Digital River (DRIV) and payment processing (V, MA, GOOG, EBAY)

Digital River is a company that offers:

1. Payment processing.  For (very) small software vendors such as myself, Digital River competes with Paypal (owned by Ebay), Google Checkout (now Google Commerce), and others.
2. E-commerce / online store.  This relates to automatically letting the user download the product once payment is received, product updates, etc. etc.  I use E-Junkie for this service.

Digital River has a lot of unhappy customers because it was upselling its customers’ customers.  The software vendors are unhappy since they can’t opt out of the upselling (nor do they profit from it) and some of their customers are turned off by the upselling practices.  Digital River doesn’t seem to understand its software vendors and has a terrible reputation among them (Google around… here is one example).  I will never do business with Digital River as a software vendor.  And I wouldn’t go long the stock.

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Baja Mining (TSX:BAJ)… dodged that bullet

I wrote a post on Baja Mining on Sept 8, 2011 but never published it because I didn’t really understand the mysterious cost inflation of the project.  Around a year later, the stock has gotten crushed as it has revealed that its mine is not as economic as originally expected.  Here is my original post:

Quick notes on Monument Mining (CVE:MMY)

In brief, Monument Mining goes into the “too hard” pile due to title issues that I don’t understand and a CEO I don’t trust.

Premier Exhibitions (PRXI) update

Premier Exhibitions closed up 18% after earnings.  (I have a very small short position so I have a very small loss.)  I believe that the two most important factors for the gain are as follows:

1. Premier reported a very profitable quarter.  They announced a profit of $2.76M for the quarter.
2. They announced that they have a non-binding letter of intent to buy the Titanic artifacts for $189M.

On closer examination of these two points, I am not worried.  (But again, I may be a little biased.)

Technology trends (many of which are overrated)

Many media articles constantly talk about how smartphones and tablets will eclipse the desktop PC and that everything will move to the cloud.  I believe that these beliefs are erroneous.

ARM, Intel, and AMD in the (micro)server space

There is talk about ARM making inroads into the server market.  I don’t believe that this will be a huge threat to Intel.

Film/TV production/technology stocks

Film/video stocks would definitely be in my circle of competence as I have some experience in the field from interning at post production facilities (e.g. Optix).  I also have a degree (in Radio and Television Arts), but I wouldn’t take anybody with a piece of paper too seriously.  Experience matters a lot more (you can’t get it in school) and many professionals in high-end film/video have no relevant degree (nor do they need one).

In brief, I dislike stocks related to film/video technology and film/video production.  There is a curious absence of shareholder profits.  For this reason, I usually do not research these stocks very much as they usually aren’t good longs.