Ultimi Barbarorum

iPad: forget the old people — it’s a chick magnet

January 29, 2010 · 44 Comments

The iPad: Bloggers hate it. Investors hate it — AAPL is down 4% in the cold light of the day after. Fake Steve Jobs doesn’t seem to like it much. Even Andrew Sullivan is down on it.

What do all these people have in common? They’re all (mostly) men. What are their complaints? The lack of multitasking; no Adobe Flash; no front-facing camera; it’s just a glorified iPod Touch; where’s HDMI? it doesn’t fit in a conceptual box — it’s not a smartphone, it’s not a netbook; 64 gig NAND Flash isn’t enough, why not 128? Where can I put it? Do I have to carry it under my arm?

Many of these complaints may be justified, but are missing the wood for the trees; we are men. We are nerds and geeks, we love specs, and compete for mastery over each other by comparing the wattage of our hi-fi systems. But we are only half the population. The women I have asked about the iPad (admittedly not a statistically relevant sample) seem to be viscerally enthusiastic.

Bento, you will be surprised to find I totally agree with your post below, even as I am extremely vexed you got yours out in front of mine on the subject and are thus getting all the glory. The iPad is as you say “a complex computer simplified”, and ideal for baby boomers like our parents. I was going to put it slightly differently however, and say it is a complex computer, turned into an internet appliance. Yes, it is to the internet as a blender is to food and as such it will attract the old and decrepit, it is true. But that’s a bit of a sideshow, if you don’t mind me saying so. As an appliance, iPad has the potential to tap a much greater prize, that vast hard-to-reach segment of consumer tech: busy, empowered women.

Men don’t like appliances. We want things that can do lots of different things, that we can tweak and fiddle with, and then argue with each other about which one is better. Women aren’t like this, and because of this I have a feeling that it’s women who actually determine the eventual winners in consumer tech; I believe but can’t prove that Nokia, for instance, came out on top in mobile phones in the 1990s and early noughties because it was the brand of phone women liked the most. It worked. It was simple. It didn’t attempt to wow you with numbers and specs. Nokias had great battery life so it didn’t matter if you forgot to charge it the day before. Nokias were nice to look at, in a non-flashy way. Women can accept and love mobile phones, a way to communicate, much more readily than they do PCs, for instance, which most males have used for solitary gaming or porn. That’s changing now pretty rapidly, but is still probably why almost 1.5 billion mobile handsets will be sold this year, and only 200 million PCs.

Women will like the simpleness of the iPad not because, like an increasingly creaky boomer, they cannot put up with computing complexity; they can. They just don’t see why they should have to. They can’t be arsed. They multitask in their heads; they don’t need it on their screens as well. How many gigahertzes it has is not important — does it do the job it is supposed to? And what is an Adobe Flash anyway? Embarrassingly, I am not sure I know myself. Women do not worship at the altar of technology.

Mrs Baruch often forgets to charge her mobile phone . This often drives Baruch up the wall, especially when he needs to get in touch with her. She knows it needs charging, but trusts that it will last that bit longer when she needs it. Why shouldn’t it? And really, she’s right, it should. The month-long standby time of iPad will mean this is a problem much less often. The large iPad screen should be good for sharing, for doing things together with the kids, showing things she finds interesting to all her friends over lunch, simultaneously, rather than having each of them hunch over an iPhone one by one. Through tied media content, she can buy fashion magazines full of glossy adverts and miniscule amounts of irrelevant content, and keep them on hand for instant recall while shopping. She doesn’t have to worry about carrying the iPad under her arm — she has a handbag it will fit into rather neatly.

For developers, this will be great – iPad has the potential of opening key new demographics, and will keep them working on the Apple OS platform to the exclusion of Android, Windows, and everything else. That’s the key for Apple here, I think. iPad doesn’t need to be a massive 50 million unit hit product for it to work (one hears of a production run of 5 million this year FWIW). It just goes to cement the edifice of Apple’s mobile internet platform dominance even more firmly — something we have written about before.

The other, highly important, meaning of the iPad is that it opens a wholly new battleground; it is the first new category we have seen in tech for some time. It is effectively a smartphone with gigantism– largely all its innards are shared with the iPhone — and as such it is finally signalling the collision of the PC with the mobile phone, with first round to the mobile phone. We are likely to see an explosion of me-too products from PC and smartphone makers, using Intel Atom or ARM-based processors, and a swathe of different yet similar sizes and form factors are likely to emerge. On the platform side, Windows, Windows Mobile 7, Chrome, Android and other Linux-based OS are all going to be vying for supremacy. It’s going to be a very exciting time, and I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen.

→ 44 CommentsCategories: Lens grinding · Philosophising

The real reason why the iPad will be a success

January 28, 2010 · 48 Comments

Those who are dubious about the iPad’s impending success (and I suspect that you are one of them, Baruch) are of course in danger or repeating history (qv iPod, iPhone). I have no intention of replicating all the arguments pro- and con the iPad, so I will limit myself to just one wholly original observation as to why I think the doubters once again are not getting it:

1. The iPhone was a success from the start, but it really became a ubiquitous device when it proved competent at a whole range of tasks beyond Apple’s original marketing copy. (It was just “a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device,” remember?) Now games rule on the iPhone, and as many parents will attest, the iPhone’s one true calling is as breakthrough child pacification device.

A similar role awaits the iPad. No, not for children; rather, look to the burgeoning end of the demographic curve: baby boomers.

I know many baby boomers who are intimidated by computers. Plenty are not, but a great many spend far too much time wrestling with viruses and drivers, wondering what a DLL is, and generally not knowing the difference between their RAM and a hard disk — all just so they can read emails and check their bank account online. Some boomers have sired offspring who gladly help them with remote tech support sessions, but many others have not, and suffer for it. The reason for all this misery is simple: Computers are still too complex for those not prepared to give them their undivided attention. That’s even the case for Macs.

Not so with the iPhone. I’ve seen that thing understood within minutes by 2 year-olds and 84 year-olds. It does one thing at a time. Your finger is the cursor. There is no need to tap things twice before stuff happens. You are allowed to turn it off with the power button.

But the iPhone isn’t perfect for baby boomers. The screen and text are too small for aging eyes, the keyboard too cramped for confident typing, making it unusable for even basic office productivity tasks.

Enter the larger, faster iPad. It’s a complex computer simplified, which makes it a perfect fit for those whose remaining life is too short to spend it defragging drives. Add the keyboard dock, and the iPad is versatile enough to be a baby boomer’s only computer. The only thing it won’t let them do is videoconference with their grandchildren — which is an omission I hope they fix in next year’s version — but on the other hand, at $500 this much is forgiven.

My prediction: Within 2 years you will be reading articles describing how it was obvious — with hindsight — that the iPad would be a hit with aging baby boomers. But who needs hindsight when you have Ultimi Barbarorum?

→ 48 CommentsCategories: Lens grinding · Philosophising

Google: Scientist

January 13, 2010 · 9 Comments

Baruch,

Symbolism is never lost on the Chinese, who are the masters of signaling, and thus there was some great poignancy to Google’s A new approach to China being posted to the blogspot.com domain, which is blocked in its entirety by China’s censorious government. This proved quite a sassy way to illustrate a point, before even starting on the merits of the case. Those outside China didn’t even notice. Everyone inside China, including the officials, had to turn on their VPN to read it.

Now that the deed is done so publicly, I don’t imagine either side will back down, and nobody expects Google.cn’s redacted search service to last much longer, with perhaps a further punitive ban on google.com for the sheer audacity of this insubordination. But already today the blogosphere erupted in competing narratives explaining Google’s autodefenestration from Chinese search, and not all were wholly credulous of Google’s stated motives.

Among the cynics, the arguments ran thus:

- Google is misrepresenting its decision: It was a face-saving, kudos-generating way to exit a failing business (though without explaining why profitably capturing 31% of the search market in China should prompt shutting down).

- Google is making a mistake: No business in their right mind would purposely anger the masters of such a lucrative market, so this has to be a stupid tactical mistake. (The stated presumption here is that Google cannot be ethical, or it would not have entered China in the first place, so this fiasco must be a very bad business decision merely masquerading as a moral decision.)

Among the partisans:

- Google was pressured into it by Hillary Clinton, thinks Rao Jin, the founder of the China’s patriotic Anti-CNN forum. (I suspect a failure of the imagination on the part of Rao — clearly, he is projecting onto the US how things are done in China.)

And tomorrow, expect the official mouthpieces’ take, which I predict will involve far more references to the peddling of pornography than to the free market of ideas.

I, Bento, take Google’s explanation at face value, however. And I intend to restate the narrative in terms that will be familiar to long-time readers of Ultimi Barbarorum: All along, Google’s approach to China has been that of the scientist: There was a testable hypothesis, an experiment, and a conclusion based on that experiment. And today, we saw the publication of the results — the hypothesis proved false.

Specifically, the hypothesis, as formulated by Google during 2005: The internet in China will become freer in the coming years, and Google’s presence in China will help strengthen this process. Many believed and hoped this might be the case — the Olympics were approaching, China was opening up, officials exuded reasonableness.

The experiment, initiated in January 2006: Enter the Chinese search market, try to improve the system from within by collaborating with the regime, and see if China’s internet gains freedoms over time.

The evidence: Over the past few years, a progressively stricter program of shutting down those Chinese sites that do not comply with demands for censorship and surveillance. The progressive blocking of all popular foreign sites that allow uncensored anonymous communication, including several Google properties: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, WordPress, IMDB, Google Docs, URL-shortening services… And, what Google cites as the final straw, recent industrial-strength malware attacks aimed at Gmail-using Chinese dissidents.

The conclusion: Google’s collaboration was not making things better; things were getting worse. They admit they were wrong! There may have been a financial return on its China investment, but the civic return proved disappointing.

Faced with this realization, Google could have done nothing. But that way lies death by a thousand cuts as web property after web property gets axed. How soon before Gmail gets blocked? Google Maps? Earth? Picasa? Google Reader? Instead, Google cleanly terminated the experiment: There will be no more collaboration with the regime. Now China must throw them out if it wants to save face domestically — albeit at the price of losing face internationally.

As Spinozists, this is a proud day for us. Google has posted that placard declaring China’s government Ultimi Barbarorum in a public place. Gone for them is the queasiness of having to placate a regime that believes calling for free elections deserves 11 years in jail for subverting party state power. I’m betting it’s a relief.

A postscript: I was surprised that several Shanghai-based European VCs and businessmen I follow on Twitter were among the cynics, berating Google for not conforming to Chinese/Asian business practices based on saving face, consensus and relationship-building, instead reverting to an “American” ultimatum. But these views come from individuals who have already made their peace with China’s political system, and whose business models and reputation do not depend on the unfettered flow of information. Perhaps some of them are unwittingly using the occasion to signal their own reliability as partners in China: “Look at us — we’d never consider doing what Google just did.” Google may have burned its financial bridges, but they are burning their moral bridges, making them the Stupid Cartesians of this sorry episode, Baruch.

→ 9 CommentsCategories: Barbarians · Fellow Collegiant · Stupid Cartesians · What Would Spinoza Do?

Dirty, rotten scoundrels

January 1, 2010 · 10 Comments

Felix is far, far too kind to the telcos of the world, when he writes in an otherwise excellent post (picked up by Krugman), of the lack of decent network coverage in NYC:

If I were an AT&T shareholder, then, I’m not sure how much money I’d want my company to spend on beefing up 3G wireless in New York and San Francisco, especially when there’s little obvious return on such an enormous investment. Sometimes you make more money with cheaper unhappy customers than with more expensive happy customers. And this could well be one of those times.

Firstly, let Baruch share his amusement at being cited as an expert in the physics of radio networks; he is at heart a poncy arts student, and is more likely to think an Erlang is a seminal German film director than the measure of network whatever-it-is that it is.

Secondly, and more importantly, western telco operators are in fact hapless, scrooge-like con-men, who have consistently misled their investors and customers about the extent of their next generation network investment. They have scrimped on 3G spending for years, preferring instead to provide investors improbably fat, 10% plus, free cash flow yields, and 5-8% dividend yields. As of this point, 10 years after getting the spectrum, they have still not properly built out their 3G capacity; and now the chickens, in the form of iPhones, have come home to roost. Keep reading →

→ 10 CommentsCategories: Barbarians · Lens grinding

Phase Transitions and the Googlephone

December 20, 2009 · 8 Comments

Baruch keeps thinking about Apple and what it’s done to mobile phones. Call him obsessed if you will, but it is also his job to think about it, and there’s good money to be made if you get it right. You may recall his last post on the subject, that Apple has become wholly dominant in the mobile internet and smartphone space. What’s struck him recently is how few of the intelligent analysts and counterparties he talks to actually agree with him on what seems even to generalists utterly obvious. Lots of them still think it’s a good idea to push other smartphone stocks, like PALM or RIMM, which if Baruch is right is a very efficient way to lose money, inferior only to piling it up in big mound and setting light to it.

Why people can think this way was a mystery to Baruch, until he made the realisation that the phase transition in the handset market is not yet evident to them; they still think the handset market resides in Mediocristan, as opposed to the Extremistan regime it has most likely become. They haven’t been reading their Taleb. Keep reading →

→ 8 CommentsCategories: Fellow Collegiant · Lens grinding

More on the trading tax

December 11, 2009 · 18 Comments

Fellow collegiants Jay and the incomparable Cassandra carp in the comments of the previous post about, well, many things, but mainly about Baruch’s distrust of a trading tax. Their key points in favour of the tax are, I think:

the financial sector is too big and needs to be shrunk and simplified, which is also Krugman’s key idea. A trading tax would be a step in the right direction
there is a way to distinguish, mostly to do with timeframe, between “speculation” and “investment”. Generally two legs, sorry, speculation is Bad, leveraged speculation in highly liquid markets even worse and responsible for lots of the financial crisis. However, ”informed and active” investment is Good; a trading tax would restrain one and leave the other unrestrained.

If I’ve misunderstood something or left something out, let me know.

Firstly, I am very interested as to how we can possibly know how big the financial sector should be. Jay and Cassandra might answer “I don’t know exactly, but I just know it’s too big”. They might argue we expect too much of them; the sizing of any particularly important industry should be above anyone’s pay grade, let alone the responsibility of a couple of commenters on an obscure 3rd rate econo-blog.

Yes, well but that’s the point. We’ve largely done away with the type of industrial planning that pulled western economies out of the devastation of WW2, the period of MITI in Italy, the Marshall Plan, the last time we had an economic regime where people actually decided how big certain industrial sectors should be. That type of dirigisme worked in conditions of relative simplicity, where there were fewer moving parts to an economy, trade was restricted to controllable flows between large trading blocs, and exchange rates were stable. For most of the postwar period the financial sector of most economies was small, and mainly boring. In the UK, for example, it was the preserve of a class of people drawn from the chinless children of an addled aristocracy. They really did wear bowler hats. Their tasks were simple enough for them to perform even after polishing off a litre of claret every lunchtime and leaving the office at 4pm.

I would argue the explosion in financial innovation and the size of the financial sector coincided with the increase in the overall complexity of the global economy from the early1980s on. Bretton Woods had broken down; there were extreme fluctuations in interest rates and costs of capital; the rise of Japan and other emerging markets were destabilising settled industries in Europe and the US; new technologies were creating new working practices and business models. I am not saying a supersized financial system was the cause of this increase in dynamism and complexity. But what if it was a response?

Looking at where we are since 2000, we have a global economy which has made a step change again in complexity and dynamism. Things have globalised to the extent that concepts of imports and exports have lost their meaning. Our economic system is optimised, primed to work at an extremely high level of just-in-time delivery. New business models pop into existence overnight, and destroy old ones — they demand and create capital and wealth at an unprecedented rate. And it’s largely great for everyone; most of us are richer. Literally billions of people have seen their living standards improve this decade. It’s been an exciting time to be alive.

This is an unpopular thought, but here goes: what if the current financial system is actually rightsized for our economy? Sized specifically to provide the greater degree of economic dynamism we have come to expect, and on a much more massive geographic scale? Might there not be a price to pay in shrinking it?

Now let’s try look at the second debating point of my commenters and distinguish between “speculation” and “investment.” I still don’t understand the difference. But I don’t think anyone does; I am not sure there is a qualitative difference. Cassandra introduces the concept of (allocative) “efficiency” in the sense (correct me if I am wrong) that the hardworking “investor” with his longer-term timeframe performs a useful societal function in allocating capital to where it is needed. Short term specs, on this reading, do not.

I think this is wrong; speculative traders probably have as much or more allocative efficiency as the investment-minded ones. They have more money, for one thing, but more importantly even the highest frequency High Frequency Trader is actually tracking the portfolio decisions made by actual investors. Even Raj, at the height of his powers, was effectively allocating capital to companies which were showing better earnings. He just had the earnings release a bit before everyone else. Most short term specs, whether technical, quant or flow-driven, are really piggy-backing on investors; they basically buy the same stocks and amplify their decisions. Qualitatively, as I say, there’s no real difference, except they are either lazier or smarter than fundamentalists like me. Probably both; I bet they get home before 7pm. Is there a difference in holding period? Generally yes. But today I entered and exited a position in a tech stock in the space of 40 minutes. In fact it was a mistake. But I don’t feel bad about it. Do you think I should?

Cassie thinks it was the leveraged specs who blew us up in the crisis. No way. It was the leveraged investors. Those guys buying subprime weren’t in it for the quick buck; they were going to hold them for as long as they could borrow overnight at 5% and earn 7% on the bonds, ie as long as the then-current interest rate regime was going to last. Holding periods were measured in years. In the end were barely able to trade the stuff. That was the problem. As Jay puts it, “in less liquid markets, shareholders act more like owners” — they acted like owners, all right, and look where it got them, and us.

Look, a smallish trading tax may not make all that much of a difference, really. Financial markets will survive, and a tax will likely end up making a good few investment bankers richer than they would have been, when they come up with a way of avoiding it. There’s actually a trading tax in place in the UK already. It’s called Stamp Duty. I don’t know how much it is because I have never paid it on any of my UK trades, we use something called CFDs to avoid it. Everyone does this except low volume retail investors: Stamp Duty has thus merely become another way the little guy gets screwed. I am not sure this was the intention of its inventors.

But if you think discouraging speculation in liquid equity or forex markets is going to somehow prevent another crisis, think again. The root causes of our difficulties lay in a combination of too much easy money feeding a boom in illiquid debt securities, held for investment. A trading tax would do, and would have done, nothing to prevent any of those conditions from prevailing again.

→ 18 CommentsCategories: Fellow Collegiant · Lens grinding · What Would Spinoza Do?

Compromising my values every day, for you.

December 7, 2009 · 11 Comments

Right now active investors and speculators are about as popular as genital herpes. This is unfortunate because I, Baruch, am one of them.

Examples of this anti-speculator animus are everywhere. Paul Krugman has long had in mind the creation of a special level of hell for “Masters of the Universe”, as he calls us, not kindly, in his excellent Return of Depression Economics. He thinks I’m “socially useless”, if not dangerous, and wants to have a special tax levied on me. Alice Schroeder, author of the latest Warren Buffett biography (how clever of her to realise that another biography of Warren Buffet was what the world needed!), has a very maximalist interpretation of securities law. She believes it’s impossible “to make a living on Wall Street without compromising your values,” and goes so far to suggest that when it comes to investing, “It’s hard to make a living legally.” Felix Salmon, sworn enemy of active investing, links to a largely incomprehensible blogpost from profs Fama and French which suggests investing in mutual funds is like buying an index fund but you pay more fees, ie it is a bad idea and thus “alpha-peddlers,” people like me, are snake oil salesmen. AllAboutAlpha (HT Abnormal) put it best last month in an apposite post about the emergence “of a very quiet yet growing subset of individuals who believe that alpha still exists, but that getting it isn’t, dare they say, legal.”

Summing it all up, the charge sheet goes as follows:

institutional investors like me are unable to deliver things we claim we are able to deliver, viz outperformance, alpha, whatever you want to call it.
As such my activities make no contribution to society and perform no useful function. In fact we are positively dangerous, and our widespread use of illegal information makes us unethical to boot.
Society would benefit much more if retirement savings were invested in index funds, which contain all the upside of equity investing but at lower cost, and meanwhile the rest of us who foolishly insist on trading for a living should be taxed.

A lot of this stems from the traditional malice and envy of those who “review” for those who “do”. We can’t do much about that. But there are intellectual assumptions behind some of it which are worthwhile tackling. In my opinion it all boils down to the hoary chestnut of the strength, or weakness, of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. The critics above share a belief in a strong form of EMH, which precludes investors from making returns which persist, and drives the less scrupulous to cheat in order to fulful their promises. Alice Schroeder puts it like this:

There is only so much alpha — that excess return above a baseline average — to be had in an efficient market. The incentive to create some artificial alpha one way or another is very high. Those who bend the rules successfully post good numbers, which adds to pressure on other Wall Streeters to push the gray boundaries of legal information flow.

What I do NOT propose to do here is get into the statistical nitty gritty of whether a strong or weak EMH is provable or improvable by positive hedge- or mutual fund returns, or their absence. I don’t quite know how to do it, and it’s deathly boring anyway. What we can do instead is weigh the intellectual coherence of the charge sheet. Is a financial system re-engineered to discourage speculation a good thing? Would it work? What would it be like?

This is what Baruch thinks: these objections to active investing are not at all coherent: firstly, we really don’t want a truly efficient market — it would be a disaster. Secondly, any restraint on speculation would endanger proper investment. The two are inextricably intertwined. Thirdly, index investing is not a truly scaleable strategy; if all of us do it, it will stop working. Let’s go through each of these points in turn.

Keep reading →

→ 11 CommentsCategories: Lens grinding · Philosophising · What Would Spinoza Do?

$1.3 million lost in blatant but failed attempt at insider trading?

November 16, 2009 · 8 Comments

The blogosphere made the catch! The Interweb protects the rest of us from evil doers! The world is ablaze with the news that prior to the 3Com buyout announced by HP last week, there was an unusual amount of volume in the $5 november call in 3Com. We’re all pretty sensitised to insider trading at the moment, and so this looks as clear cut and beautiful a case of evil-doers caught with their hands in the till as we are likely to see in our time on earth. As Tyler Durden puts it:

This is so blatant it is sufficiently stupid that even the SEC will presumably catch the perpetrator. Here’s to hoping the trader ends up being Galleon’s Raj Raj buying options from his E-Trade account while on bail. Of course, we fully expect any prosecution case against the perpetrator to fall apart at the seams courtesy of a completely inept legal team at the SEC and the Justice Department.

Oh really? Before the Zero Hedge folks get the pitchforks out, let’s stop and think a bit. Let us be splitters, and not lumpers, and we might see that would be quite reasonable for the SEC and DoJ not to prosecute anyone at all. Using the principle of Occam’s Razor, they may well tend to conclude that no insider trading took place. At least not in the options, the underlying or common may be a different matter.

Let’s get technical here. In the case of the unusual volume in the 3Com options, you should know that incredibly unusual volumes in options is not terribly unusual, if you follow me. It is in fact the case that the volume of a particular option resides, as Taleb would have it, in Extremistan. It is subject to many many days of low and limited trading, and very few days of extremely high volume, orders of magnitude above the norm, where most of the total volume traded in the life of the option takes place. This occurs most notably in the final month of the option’s life. This is so because people are more likely to buy a particular option when its intrinsic value (the portion of the option price described by the difference of the strike and underlying prices and its volatility) is highest in proportion to its time value and its total value. This is when you get the most “bang for your buck”, as Baruch puts it — roughly 2 weeks before expiry, the option is in its prime, near its most efficient for hedging and speculative purposes.

That’s what people use options for, mostly. Hedging, and speculating. Options are excellent as a way of profiting moderately, or reducing losses, in conditions of risk and uncertainty. As a way of playing a dead cert, however, options are pretty crap. Had someone concrete knowledge of the 3Com deal, it would be far more efficient to buy the stock. The most important of the “Greeks”, as options dudes call the panoply of statistics surrounding options, is “delta”, the rate of change in the value of the option relative to the value of the shares (it’s a function of volatility, time to expiry, a whole lot of stuff, don’t trouble your head), and this is always less than one. 3Com options buyers made far less money on the takeover by buying options than they would if they had bought the stock.

Assume the 4,000 Novs and the same in Dec calls that day came from a single buyer. S/he bought an economic interest in 800,000 COMS underlying. Purchased at 65c and 85c, both calls popped post the announcement to $2.50. Hooray, a profit of $1.4m. But trading the underlying, buying at $5.611 would have given $1.52m profit. The other thing favouring the underlying as the vessel for insider speculation was that it was so much more liquid than the options. Buying 800,000 COMS would have been a drop in the lake of the volume that day, which saw 22m shares change hands. It would also have been much, much less conspicuous, and we wouldn’t even have a story. These were pretty stupid inside traders, indeed, who not just left money on the table by playing the options, but drew extra attention to themselves by doing so.

Though of course, if you want to insist on the inside trading thesis, you can always posit insiders with limited funds who couldn’t afford 800k underlying shares. So the DoJ in its inquiries should be able to exclude institutional investors. Or at least competent ones. But come on; is it the simplest explanation? Or is it actually a stretch?

Perhaps it was insider trading, but we have to posit incompetent and poor insiders for the thesis to work, and while possible this seems less likely than other explanations. A less complex interpretation for the COMS trade is that shorts, not long insiders betting on a takeover, got spooked and decided to hedge. Over 10m shares of COMS were shorted at the end of October, a proportion which might have remained stable into the takeover. Rumours fly about all the time, and 3Com has been known to be a takeover target since like forever. A 20% to 50% gap move in a big short can seriously spoil your day, if not your year, and a call position is an excellent way to hedge, to take the sting out, to make an existential 50% loss into, say, a merely unpleasant 10% one. When COMS has cancelled a roadshow, you’re seeing weirdly high volumes and a breakout, it’s actually pretty prudent for a short to hedge a bit with calls against a takeover.

This sort of trade, moreover, happens all the time. Just this Friday, PALM November $12.50 option volume went through the roof; never mind a measly 4,000 contracts, they traded 21,000 on the day. The occasion was the the ridiculous suggestion, no doubt assiduously spread by inscrupulous holders eager to get out with some honour, that Nokia would be taking them over that weekend. The volume can probably be explained by the fact that PALM is probably the most shorted tech stock around at the moment, and more likely than not it was this lot, not numpty spanners who actually believed this crap, who bought most of the calls to cover their arses just in case. It would have been evidence of insider trading, of course, had there been an actual takeover at the end of it, and no doubt we would all be tut-tutting about the state of the markets today and how it’s all stacked against the little guy.

As it is, there wasn’t. At least there hasn’t been yet. And the owners of the options, who bought at 65c (they last traded at 23c) have until friday for the takeover to happen, after which the options will expire worthless with PALM at its current price. That will be $1.3m down the tubes. If that was money for speculation, it would have been painful for all but the biggest fund. If it was merely shorts paying up for insurance against getting their faces ripped off it would be more than bearable. You tend not, after all, really want your hedge to be making you money.

“To speculate,” the prophet said, “is human. But to hedge is divine.” The game is not just stacked against the little guy, it’s stacked against everyone, which is why some cheat. At least the little guy probably has a day job. It’s not wrong to be aware of what is probably widespread insider trading in stockmarkets today. But it’s probably very important to aim for the real evil-doers, the ones who pay executives to “get the quarter”, who know exactly what the company is going to print to the decimal point, and who have covered the tracks of their entry in a way specifically designed not to be noticed. We should get these guys, they suck, and Baruch can only applaud the FBI for the way they have handled the Galleon case. But we do need to stop and think before we throw premature accusations that may get innocent hedgers into hot water and don’t help anyone to make the game fairer.

→ 8 CommentsCategories: Fellow Collegiant · Lens grinding · What Would Spinoza Do?

An article wherein it is explained why everything written so far about Apple’s iPhone launch in China is beside the point.

November 14, 2009 · 5 Comments

Baruch, you know how hard I, Bento, try to refrain from commenting about Apple on this blog, but it appalls me how it’s been several weeks since the iPhone launched in China and still none of you pundits has caught onto Apple’s strategy here, not even accidentally through sheer volume of keyboard combinatorics. I think I shall help along the process a bit.

Apple is not selling iPhones in China because it wants to sell iPhones in China, but because it wants to sell iPhones to the Chinese. That’s a big difference. I’ll explain.

The Chinese have long had access to iPhones. They are for sale at stalls in every cybermall and market in every Chinese city, and come in two varieties: The most expensive ones (at around 6000 RMB in Shanghai for a 16GB 3GS, or 880 USD, depending on your haggling skills) come directly from Hong Kong, where the factory-unlocked model is available from the Apple store for around 4800 RMB. That’s a nice arbitrage play by the stall owner, and everyone is happy. The cheaper model, at around 5000 RMB for a 16GB 3GS, was originally bought locked in the US or Europe, and has been unlocked by the stall owner’s hacker-genius cousin using 3rd-party software. This kind of iPhone is cheaper, because you are on your own when it comes to upgrades and iTunes compatibility.

The distribution model is extensive and robust, and in fact most Chinese buy their mobile phones from stalls like this. There are no iPhone shortages, as prices fluctuate to meet demand. The received wisdom is that around 2 million iPhones are in the Chinese wild; I’ve personally seen a good many of them here in Shanghai, where they are much in evidence among the eliterati. Still, this is a minuscule portion of the 700 million odd phones in use in China, of which a small but growing portion is smartphones.

What can Apple do to grow the number of iPhones on mainland China? Short of lowering prices in Hong Kong (not going to happen) it can do two things: Increase awareness of the iPhone via advertising, and bring the benefits of a Chinese-language App Store to Chinese iPhone owners.

To do either of these, you sort of need to sell the product locally first, though. Apple can’t really go round putting up banners in Chinese tier-3 cities urging consumers to head for the local iPhone aftermarket. Unfortunately, an ill-conceived Chinese law forbids selling mobile phones containing wifi functionality (unless it is the wifi variety developed in China that nobody uses) so if Apple wants to sell iPhones in China, it has to first cripple them.

Why anyone would buy a wifiless iPhone beats me, especially if it is more expensive than the arbitraged unlocked Hong Kong model. Apple seems to think the same thing, because it is not revenue-sharing with China Unicom, the local vendor, but selling the iPhones outright to them. It is up to China Unicom to flog them in China.

And that’s what China Unicom is trying to do. China Unicom stores all have iPhone banners up; I’ve passed several China Unicom road shows stopping by Shanghai extolling the iPhone. The iPhone is being talked about widely. But so is the fact that the China Unicom iPhone is crippled — the Chinese are sophisticated consumers; forget this at your own peril.

The upshot: anecdotal reports tell of aftermarket prices increasing for Hong Kong iPhones these past few weeks, as demand increased. Clearly, the advertising is working, even if China Unicom’s sales of wifiless iPhones are anaemic.

There is a certain poetic justice to the whole spectacle: China Unicom, a state-owned company, forced to sell inferior iPhones in a porous market due to stupid laws promulgated by the Chinese state, spending on advertising that mainly benefits the aftermarket for Hong Kong iPhones.

China Unicom will also be a useful partner for Apple to secure a Chinese iTunes App store. It isn’t there yet, in part because this kind of venture inside China requires the involvement of censors (and you thought Apple was an overbearing app gatekeeper…) but as per China Unicom’s own admission, the process is underway. Once such an app store exists, of course, anyone with a Chinese credit card and an iPhone will be able to partake, whether or not they bought the iPhone from China Unicom.

But I believe Apple is not just doing this to get advertising and an app store into China, important as this is for growing sales to the Chinese. I believe the intention is to pressure for a change to the law, simply by making the the absurdity of the situation so plainly visible. This is speculation on my part, but there is a precedent: Egypt.

In November 2008, the iPhone came to Egypt, but without GPS. That’s because there was a cold-war era Egyptian law on the books that banned civilians from possessing GPS devices. The law was unenforceable, with plenty of foreign-bought GPS-enabled devices in the hands of tourists and archaeologists and wealthy Egyptians. The only people suffering were the local vendors, which couldn’t sell anything with GPS in it. Apple garnered some criticism with this move, for kowtowing to authoritarian rule. But the GPS-less iPhone also put the spotlight on the law, making many people aware for the first time that Egypt was one of only three countries in the world where GPS use by civilians was banned. Egypt’s regime hates that sort of loss of face, and by April 2009, the ban was lifted. Egyptian iPhones these days come with GPS, but the win is for everyone in Egypt.

Is China up next? It’s now in China Unicom’s interests to have the anti-wifi law changed, so that they can sell a larger portion of the iPhones ending up in Chinese hands. That kind of incentive makes me optimistic. Apple has already cracked the Chinese market for wifi-enabled phones — via Hong Kong. Now China Unicom needs to do the same — by getting its owner to change the law.

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