Google Trends

Google Trends may be an interesting tool for investors.

1. It allows investors to gather data on a company that’s fresher than the last quarter’s earnings release.  This can be helpful in turnaround situations such as Aeropostale (ARO) and Cafepress (PRSS).
2. Having leading earnings indicators can be helpful for manufacturing companies (e.g. RGR, SWHC) where there is not much data on consumer demand due to fluctuating inventory at the retail and distributor level.
3. In rare cases where fraud is suspected, Google Trends may provide some indications about actual revenues.

Here is an example of Google Trends in action:

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Enterprise storage will become more commoditized (EMC, NTAP, VMEM)

History has a pattern of mass-market products eventually decimating low-volume high-end products.  The cost savings from economies of scale overpower the benefits of specialized solutions.  This has happened to word processing (e.g. Wang Labs), mainframes, high-end CPUs (SGI versus Intel), post production systems (ADSK, ADBE, AVID, etc.), film/video cameras, and many other industries.

Back in Dec 2012, I wrote a post on enterprise storage.  Now, I’m starting to be more confident that enterprise storage will indeed become increasingly commoditized.

New long and short positions Dec 2013

New positions I have initiated without doing thorough research.  (I’m not kidding when I say that I haven’t done much research…)