Blog

  • Activist shareholders, Tobin’s q = Marris v

    Investors generally over-react to good and bad times. Equity values are now increasing at a decreasing rate across the indexes as investors anticipate corporate earnings and begin to read the signals; many investors extrapolate past share price performance, and using an moving average or charting the trends in the share price are de rigueur in…

  • Who Owns our Personal Data?

     Who Owns our Personal Data? Personal information and data stored in the cloud have an inherent high ‘tradable’ value – they facilitate the discovery of patterns.  We trust the providers and processors and distributors of the data, they retrieve our personal data and they can and do use it. Our data is now a tradable…

  • Memo to Ms Ahrendts

    MEMO Re: Apple Inc: Play not to lose: Minimax strategy Dear Ms Ahrendts Congratulations on your recent appointment. We have been commenting on Apple for a number of years in this Blog, and from the perspective of game theory. You should challenge everything about the data – market share figures, consumer loyalty and the source…

  • Drifting into a debt-recession trap

    The despondency that has attached itself to the financial crisis is ‘taking shadows from the reality of things’. Dante would not approve. Europe is drifting into a prolonged recession as policy-makers worry about inflationary expectations and competitive devaluations. Households hope to be delivered from this agonizing crisis.  Are there solutions? The following is a grand…

  • Fiscal cliff and Kantian equilibrium

    The fiscal cliff is the Nash Equilibrium [NE]..it is the best the Democrats can do given the reaction of the Republicans; they will debate big ticket items on spending asnd taxes but both know that neitherparty wants to go there  –  but it will happen if there is no compromise, according to game theory. The…

  • Spin-0 for Apple in a French defence: from iPod to iNext or acquire a telco?

    In our previous Blog entries, on the smartphone and tablet market, we referred to the market as a game, G. In G a new phenomenon has occurred, created by a convergence of technology coupled with rational consumers asking: is the iPhone5 = a mini iPad or is the new iPad mini = iPhone6? This line…

  • i-Lag or Byte of the Apple

    The smartphone has evolved from new gadget to just another gadget – it has become commoditized.  The Razr i will indeed allow you to switch quickly between the web, play games, send texts and take photos. Will iOS 6 disappoint as consumers realize that it begins to slow down your iPad2 and is backward incompatible…

  • Economic Damage & Spoiled Markets

    Markets are spoiled when policymakers place greater worth on the value of a penny saved than on a pound spent on doing something. Consumers prefer to save instead of spend, as each fears to spoil the chance of getting a better price later. With a declining demand at a time of positive technology expectations, economic…

  • Greek crisis is a sub-game

    Europe is in the long game of a United States of Europe and the Greek crisis is one sub-game in the time continuum, but the sub-game to watch in order to define a Nash Equilibrium is a Euro currency crisis…such a crisis has not happended although the Euro at May 2012 is devaluing against Sterling and US dollar.  I had…

  • Simon en-cycling to SMIN!

    In less than 10 years the smartphone game has eclipsed its humble beginnings of combining a PDA with a phone. The App-ing Generation T who communicate and share across technologies can have an ice cream sandwich in their operating system or a mountain lion or faster graphics performance with ivy. Poorer consumers across the developing…