Talk About the Pot Calling the Kettle Black

From the Financial Times:

Activist investor Jeff Ubben urges ‘fix’ for Silicon Valley

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Corporate compensation and inurement is out of whack. I agree.

But it is ironic, to say the least, that a guy who comes out of an industry in which the top 10 managers each earn more than $1b a year - doing nothing but taking levered bets on other peoples money - has the gall to criticize the $100m salary of the guy who managed to build a globally ubiquitious business increasing its shareholder wealth from $36b to $367b company in less than ten years.


I say pox on both their homes. 


Addendum:
Institutional Investors Top 25 Earning Hedge Fund Managers in 2013.

The Insurance Scam

All insurance companies do this.

"bait and switch"

They hook you with attractive first year (or six month) rates and then they start cranking up the renewal each year (generally between 10%-30%).

The scam is based on the assumption that customers are either too lazy to change or can't remember last year's rate. 

To sink their teeth into you are far as they can, they try to get you signed-up for auto-renewal at the front-end.

The practice is probably worst with house insurance. I don't really know, because I pay for my home owners each year outside the mortgage escrow account.

Note: And it is not just Insurance that is the scam. Cable, internet, phone. They're all scams predicated on "bait and switch" and lazy consumers. The basic assumption is that if they make it so hard to switch, then they'll keep their annuity stream. And they are right. 

Lots of Sturm und Drang but Not Much To Show For It

Naturally I'm kicking myself for not hanging tough on my high beta shorts. Actually I'm not really. I wish I had them. They would have been killing it. But I had to cover because you just don't know how high a market can go.

What it does is confirm how close I am to making the big score.  If I keep it up, one day I am going to nail it and make the mullah.

It feels as though the market has been going nuts, but the averages are only off a little bit (actually the S&P is still up over a 1% for the year, Naz off 2.2%). Let's hope it doesn't implode upon itself because although there has been plenty of noise thusfar the damage hasn't been all the bad (unless you own the momo guys).

Season's Change

Here's hoping.