Vodafone dividend from Verizon, Microsoft buying Activision, and what I am doing now

Vodafone and the possible dividend from Verizon

This is a fantastic article about the potential special dividend Vodafone might be getting from Verizon.  The article talks about the relationship between the two companies, how big the dividend could be, whether it could become a regular thing, and whether there could be a possible Vodafone/Verizon merger or if Verizon could buy out Vodafone’s 45% stake in them.

What if Microsoft Bought Activision Blizzard?

This article talks about some scenarios that could possibly happen in the video game industry if Microsoft were to buy Activision Blizzard.

What I am doing now

I am currently reading Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies, one of the free books that Csinvesting put on his site, so it will be a few more days until I will be putting up some more valuations.

I have also been learning and applying some of the different valuation techniques from the Manual of Ideas to some of the stocks I have already written about, and will post some of them after I finish reading Valuation.

I can’t wait to start diving into some more annual reports and finding another company to evaluate, as this book is so far kind of a let down. Valuation is a good book so far, about a quarter of the way through it, but a lot of the stuff I have already learned from Damodaran’s free valuation course, Bruce Greenwald’s books, and from various other books I have read.  So far up to where I have read in the book, it is almost exclusively talking about how to do DCF valuations, which I don’t do, with a little bit of strategy mixed in, and how companies with high ROIC are better investments than lower ROIC companies.

Until next time.

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Minority Report, Batman tech, and a few good articles on stocks I have written about

Minority Report and Batman Tech

This first article is kind of scary and the people who developed it must not have watched Minority Report.  Clip is 10 minutes.

There is a new program that cops are using under the name PredPol, that is supposed to predict crime.

Very scary in my opinion due to where it could lead.  It will only be a matter of time until something exactly like what was used in Minority Report is being used.

The article also talks about other tech that cops could be using in the near future.  The one that caught my eye is “A ShotSpotter system uses microphones positioned around a city to detect gunshots and triangulate their location within 40 to 50 feet. A human at ShotSpotter’s headquarters confirms if it’s a gunshot and alerts the police. The system starts at $40,000 for every square mile of coverage.”  Sounds like this from Batman.  The clip is just over a minute long and I think they should heed Fox’s words from the movie.

Stock articles and valuations on stocks I own from others.

The first stock article talks about how Vodafone might be getting another big dividend from Verizon and what Vodafone might do if they get the dividend.

The second stock article goes over three value stocks and talks about their growth characteristics.  One of the stocks he talks about is Dole.  While I generally agree with his assessment that Dole could be worth upwards of $16 if there is some kind of spin off or asset sale, I think he is downplaying the risk from the debt which I talked about in my article on Dole.

He also talks about Forest Oil and NVR.  Both look like opportunities that should be researched.  Here is an amazing analysis on NVR from 2001 that I originally got from csinvesting’s site.  I also recommend reading the comments section here for more on NVR from 2001.  Read his analysis carefully and the discussion in the comments section.  The way he thinks about things, his reasonings for buying, and how he researches are to be learned from.

The third article talks about Fresh Del Monte, Dole, and Chiquita.  In my opinion this is a very good analysis and includes some if the reasons I will look to buy FDP when the stock price drops.  Here is my article comparing the three companies.