It is Sunday, overcast, and autumn cool in Hong Kong. The windows and balcony doors are wide open, plants happy, birds chirping, fans spinning and Gathering of the Shamen - native flute ensemble sounds are reverberating off the walls. I am happy, as if all the world's affairs are going my way. They are not, but I am still, as I am always.
I have had a few continuous hours in Hong Kong after a series of trips with my wife and had just spent a few quality hours with my broadband service installed not long ago - the experience is like reliving the first encounter with Internet or with that first girlfriend, just magic, again and again, and before I forget, again once more. The streaming video from BBC is good, especially if kept on in the small window whilst I am doing investment reading. The background music from mp3.com is fine for while I am answering e-mails. The mPlayer.com aggregated on-line game lobbies is super for some fast pulse Unreal Tournament against a dozen individuals intent on killing you, again and again.
I am working with a client to investigate the launching of such services on airplanes. Brave new world. They got the dollars and I got the time.
Now, about our Softbank. It is by far the least of our problems, as we must define problems as bad stuff still ahead of us as opposed to disasters already happened. However we may have had our different opinions on this thread, we must all agree that the worst of 9984 is behind us already, maybe not in percentage terms, but mathematically and certainly in absolute terms. The ability of 9984 to do damage to our portfolios is thankfully now limited, unless 9984 starts buying our other portfolio companies using money borrowed from our brokers.
A sip of my home brewed coffee, as I ran out of Starbucks. I have discovered a bag of coffee sent to me a while back along with some new stock certificates by The Coffee Station, a private equity deal that has entered chapter 11 protection program. Good coffee, and hopefully the absolute highest priced coffee - about the price of 1.5 Audi TT roadsters - I will ever drink in this life time.
I am thinking that Softbank is simultaneously the most expensive entry ticket I have ever paid for the joy of participating on a discussion thread and is also still my most profitable, in absolute number terms, speculation.
Once again I find my friends and relatives in the US and Asia strongly, imaginatively and yet again strongly disagreeing on the direction of, no, not 9984, but the market, The US Market, the only one that matters at this point.
The ones in Asia, many from the US, are running for shelter to cash as quickly as they can, the ones in US are hesitating, and then buying. We out here in Asia are amazed and think to ourselves - maybe there is magic after all, maybe they are right back in the US, maybe Christmas will be joyful. But we have collectively all retreated to cash and equivalent and looking from outside through the window at the party that simply is amazing. I saw my mom buying more Lucent even after she promised not to make a move. Every boy needs a mom. Girls too.
Images dance around in our heads - Shanghai 1948, Vietnam 1972, Iraq 1991, Thailand 1997, Hong Kong 1998, and Softbank 2000. We are scared, fascinated, tempted ... |
