The Oxford Club publishes an investment newsletter but I'm pretty sure they make far more money pushing financial advisory info products than they do actually investing into the trades they talk up. I subscribed for a year, found it to be a "pay for more ads" kind of upsell machine and discontinued.

They still send me their sales letters. I guess the hardest thing to face was that at one point in time I actually responded to this stuff.

Anyhoo...today's sales letter is a 19 page opus How to Claim Your First "Gas Rebate" Check on July 15 because....

"Some smart Canadians have begun collecting checks for a little-known government-guaranteed gas rebate program. And they'll continue receiving payments until 2011. Now you can join them..."


Continue reading "Demystifying "Government Guaranteed Gas Rebate Cheques" "

Can't go into this too much, but was on the phone yesterday with a friend of mine who is COO of a tech outfit in New York state. Been in business around 5 years, has customers, revenues, cashflow, etc.

They had an operating line-of-credit with Silicon Valley Bank, who in December took somewhere north of 230 million in TARP funds. TARP funds were handed out to "get the credit markets flowing again" after they completely seized up in late '08. This company has not used up a lot of their credit line, but they do use it. They've never missed a payment.

This week they've been informed by SVB that their credit-line is no more. It's been converted into a note and they've been given 10 months to pay it off.

After I got off the phone I wondered if perhaps they were registered Republicans

Following on our explanation of why we do not offer whois masking here at easyDNS, we note tonight that Registrar Namecheap has been sued"over cybersquatting claims for a domain name registered under the NameCheap whois privacy services".


As we outlined in our original article: Whoever is listed as the Registrant in the domain's whois record, effectively owns the domain. If you own the domain, you get all the responsibilities for it. That's why most Registrars simply drop the whois mask at the slightest legal speedbump. Namecheap didn't, and so now it cuts the other way they get the sharp end of the legal stick being poked at the domain.


Technology lawyer Eric Goldman in his analysis of the matter under the subheading Why This is a Troubling Ruling noted:

Read literally, every proxy service is exposed to potential contributory ACPA liability for every domain name it services. I can’t imagine proxy service providers will be excited about that liability exposure, and some may choose to exit the business.

Some certainly should. Any of the proxy providers who basically viewed whois masking as an easy business which basically pulls in money for doing nothing (which is more or less how I view it, I'm sorry, but that's only my opinion) - should take this as their signal that the party's over and exit the business.


As I've noted before, in it's current implmentation: whois privacy doesn't actually protect the underlying registrant's privacy (because most proxy providers will drop the mask at the first sign of trouble) and if they don't, the proxy providers are exposing themselves to inordinate risk. Coupled with the fact that the whois mask puts the underlying registrant's rights to the name in question and the whole thing is just one big mess waiting to blow up.

CNBC has always been somewhat of a joke to people like me: contrarians, goldbugs, bears and sundry "nutjobs". We get no respect but it's hard to believe that people like this are highly paid market commentators




This happened on CNBC yesterday, when Jeff Macke started interspersing absolute non-sequiturs between a litany of tangential rants and insults. Clusterstock reported today that Macke is under a lot of stress, currently negotiating his contract with CNBC. Word is, after yesterday's stunt, he may be on his way out the door.

As Clusterstock observed:

"He couldn't carry his own show, he doesn't have any obvious alternatives and, more importantly, his latest breakdown may have torpedoed any chance to get hired somewhere else."

In my role as a failed musician and absentee CEO, I'm often asked to do celebrity endorsements: hair restoration, hair removal, breath mints, etc. I rarely do unless it's a product or service I actually believe in.

So when Mike Swanson of Wall Street Window emailed me to tell me that tomorrow at noon he will open the gates of his Power Investor service to 500 new members, I took the time to forward the advance access link to a few friends of mine who were waiting for their next chance to sign up, and now I'm posting it here.

I've subscribed to endless newsletters and advisory services over the years and I rank them using three key criteria:

Number 1) Do they subject me to a never-ending barrage of intelligence-insulting sales letters attempting to upsell me to yet more products and services (Yes Agora publishing, I'm looking squarely at you guys - give it a rest)

Number 2) Are they merely a "black-box" service for "hot stock picks" expecting me to merely parrot their positions and mindlessly follow their recommendations?

Number 3) Do they claim some kind of Priests of the Temple exalted position in relation to the markets? Some special insight only they can comprehend and relate to us peons?

I prefer, and stick with services where the answer is "no" to all three of the above. They are few and far in between. Wall Street Window is one of those services. Even though as an investor, I gravitate toward "value investing" rather than technical analysis, it was Mike Swanson who helped me understand the validity of certain aspects of technical analysis. And it was from following Swanson and reading the books he recommended that finally helped me understand one key discipline any investor must understand about "the market": Our job as investors is to understand what the market is telling us about right now as opposed to what most of us actually do without even realizing it: try to impose our beliefs about what the market should do, onto it

I have been a 5-year subscriber to Wall Street Window, and I don't even make the same trades Swanson does. I just like the market analysis. I like that Swanson is a teacher and not a "stock-picker". I find his acumen in analyzing the secular trends and the macro forces versus the mass psychology that actually moves markets invaluable.

So tomorrow, noon, he's taking on 500 new subscribers, when he does this he usually maxes out those slots within a few hours. But you can get in today by following this link. In the interests of full disclosure: yes, I'm also an affiliate of WSW and will be compensated for any signups activated through the above link. I'm comfortable telling you that because this is a service I use and one that I'm happy with. (As part of his service he his "Stock Market Mastery" course is, in itself, worth the price of admission.)

Marc Faber of GloomBoomDoom included the daily dirtnap in his May commentary that contained the following description of government:

The gold bugs realize that government is nothing more than a grandiose, malignant, homeowners' association and that any collective of do-gooders tends to do themselves in if given enough time.

Amen to that.

We've turned up .tel registrations now that they've gone realtime and the initial registry implosion has stabilized. You may have noticed a distinct lack of urgency from us to light a fire under your keester to go register your name under .tel right now before somebody else takes it.


As we outlined previously, we find the hoopla around new top-level domain rollouts both tiresome and for the majority of domain holders, unnecessary. So we have a policy here that we generally a) don't launch the new TLD until it goes realtime and is considered "stable" and b) we don't try to whip our users into a hysterical frenzy ahead of time to register their domains under every new TLD.


The fact is, in the future there will be more top-level-domains, a lot more. So many of them that between obvious typos of one's domain, one's core domain or domains, and one's local geographic top-level domain, it will be a fool's errand to try and register your name under every new TLD that comes along just for the sake of "defending your mark".

The other problem is, .tel is severely crippled

While we do find .tel slightly unique in the realm of new TLDs because it actually exists for a reason: to cultivate internet telephony usage. This isn't some country-code ccTLD hiring out their namespace under some made-up reason (.me, .tv, .ws, et al) to draw in foreign registrants, it's an actual TLD geared toward SIP, VOIP and telephony and exists for that reason.


But .tel isn't doing anything under the space that can't be done under any other domain name with the appropriate use of SRV or NAPTR records and to actually make matters worse, you are forced to use their nameservers and your domains are under an Acceptable Use Policy which forces you to use the name for certain things (basically as a "contact" switch rather than a "content" page).


While the objective may be laudable: giving a TLD an actual raison d'etre beyond "register your name before somebody else does!", we don't like that you're forced to use their nameservers and don't have total latitude with your .tel domains. It runs contrary to the ethos behind easyDNS which was, and still is to drive a stake through the heart of lock-in. (It's not like we force everybody who registers a domain through us to use our nameservers because we're an outsourced DNS host, in fact we even allow our members to mirror their DNS from our nameservers from outside DNS hosts).



As such we have not become directly accredited under .tel, instead we're supporting them through our OpenSRS reseller tag, but the functionality is transparent.


Most of you reading this probably have no compelling reason to register your name under .tel unless 1) you like the TLD or 2) you have operations in the IP telephony space that would make sense segmenting under a .tel name and 3) you don't mind the crippled functionality and lock-in.

This morning on my way into the office, I was listening to CIUT, as I often do. Nena Baker was on Alternative Radio talking up her book The Body Toxic, and she cited the case of an herbacide called Atrazine. It seems to seriously mess up some frogs in lab tests, and from many indications is highly toxic. The chemical is already banned in European Union, where Syngenta, the company that manufactures it, is based.

It got me thinking. How on earth can anybody be expected to keep on top of this stuff? The next thought was "only a government could undertake it", and then I thought, as I normally do when I arrive at this type of conclusion: private companies can do anything a government bureaucracy can do, only better, faster, cheaper, more effectively.

Sure enough, by this time Baker was describing the inadequacies of the EPA's efforts at getting noxious chemicals banned. So if there were private companies who were conducting these watchdog functions under contract to agricultural businesses and consumer stakeholders, they'd do a much better job at shedding light on these problems, wouldn't they?

My free market uber alles mentality seemed vindicated. But....
Continue reading "Did the free markets fail us in this meltdown? "

Many of you may not know that we have an ongoing member feedback survey where we ask for your thoughts and impressions of using easyDNS.


We try to make it as unobtrusive as possible, and for each respondent we make a $5 donation to a charity of your choosing (World Wildlife Fund, Children's Wish Fund or Unicef).


We've recoded the survey using eSurveys.com. Feel free to give us your thoughts by taking it today.

easyDNS Member Survey

You may be surprised to learn that I often listen to Democracy Now! on CIUT on my way into the office in the morning, because a lot of "business types" think DN is "left leaning" and "socialist". The thing I find so lonely out there, is that there is no coherent "grouping" for people who oppose the abomination that passes for "capitalism" outside of "the left".

If you think invading Iraq was a bad idea, you're left leaning.

If you think bailing out all these zombie banks will make things worse, you're a pinko.

In the height of Orwellian irony, it is now "in the interests" of our free market economy to become a socialist state, while the real leftists and socialists out there are gleefully pointing at this economic mess and gloating "See! We told you Capitalism doesn't work!"

As I say tirelessly (and perhaps pointlessly) here time and again:


What passes for "Capitalism", isn't
&
"Free markets", aren't.


As I hear the chorus growing louder that the financial crisis was caused by rampant deregulation of the financial industry, the rush is on to regulate it. But here's the thing: this mess was caused by government interference in various financial markets and asset classes going back a lot of years.
Continue reading "Did "de-regulation" really cause this mess? I think not..."

With gold nearing that psychological $1000/oz mark once again with a full head of steam, the USD dollar looking very toppy and a bond collapse all but assured now, gold investors and even mainstream media are occasionally talking about "gold standards". With the likes of Peter Schiff and Marc Faber getting some respect in the mainstream media, joe-six pack is hearing phrases like "return to a gold backed currency" in passing over CNBC et al.

It's not being discussed seriously, it's just that the sound money pundits are actually able to get the words out of their mouths now without being ripped off camera by a grappling hook or laughed out of the studio by expert pundits who have the sense to stay more "on message".

I have seen numerous figures bandied about for what a return to a gold back USD would do to the price of gold, but they vary widely as they are dependent on the actual amount of reserves the US has on-hand and what the size of the money supply will be if they ever tried it. I've seen numbers from $5,000/oz to $100,000/oz and everything in between.

Goldbugs get excited at the prospect of this. Fortunately, I don't see it happening, ever but if it did, they are overlooking something obvious:

Any return to a gold backed dollar will be accompanied by wholesale gold confiscations and a ban on private ownership of gold

This is such a no-brainer that I have to shake my head when I see goldbugs gleefully predicting an inevitable return to a gold standard that will make them wealthier than Warren Buffett overnight. It won't. They'll be paupers because the day before it happens Uncle Sam will come calling and take away their gold, all of it. Same goes for all the G7 nations as the mining companies will be gleefully nationalized and private gold ownership banned. Anybody who squirrels away a private stash will find themselves unable to sell any except on the black market, which would be the same thing as money laundering: you'll see pennies on the dolllar at best.

In the lead-up to this, expect to see some hysteria casting gold owners as the new villains of the economic collapse: last year it was short sellers, someday it'll be those nasty goldbugs. There will be "windfall taxes" on sales of bullion and mining shares. You had the sense to buy Kinross at $5/share? Well when you sell it at $500 watch as some obscene slice like 90% of it will be taxed away because "you didn't really earn it" and you're damaging the economy!

I'm sure there will be some exceptions and loopholes that will enable the likes of Dick Cheney to sit on a private horde of bullion somewhere, but for the peons like us, forget it.

My first post of the year. I did mention briefly last year that I had gone long on oil. That position is of course, taking some heat. I started going long at about $46/barrel oil and it still had lot farther to fall. There is an old adage "The graveyards of Wall St. are littered with the skulls of those who were too early". They were probably margined out the hilt.

Fortunately, I'm not. So I just wait, well actually I've been buying more oil all the way down. I find this a lot different than piling into, say Nortel in 1999 somewhere north of $1000 and averaging down all the way to, maybe today where they hit .12 on their bankruptcy filing. Oil isn't going to file Chapter 7. There is a finite amount of oil in the world, and we use more and more of it almost literally every day. So softness aside, I see the price going nowhere but up from here. Keep in mind there's a reason I call this channel "This is not investment advice", because it's not. Do your own due diligence, remove cellophane before eating, etc.

But oil is too cheap. David Skarica points out in his newsletter that the gold-to-oil ratio is the highest it's been in decades, and the last two times it approached anywhere near these levels were 1994 and 1998, shortly before multi-year bull runs in the commodity.


Continue reading "Don't be surprised to see the Saudis embrace "Peak Oil""

As the auto maker bailout drama unfolds, with the Senate now rejecting the latest attempt at one. Bush is suggesting the rescue proceed under TARP, which is widely slagged as the Trash Assets Recovery Program, or more simply "Cash-For-Trash".

The obvious remark aside, that this may be extremely fitting for the North American auto industry, even as a guy opposed to bailouts on principle I still can't wrap my head around why exactly the Big 3 are having such a hard time securing this bailout when the big banks who created this mess have since had second and third helpings of bailout cash of a higher order of magnitude NO QUESTIONS ASKED. It should be noted that if any of the Big 3 fail the US taxpayers will be on the hook for their pension obligations anyway - and said obligations (north of 30 billion for Chrysler alone IIRC) exceed the total amount being asked for in the package.

How could a US "commoner" not look at this and think there's an obvious double standard between blue collar and white collars here? The auto-execs where lambasted publicly for jetting into Washington on private aircraft, while Lehman's number #2 man still had a domestic staff of 29 (whom he's recently had to let go) and Merrill's top man was asking their Board (with a straight face) for a $40 million bonus this year?

The solution for all this is obvious. In Ben Bernanke's now famous anti-deflation speech where he inferred the Fed could drop money from helicopters to stave off Deflation (earning him the nickname "Helicopter Ben") we find a way out that solves everybody's problems:

The US Treasury could purchase 25 to 30 billion dollars worth of cars from the Big 3 and then drop them from helicopters. This would save the automakers and create enough work rebuilding infrastructure to goose the economy back into buy-now-pay-later mode.

I'm surprised this idea hasn't been floated yet.

/Toronto tPHwire/ - In a move presaged by Amex and GMAC, The Parkdale Hookers, or TPH have made the requisite filings with the SEC to become a bank holding company. If approved, the Toronto based indie rock group will then request an estimated 3 billion dollars in recapitalization under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.



Although an unorthodox move for an unsigned rock group, "the financial crisis has forced everybody to consider their options", a spokesperson for the group told Forbes. The power-pop group known for its three chord guitar rock oriented anthems reported no revenues in fiscal 2008, have no retained earnings, no assets, and no owner's equity on its balance sheet. But the band is estimated to be counterparty to over 7 trillion dollars of derivatives, credit default swaps and leveraged futures.

"Allowing this band to fail will put the entire financial system at risk", the spokesperson continued, "we may wind up under martial law".

Under the band's proposal the group would be recapitalized, and the treasury would take a direct equity stake in the group's forthcoming record, due for release in Q1 09, tentatively titled "Sleazebags in Suits".

For more information, see http://www.parkdalehookers.ca

We get asked this a alot: Why do you guys not offer whois masking or whois contact privacy?


The brief background on this is: whenever you register a domain name, your contact details are published in a publicly visible database called "whois", where your contact details are instantly harvested by spambots and marketers who proceed to email and postal mail you marketing offers, deceptive "domain slamming" attempts, ads for dubious products, and perhaps even telemarketing calls.


Nobody likes that, so over the years people started resorting to various tactics to protect themselves from the deluge of crap that inevitably comes with simply registering a domain name: throwaway email addresses in whois records, fake postal addresses, fake phone numbers, etc. The problem is, Registrants are obligated under their various end user agreements to provide true and accurate data (not doing so is grounds to lose one's domain), and the US even passed legislation making it unlawful to use fake contact details in a domain name registration.


Our response to this, years ago, was MyPrivacy.ca which protects your email address from being harvested from your whois records, but leaves your other data intact. We didn't see it as a revenue opportunity, in fact we made it free and opened it up to competing registrars, many of whom started recommending it to their customers. We just wanted to drive a stake through the heart of the whois spammers.


It wasn't long though, before many registrars took it a step further and created the concept of "whois masking" or "contact privacy", where all of the domain-holder contact details would be masked from the public whois. Of course, this was heralded as a "value-add" and most outfits charge extra for it.


In today's long overdue post, we're finally revealing why so-called "whois privacy" puts your domains at risk, costs you more and doesn't really protect your privacy.

Continue reading "Why we do not offer Whois Privacy at easyDNS"