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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (12463)	12/14/2006 2:48:37 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 220063

SI is my main source of information about the outside world. Plus, I supply information and ideas to it, which prompts people to supply me more, specific to my interests. SI was the best world source of information about Globalstar in the good old days. We knew things the management didn't know. Globalstar in the form of the assets is back from the dead, as Globalstar Inc, under new management, [Tony Navarra notwithstanding] but the financial interests of Globalstar LP are pretty much dead and buried though the senior note holders and other creditors got some shares in Globalstar Inc in exchange for their debt and Bernie Schwartz is still to pay class action litigants who are supposedly going to receive $20m less legal fees [about 30% I suppose]. Why Globalstar? Because it is the best investment I can come up with which fits my interests and personal situation [tax etc]. I don't bother looking at other excellent investments, such as cigarette companies, which don't fit my anti-Ted Kaczynski "in divine service, philanthropic investing for fun and profits" theories. For example, a lot of people give a lot of money "to Africa". I provide service via CDMA terrestrially or via space so they can join the cyberspace revolution. South Africa has a gateway built, still waiting to start service after years of sitting there, and a new constellation is needed to replace the failing one. I can make a load of money which can fund the next great thing while providing cyberphone services across the world. People like having phones available everywhere. If it's too risky and I lose the money, that's the philanthropic part. Most people are far too sensible and know that Globalstar will fail. They knew last time and they know this time. As you might have gathered, I'm persistent. QUALCOMM took 17 years from when I first thought of Fourier transforms to unjumble signals in a handset and 15 years from when I met a bloke from QUALCOMM at a social function and he told me that's what they were working on. But now QCOM is being sued for being an evil-doing monopolist in mobile cyberspace. I imagine Globalstar will take a similar time to be as significant. Give it a decade or two and people should start the anti-monopoly squawking, moaning about excess profits etc. Globalstar has already been going for a decade. QCOM was started in 1985 so they have been going twenty years. Why do I think Globalstar is a good investment? Because high quality voice minutes can be delivered anywhere for about 2c each [that's the construction cost]. If I add a cent for me, that's cheap enough that nearly anyone can afford to make a call if they can afford to buy a phone [or rent one] and they will only cost $100 when they are produced by the million. Meanwhile, the minutes are still at absurdly high prices, with stupid "bundled" plans [one doesn't buy gasoline by the month so I don't see why people should buy megabytes by the month - in voice services, megabytes and minutes are pretty much the same thing]. The phones are $800 or so. The constellation is full of holes, the photovoltaic wings are failing, the fuel tanks running down, competition is increasing. So there is room for improvement. But there are sufficient subscribers paying sufficient money to enable development to continue. Further capital can be raised to build and launch the next constellation. I can't imagine there is anyone more enthusiastic than me for Globalstar, so I'm the logical investor. There are many people working on it, and investing in it, but most people adopt the foolish mantra "keep emotions out of investing". Not me. My investments are deep in emotion. I think other people only fool themselves when they say they keep emotion out of investing. When their investment goes to zero or to da sky we can see how unemotional they really are. I don't think emotions are things from which we separate ourselves. They are like horses to be harnessed. They are the energy. I have been on the case since I was about 8, getting books out of the Carnegie Library in Onehunga on a Friday night, about rockets and science and stuff. I've been on the "communications in space" thing since my BP Oil days in 1987, which wouldn't seem a strong association to you, but my job involved more than just "how to make and sell diesel fuel" though that was my oddly super-specialized job in BP HQ for a couple of years. I'm not superstitious, but I probably should be. I found QCOM doing CDMA by a fluke and by crikey they were going to do Globalstar too. I put it down to preparation meets opportunity. They even started Wingcast, which is pretty much exactly what I was thinking of for BP Oil though that went bust - grrrr.... But seriously, I do think that what people can do with their smarty-pants brains is not far off surreal. We literally create our own reality. We take the four forces of the apocalypse [strong, weak, gravity and electromagnetic] and bend them to our will. We bootstrap into the cosmos. I think there is a teleological aspect to what's going on and humans are using DNA to create cyberspace sentience. Ted Kaczynski was right about what's going on. Ironically, most people, I'd guess about 90% or maybe 98%, agree with Ted, in deed, not word, and deed is what is real. Word is just description of what happened or what is going to happen and might or might not be true or accurate or intelligible and are not even able to describe possible reality - maths kicks in to take over some aspects where words fail. Most people don't send pipe bombs to people, but they send their agents in IRD or management consultants or whatever enforcers they choose. Sometimes they send predator drones or people with box-cutters. Or nukes. Iran is planning nukes. The USA used them. So, that's the short story on "why Globalstar?" I do think it's a good investment. So I do recommend it. But not with the grocery/rainy-day money. Mqurice

To: Ilaine who wrote (12463)	12/14/2006 3:26:08 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 220063

Separate post for this one: <TW, my dad, who is an old coot, is madder than hell that the smart guys who are managing his portfolio sold his ALB that he bought many moons ago. He opened up an E-Trade account with $30K for "mad money" and asked me to show him how to trade on-line. Might be signs of a market top, or maybe he just wants to show those young smart-alecks that he can do it himself. But, sad to say, he wanted me to teach him how to buy stocks that went up 50% in the last year. Asking the wrong person for that one. But I can see how there can be safety in numbers -- until you're the one left holding the bag. > Self-investing is much better than managed funds [for me and no doubt for many people who take the trouble and are able to learn to do it right]. The NZ government is introducing the "Maurice Winn Overseas Investment Tax Deemed Rate of Return Tax Law". They haven't quite called it that, but they should have. Self-investing is much more efficient than using mutual funds who leave little for the shareholders. The NZ government is trying to "level the playing field" as they call it. Rule number one = don't buy at a market top. I have just broken that one, and, unbelievably at the same share price [within 50c] for the same name [Globalstar] and for almost the same reasons. The Dow is at an all-time high. If the spare satellites crash in April when launched, then I will repeat history! Rule number two = don't buy shares which have just gone up 50%. Buy sheep and sell deer - that's the rule. Buying at a market top and a share that has gone up 50% is a double rule break. Which is of course a lot of fun. And success usually leads to success. It probably went up for good reason. Rule number three = traders are up against extremely talented people with very powerful computer systems, running cyberwars against each other with their programmes. Think Deep Blue vs Deep Junior vs Gary Kasparov vs all the rest. I'm pretty good at chess but even with luck, I am NOT going to last very long at all on that battlefield. While cyberinvesting computer PhD mathematician wars are not "winner takes all" because it takes time to run the process, wait for the time to sell, and buy and they all have limited capital and size limits options too - Warren Buffett simply can't invest $10bn into Globalstar [well, he could and I think should, but that's another story]. It's too little. Your father can bet against Warren Buffett there because he's little and under the radar. But the computers are after the small opportunities too. Computers can't figure out how long Globalstar's photovoltaic wings can fly and how many Indians will buy how many minutes. Your father can. The computers can just model the minds of the people investing in the markets - en masse, not individually. The computers can do things like a feint [a sell] to see what the response is to a slightly lower price, then predict what a bigger drop would do and see whether they can induce lesser computer war-gamers to sell in fright when they see the small drop, only to have the champion computer buy back in quantity at lower prices. I don't know that is happening, but it should be happening and I believe that like CDMA, it can be done. So I'm sure people are doing it, just like your father [using his fingers and thumbs rather than a computer and market models]. Umpty $trillion isn't swishing around in cyberspace with fingers and thumbs running it all. There are predators in there, just as in any wild area where survival of the fittest is a matter of survival. We didn't get the big bumps above our eyebrows because those without did better. But of course, there is always the gambling factor. If you get 100 monkeys, and get them to choose up or down [say by pushing one of two buttons], half of them will be right and half wrong. If you get the 50 who were right and give them another chance [rewarding them with a lollipop to keep them interested], you will get 25 get it right twice in a row. 12 will be right 3 times in a row. 6 right 4 times, 3 right 5 times, 2 right 6 times, and 1 right 7 times in a row. That monkey will think he is quite an investing wizard if he spent some time reading lots of stuff about companies, investing, trading, cups and handles and double tops and my favourite, head and shoulders. If you get 1000 monkeys to take part, you will have one very smart monkey driving around in a Lexus, telling other monkeys how to do it and what his next recommendation is [after he has bought it so that others boost his share price and enable him to sell to the last sucker in]. Personally, I don't like the monkey world. Especially if PhDs with computers and monkey models are hunting monkeys. Then there are the brokers who take a cut for the house. My furry arms with prehensile fingers look too much like a gibbon for my liking. I don't want to be hunted. On the other hand, I have wondered whether I could hunt PhDs with computers. Or at least lesser monkeys. I think those hunters are performing a valuable service. They are reducing volatility for a start, which is a good thing. They have to compete with each other to succeed at buying at the bottom - if they wait for a slightly lower price, the smarter computer will grab it before it gets so low. Same at the top. Speculators in general produce the same valuable service, putting their necks on the line. But also, apart from volatility smoothing, the computer modellers are defining nothing less than the function of a mass mind. They are making the market's mind work in a rational way, just like our own have to run smoothly, with the right neurons firing at the right time and not all going nuts in epileptic fits. When the monkeys panic, and try to create a depression, the computers will see a great opportunity and compete to profit from the mass mindlessness. Perhaps. Maybe your father will be a lucky monkey. As long as he keeps his emotions in the game too, he will know he's alive while he plays with the other monkeys and mathematicians armed with megahorsepower computers. Mqurice