Best Prices for Books in CH

http://www.billigbuch.ch/

The so called "Preisbindung" for books has been dropped in Switzerland (or so I heard). billigbuch.ch lets your compare book prices across all Swiss online sites.

You might still go and compare with amazon.de too, thought.

Indices Performances

Below is a selection of world indices and their performances for the last few years. Performance for 2007 (not annualized) is for the closing price as of 2007-04-03/4 (depending on the timezone).

No		Index	Ccy		2007	2006	2005	2004	2003
1.		BOVESPA	BRL	%	4.08	32.93	27.71	17.81	97.33
2.		SMI	CHF	%	3.05	15.85	33.21	3.74	18.51
3.		SPI	CHF	%	4.60	20.67	35.61	6.89	22.06
4.		Shanghai Composit	CNY	%	23.03	130.43	-8.33	-15.40	10.27
5.		Shenzhen Composit	CNY	%	57.04	97.53	-11.74	-16.59	-2.60
6.		DAX	EUR	%	6.80	21.98	27.07	7.34	37.08
7.		DJ EURO STOXX 50	EUR	%	3.07	15.12	21.28	6.90	15.68
8.		FTSE 100	GBP	%	2.34	10.71	16.71	7.54	13.62
9.		Hang Seng	HKD	%	1.23	34.20	4.54	13.15	34.92
10.		Mumbai Sensex	INR	%	-7.25	46.70	42.33	13.08	72.89
11.		Nikkei 225	JPY	%	1.85	6.92	40.24	7.61	24.45
12.		KOSPI 100 Index	KRW	%	3.56	4.52	52.51	9.25	31.57
13.		Bangkok SE Set Ind	THB	%	2.02	-4.75	6.83	-13.48	116.60
14.		DJ Industr Average	USD	%	0.38	16.29	-0.61	3.15	25.32
15.		EM	USD	%	2.68	29.18	30.31	22.45	51.59
16.		NASDAQ Comb Comp	USD	%	1.45	9.52	1.37	8.59	50.01
17.		S&P 500	USD	%	1.37	13.62	3.00	8.99	26.38
18.		The World Index	USD	%	3.29	17.95	7.56	12.84	30.81

A table with the absolute index numbers is located here.

Security Analysis

Security Analysis is a famous book by Benjamin Graham first published in 1934. Benjamin Graham is the so called father of "Value Investment" and teacher and mentor of Warren Buffett.

Another book by Graham, The Intelligent Investor, is even more famous. According to Kilpatrick in "Of Permanent Value":

Buffett has said, "I read the first edition of this book early in 1950, when I was nineteen. I thought then that it was by far the best book about investing ever written. I still think it is.

Graham's Intelligent Investor is a popular version of Security Analysis, the classic study written by Graham and Columbia Professor David L. Dodd.

Nevertheless, it has been said, Buffett has red Security Analysis (and especially the 2nd edition from 1940) many times over.

I have heard him say, that he has read it from cover to cover more than a dozen times. He has read the other editions as well.

Security Analysis: The Classic 1940 Edition


The book plays also a major role (next to the bone scanner) in the movie The Pursuit of Happyness.











However, according to Wikipedia:

The film prominently showed the 5th edition of Security Analysis — black jacket, white, gold, red fonts — as the one that Dean Witter Reynolds required 60 unpaid interns to study for six months. The intern portion of the story is circa 1981; the 5th edition of Security Analysis was published in 1988; ergo, the film production prop department used the wrong edition.

The Pursuit Of Happyness


Oh yeah, and just for the record, the movie IS cheesy:)


Here is the real Chris Gardner (not so cheesy):
Chris Gardner - Excerpt from "The Pursuit of Happyness"

The Pursuit of Happyness Part 1

The Pursuit of Happyness Part 2

Warren Buffett on Video

Update 2007-03-31:

Unfortunately you now have to pay for the videos with Buffett and Charlie Rose, even thought they are well worth the price. Nevertheless the last video below of the speech to students is still available, which actually is just as good:

Warren Buffett MBA Talk

---------

An absolute must watch!

Google Video: Charlie Rose - Warren Buffett: The Man - Part One in a Three Part Series

Charlie Rose - Warren Buffett: The Business - Part Two in a Three Part Series
Charlie Rose - Warren Buffett: The Gift - Part Three in a Three Part Series

Last not least: Warren Buffett MBA Talk (Buffett starts at 00:03:16)

BILANZ iPod Shuffle

Pay CHF 140 for an anual BILANZ magazin subscription and get an iPod Shuffle for the Swiss retail price of CHF 119 for free (till the end of the year).

Actually BILANZ has sometimes excellent background stories.

Here is the link: http://www.bilanz.ch/ipod/

This Is China! Weblog

This Is China! Weblog
Business, IT outsourcing, culture... lot's of interesting and personal episodes from a foreigner doing consulting work in China.

Apple's Music Business

Apple makes 42% of its revenue in the music business.

Revenue source                      4th Quarter 2006
Macs                                $ 2'213 million 
Peripherals and Other Hardware      $   297 million 
Software, Service and Other Sales   $   316 million 
Computers total                     $ 2'826 million    58%
iPods                               $ 1'559 million 
iTunes                              $   452 million
Music total                         $ 2'011 million    42%
Total                               $ 4'837 million   100%

Google's Shopping Tour

From Wikipedia: List of acquisitions by Google (here is the same list for Microsoft)

For reference, here is a list with a description for all Google Acquisitions.

The following list is copied from Google Blogoscoped: The Acquisition Price Guide

Company	Acquired by	Price
Skype	Ebay	$2.6 billion
YouTube	Google	$1.65 billion
5% investment in AOL	Google	$1 billion
MySpace	News Corp	$580 million
dMarc Broadcasting	Google	$102 million
Grouper	Sony	$65 million
Flickr	Yahoo	$30-35 million (rumored)
del.icio.us	Yahoo	$30-35 million (rumored)
Bloglines	IAC (Ask)	$25 million (rumored)
Weblogs Inc.	AOL	$25 million (rumored)
Blogger	Google	$20 million (rumored)
Oddpost	Yahoo	$20 million (rumored)
Jumpcut	Yahoo	$15 million (rumored)
LiveJournal	SixApart	$20 million (rumored)
Rojo	SixApart	$10 million (rumored)
Picasa	Google	Under $5 million (rumored)
MeasureMap	Google	Under $5 million (rumored)
2.6% ownership of Baidu	Google	$5 million
weblogs.com	Verisign	$2 million
Writely	Google	Around $2 million (rumored)
Dodgeball	Google	Around $1 million (rumored)
Upcoming.org	Yahoo	Around $1 million (rumored)
WebJay	Yahoo	Around $1 million (rumored)
Urchin	Google	$???
Keyhole	Google	$???
Deja News	Google	$???

BTW, Google sold their 2.6 % share in Chinese search engine Baidu for USD 60 million (source).

Chinese Banks

Source: Bloomberg Markets, 2006 September p. 11.

Total assets and foreign investors:

• Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, USD 814 billion, Goldman Sachs, Allianz, American Express: 10%


• Agricultural Bank of China, USD 611 billion


• Bank of China, USD 593 billion, Royal Bank of Schottland Group consortium: 8.5%


• China Construction Bank, USD 574 billion, Bank of America: 8.5%

Compare to other banks world wide: Bank Market Caps

Millionaires 2004

in USD, source Bloomberg Markets, July 2006 p. 44:

Country   Millionaires   % of      Population
USA          2,498,000   0.85     293 million
Japan        1,334,300   1.06     127 million
China          300,000   0.02   1,300 million

Bank Market Caps

Source, Stocks Magazine, 2006 No 18, in billion USD:

01. Citigroup                 USA      240.8
02. Bank of America           USA      237.6
03. HSBC                      GB       206.8
04. JP Morgan Chase           USA      158.8
05. MUFG                      Japan    153.5
06. UBS                       CH       120.7
07. Wells Fargo               USA      118.3
08. Bank of China             China    106.3
09. Royal Bank of Scottland   GB       106.1
10. Mizuho Financial          Japan    100.2
11. Santander                 Spain     97.3
12. Wachovia                  USA       88.5
13. Unicredit                 Italy     84.7
14. Sumitomo Mitsui           Japan     83.5
15. Barclays                  GB        79.8
--------------------------------------------
??. ING                       NL        97.5
??. Credit Suisse             CH        65.6
??. Deutsche Bank             Germany   60.7
??. ABN AMRO                  NL        54.9

Getting soon into that list:
- a new merged mega bank in Italy bigger than Unicredit and
- the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, supposedly bigger than the Bank of China.

Here is a list of uptodate market cap rankings of US listed banks at Google Finance: Money Center Banks

Here is a German article comparing the market cap development of Credit Suisse with UBS over the last couple of years.

Tages-Anzeiger: Credit Suisse im Schatten der UBS

It says that on 2000-03-22 both banks had roughly the same market cap of CHF 90 billion. Actually I can remember the time when CS was actually higher valued than UBS at the height of the dot com bubble. More than six years later, Credit Suisse is again valued at CHF 90 billion. But most funny, in the interim it was down to CHF 24.5 billion. So you can also make (or loose) a lot of money with a blue chip company.

Another funny comment (but unrelated to mc) from that article about the CS boss:

Zunächst hat Kielholz in den letzten drei Jahren all das umgesetzt, was er erklärtermassen nicht zu tun beabsichtigte, wie in verschiedensten Interviews nach dem Rücktritt Mühlemanns nachzulesen ist. Vom Versicherungsgeschäft wolle man sich nicht trennen - die Winterthur wurde an die französische Axa verkauft. An der Konzernstruktur werde man festhalten - man hat sie durch die One-Bank-Strategie ersetzt. Die zunächst gewählte Doppelführung an der Konzernspitze mit Oswald Grübel und John Mack sei keine Übergangslösung - sie überdauerte gerade anderthalb Jahre.

Yahoo! Doom

Two blog entries from InsideGoogle about recent Yahoo results and employees leaving yahoo finance, which is actually their cash cow.

Here an interesting side by side comparison of Google and Yahoo quarterly results:

Google’s earnings, in millions, for every single quarter since the third quarter of 2003:

2003: $394 | $512

2004: $652 | $700 | $806 | $1,032

2005: $1,257 | $1,384 | $1,578 | $1,919

2006: $2,253 | $2,456

Yahoo, in those same quarters:

2003: $356 | $663

2004: $758 | $832 | $906 | $1,077

2005: $1,173 | $1,253 | $1,330 | $1,501

2006: $1,567 | $1,575

See the rest in: Yahoo Warns Of A Bad Quarter

And, very insteresting read: Yahoo Finance Employee Exodus?

While people say they are not impressed with Google's offering yet, it doesn't look like Yahoo! Finance does have a lot of (positive) traction right now.

Finding Great People

Joel on Software:

Imagine that the goal of your software company is not to solve some specific problem, but to be able to convert money to code through programmers. That's a little bit strange, but bear with me. A software company has to think of recruiting the right people as its number one problem. If you are successful, this can solve any other problem. Hire smart people, and they will produce good stuff that you can sell and make money off. Then everything else follows.

Read the rest in: Converting Capital Into Software That Works

The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.

Five Antonio Salieris won't produce Mozart's Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years.
...

The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time. The number of divas who can hit the f6 in Mozart's Queen of the Night is vanishingly small, and you just can't perform The Queen of the Night without that famous f6.
...

Apple made a decision based on style, in fact, iPod is full of decisions that are based on style. And style is not something that 100 programmers at Microsoft or 200 industrial designers at the inaptly-named Creative are going to be able to achieve, because they don't have Jonathan Ive, and there aren't a heck of a lot of Jonathan Ives floating around.

I'm sorry, I can't stop talking about the iPod. That beautiful thumbwheel with its little clicky sounds ... Apple spent extra money putting a speaker in the iPod itself so that the thumbwheel clicky sounds would come from the thumbwheel. They could have saved pennies ... pennies! by playing the clicky sounds through the headphones. But the thumbwheel makes you feel like you're in control. People like to feel in control. It makes people happy to feel in control. The fact that the thumbwheel responds smoothly, fluently, and audibly to your commands makes you happy.
...

It's not just a matter of "10 times more productive." It's that the "average productive" developer never hits the high notes that make great software.

Sadly, this doesn't really apply in non-product software development. Internal, in-house software is rarely important enough to justify hiring rock stars. Nobody hires Dolly Parton to sing at weddings. That's why the most satisfying careers, if you're a software developer, are at actual software companies, not doing IT for some bank.

Read the rest in: Hitting the High Notes

Let me, for a moment, talk about the famous Aeron chair, made by Herman Miller. They cost about $900. This is about $800 more than a cheap office chair from OfficeDepot or Staples.

They are much more comfortable than cheap chairs. If you get the right size and adjust it properly, most people can sit in them all day long without feeling uncomfortable. The back and seat are made out of a kind of mesh that lets air flow so you don’t get sweaty. The ergonomics, especially of the newer models with lumbar support, are excellent.

They last longer than cheap chairs. We’ve been in business for six years and every Aeron is literally in mint condition: I challenge anyone to see the difference between the chairs we bought in 2000 and the chairs we bought three months ago. They easily last for ten years.

Read the rest in: A Field Guide to Developers