stock will continue the upward climb. The company has some serious debt and liabilities and this is their do or die chance. While I am almost sure about Pre’s (and webOS’s) success, the competition is way too fierce, and a single mistake in the pricing/launching strategy could hamper company’s turnaround efforts. The next few months without doubt will be crucial for both Palm and even Sprint. PALM is a perfect lesson for me, and will probably keep me motivated to stay on a lookout for opportunities that lurk in the ‘backyard’! Happy Investing!!  Most awaited phones 2009 (US) 05/13/2009
We are almost halfway through the year, and so far the year has been flooded with run of the mill touch screen phones (and smart phones). I am going to try and avoid writing about them, and instead I’ll try and focus on some of the phones I am looking forward to.  Palm Pre The wireless charging is truly revolutionary (Though it’s sad that Palm/Sprint might charge a premium for that), The phone is supposed to be a lot more social networking friendly, and is going to offer greatly improved LBS applications Apple Iphone (AT&T): Let’s just face it… Apple knows how to keep innovating! It manages to introduce both revolutionary and evolutionary devices year after year, and rest of the industry just stays busy catching up! I wish June 8th could be declared some sort of a national holiday! Actually, as of this morning, I am a bit disappointed since Steve Jobs won’t be presenting the keynote, but nevertheless, the event is going to be full of excitement.  Iphone While Apple already gave an early preview of what the OS 3.0 is going to look like, I am sure all the Apple diehard fans (including me) are hoping that Phil Schiller will bring his magic hat along and pull out a few surprises! I personally would settle for an OLED screen (it’s probably not happening this year), flash support, and apps that cook food for you, earn gazillions of dollars, and let you rule the world! (lol just kidding, maybe I am expecting a bit too much!) Lots of Android love (multiple carriers) While HTC won the race with G1 last year, multiple vendors including Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony have announced their plans to launch Android based devices by the end of this year. Last year, Sprint’s CEO said that Android needed a lot of work. Google actually has been working very hard to improve the OS and introduce a lot of new features. I am excited about Android, because I use Google for everything, and they just seem to know how to integrate their products to make everything extremely simple. So, expect a lot of love from Google this year!  Blackberry Storm 2 (Verizon?) RIM’s CEO has announced that a new Blackberry Storm will be available before the end of this year. While Blackberry has been releasing a lot of ‘regular’ devices (which are pretty good too by the way), their second attempt at touch screen phones should be interesting to watch! Garmin Nuvifone (Carrier unknown) Ok, to tell you the truth, I am not really excited about this one at all! I just wanted to mention it here because they have been working on it for so long now… I hope they release it while touch screen phones are still in fashion! When they announced the phone in 2008 (or was it 2007), it would have been a pretty cool device, but now it’ll just be another run of the mill touch screen phone. Well, it’ll have a solid GPS, but at this point it’s nothing new!  Garmin Nuvifone Apart from all these, there have been way too many rumors about Dell entering the smart phone market, and lately, even Microsoft’s Zune phone has been making some rounds (I just don’t see this one happening!) Windows 6.5 / 7 based phones didn’t make it to my most anticipated list. It’s an ok OS I guess, but I really don’t think it will have a lot of innovative features! (I didn’t really like their Honeycomb interface either) So let’s see which phones sell like hot cakes (or Cupcakes, eh?) and which phones fall short of expectations. For me, June 7th and 8th can’t come soon enough! Reviving newspapers @Amazon’s Kindle 05/11/2009
When Amazon launched a new model of Kindle last week, it created a lot of buzz on how it’ll revive the newspaper industry which is desperately seeking new areas of revenues. (See here) If Kindle can manage to offer this technology at an affordable price sometime soon, more readers might jump in the digital wagon feeling rewarded by a whole new level of experience that it might provide. Well, to put it another way, have you watched the movie Harry Potter and observed their newspaper, The Daily Prophet? Ever wished your newspaper had all those interesting animated/video clips? Well, thanks to devices like Amazon Kindle, it might just happen soon! Another FYI, If you were spread betting or investingin Amazon on the news regarding Kindle, you likely made out very well. T-mobile: Best customer service! 05/09/2009
Is it really a surprise that T-mobile wins best customer service awards, year after year? Oil Prices: Will the rally continue? 05/08/2009
Most of the things that happened last year in the financial markets will probably be remembered for quite some time to come. Apart from the housing crises and global economic meltdown, the fluctuations in the Oil prices will take quite a prominent position as well. After starting the year (2008) at around 80 dollars, oil prices maintained their steady climb to reach up to as high as 147 dollars, and consequently broke whatever vain attempts the economy made to recover midyear. The rebate that people received from the government mostly just vanished into thin air! That is when the economy threw in the towel, and the conditions deteriorated very rapidly! The unemployment numbers started skyrocketing, and people just couldn’t afford travelling as much with gas prices hovering around 4 dollars. As a result, the demand for oil suddenly went south, and the oil prices came down much faster than they had gone up, touching a low of about 30 dollars!  Graph taken from www.opec.org
Netbook war: Clash of the titans! 05/07/2009
Netbooks seem to be the hottest pie in the market, and all the major players are cringing to get a piece of the market share. Though it’s currently dominated by Windows and Linux, several new players have announced the plans to launch their own version of netbooks and the OS very soon.  The netbook market was born when Asus released the first netbook in 2007 and it was a huge success right out of the door selling more than 1 million units by the end of 2007. While the Asus netbooks were mainly Linux based and caught Microsoft off the guard, Microsoft strategized quickly, and thanks to their efforts, more than 90% of Netbooks now being sold operate on Windows! However, this might soon change too. Since, the rumor mill is working with full speed these days, and “people familiar with the matter” are slipping up a lot of information, please take all this with a pinch of salt. Which OS would you like to see in your netbook Reference: Coinstar will be announcing its 1Q result after market close tomorrow. Most of the analysts seem to be very bullish about the stock at this point. While I am hoping the results will provide the stock price a further boost, I am actually feeling that it's getting a little overpriced now. I have held this stock for more than an year now, and it has provided me a relatively healthy return of about 25-30%. It might be time for me to let this one go! I think I will decide that after reading the call transcript tomorrow! Amazon Kindle DX: Hits and Misses 05/06/2009
First let me say this, the kind of coverage that kindle launch today received is just amazing! I wasn’t there in person, but I was busy refreshing my engadget live coverage page every few seconds to follow the keynote.  Kindle Hits: Next generation address book / contact list 05/05/2009
Given the meteoric rise in the demand for mobile data and text messaging, and the increasing popularity of social networking, and micro blogging sites, some more convergence is bound to happen in the next one or two years. We should start seeing some implementations may be as soon as this year, but the usability should continue to improve over the next few years.  Till now, the phone’s address book has been relatively boring and dry, unless ofcourse you take some efforts to click friends’ pics and individually assign them to each and everyone. Won’t it be awesome, if the phone’s address book could attempt to retrieve your contacts’ profile pics from social networking sites like facebook, linked-in and even twitter? (Depending on how and if you are connected to them) This way there won’t be any privacy issues either. If the contact is your friend, then the phone could try facebook/orkut etc. If you know the contact professionally, the phone could check hise/her profile on linkedin etc. To go one step further, it could even pull the status messages from twitter/facebook/linkedin.  I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I told you that Apple was the only reason that got me interested into the whole stock market. Seriously! For most part of my college, I didn’t really know what apple was all about. I had seen some white earphones, and some click wheel devices, but didn’t understand what all the rage was about. However, that’s when I saw the video of Steve Jobs introducing the Ipod Nano at a keynote in 2005, and watching the presentation was like experiencing a gadget heaven ( if infact there is one!). It’s not like there weren’t any good MP3 players in the market. There was just this whole new degree of coolness attached with it. I saved some money and ordered it soon after it was released. That’s when I truly became a diehard fan of Apple. (If I would have bought 5 Apple shares worth 250 dollars instead of buying an Apple Nano for about the same amount, I would now be sitting at 1250 dollars! But I digress…). Anyway, at that time I didn’t really follow the stock market that much. It wasn’t until 2007 that I took serious notice. The keynote where Steve Jobs introduced the Iphone left me mesmerized, just like millions of other Apple fans(A trip to gadget heaven all over again.) It is only then that I observed how Apple’s stock went from about 87 dollars all the way up to 192 dollars in a matter of few months. However, the stock rose so rapidly, it felt like an opportunity that I saw and still let it pass by. I guess it’s true...most of the stocks that go up, eventually come down. When Apple’s stock came down sharply towards the starting of 2008, the opportunity was just too good to resist. It wasn’t like conditions at Apple had deteriorated or something. Macs, Ipods and Iphone were simply blowing off all the numbers, and the company was unstoppable. I had no idea why the stock price had come down so sharply, but I guess I didn’t care…after all it was Apple! Within a matter of few days I bought my first book on stock market investing (Charles Schwab's New Guide to Financial Independence Completely Revised and Updated: Practical Solutions for Busy People) and figured out how to open an account for buying stocks. I didn’t waste even a moment, and loaded up about 50% of my portfolio with Apple’s stock. The first few days were simply amazing. Any free time I could find at office and home went at staring at the stock price go up and down. Watching money earn more money was new to me, and I was enthralled! May be, I put in money at just the perfect time. The stock went from 119 all the way up to 188 in a matter of months. I couldn’t believe earning money could be so simple. However, that’s when the whole market came crashing down. Apple’s stock was not only affected by the global economic crises, but also by rumors of Steve Jobs health. I didn’t want to sell Apple’s stock, mainly because the company was still doing terrific. The Iphone 3G was going to be released all over the world, and the Macs were doing great as well (Mac Air was pretty cool too). I thought there never was a better time to buy Apple’s shares, and at that time I didn’t really give in to the health rumors. Consequently, my portfolio went from green to deep down in the red. While, I had my doubts from time to time, I never actually thought of selling the stock. That’s when Steve Job’s decided to take a couple of months off because of health reasons. Since the analysts had already seen this coming, the stock didn’t go down as much as I had expected. In the last few months, Apple’s stock has regained its upward climb, and is charging ahead with some momentum. Whether the rally can be sustained remains to be seen.  Stock Analysis: I’ll break it down into positives and negatives for the stock, and then you can decide on your own. | Mehul JainFinancial market & technology enthusiast  CategoriesAll ArchivesJanuary 2010 Spread the word!
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