There's not much there yet, but Google's Initial Public Offering page is now online. This will be the place to go for official information when it's available.
(The best unofficial source is probably Google-IPO.com, which has the latest news and a discussion forum. If you're more interested in staying on top of general Google news -- the technical side of things and such -- check out the (unofficial) Google Weblog and the official Google Blog)
When the dot-com bubble exploded at the end of the 20th century, business writers began delving into history, particularly pointing at the South Sea Bubble, in which investors bid of the price of stock of the South Sea Company, despite it not really doing much of anything, and the Tulip Bubble, in which tulips first sold for astronomical sums and then, quite rapidly, for next to nothing.
The latter bubble has long been seen as a sign of how irrational investors can be, pouring their money into the latest craze even if no one could possibly think, for example, that one tulip bulb was worth 6,700 guilders when the average salary was 150 guilders.
But now a study done by a University of California professor and a Boston University graduate student says that investors might not have been that crazy after all. As Slate's Moneybox reports:
Tulip-bulb investors were neither mad nor delusional in 1636 and 1637. Rather, (Thompson) says, they were rationally responding, in finest efficient-market fashion, to overlooked changes in the rules of tulip investing.
The entire piece is slightly technical, but if you understand futures contracts and options, you can begin to see how Dutch tulip investors were acting in ways that made sense at least at the time, and perhaps even in hindsite.
Slate is running an interesting series by Henry Blodget on how to survive the stock market. Blodget, of course, is an interesting choice to write such articles; he was one of the bad guys in the recent stock market scandals, with the SEC saying he issued positive research reports on companies that he then disparaged in private e-mails. (Blodget and others settled the case without admitting or denying guilt, but agreeing to pay a large fine and be barred from working in the securities industry.)
In the series -- which so far consists of part one and part two -- the former research analyst approaches Wall Street as a private customer and has to face the assumptions that brokerages use to snag clients:
When gazing at a presentation book filled with beautiful pie charts, graphs, and tables created just for you, it is easy to forget that projected returns are just black marks on a page. Far more important are the assumptions and logic underlying them.
Those assumptions, Blogdet says, are based on a long-term stategy that is longer than most of us plan on investing.
n the financial markets, the "long term" is long. Over the past 200 years, U.S. stocks have, on average, returned approximately 10 percent a year (about 7 percent, after adjusting for inflation). For many of those 200 years, however, stocks have returned nothing—or worse. The fallow periods, moreover, have not just lasted months or years. They have lasted decades.
Go read the whole thing. It's good.
The news that Microsoft plans to pay $75 billion to its shareholders in the next four years excited the stockmarket Tuesday night and had commentators chattering this morning.
The Chicago Tribune's Bill Barnhart wrote about what this could mean for other companies:
Drake Johnstone, an analyst at Davenport & Co. who tracks Microsoft, said the company can easily afford the payout without impairing its balance sheet or hampering future growth.The news could have broader implications, he added.
"Certainly, this may put pressure on other companies that generate substantial free cash," Johnstone said, mentioning semiconductor-maker Intel as a prime example. "One would think that shareholders would start agitating."
Among those expected to benefit from the move are mutual fund companies such as Fidelity Investments and Pioneer Investment Management Inc. as well as retail merchants who like the Dec. 2 timing of the dividend disbursement.
It's also interesting to take a look back at Microsoft's decision to issue its first dividend ever, in January 2003. Back then, BusinessWeek wrote:
Gates and Ballmer are as paranoid about threats to their business as they come, and they've always rationalized the cash hoard, which now tops $43 billion, as a cushion against rivals. It gives Microsoft the ability to make multibillion investments and acquisitions without batting an eye.[snip]
So why the reversal? Mostly because the cash hoard simply got too big.
As might be expected, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has been all over the story. The latest news, including the results of a P-I poll on what Microsoft should do with its money, can be found at the paper's Microsoft blog.