Many prominent economists [mostly the ones who want to be considered for political appointments] have gone on record in recent weeks – saying that if Glass-Steagall was law today, the banking crisis would never have occurred. Glass-Steagall [G-S] a.k.a The Banking Act of 1935 [passed in 1933] was the law that created the FDIC and separated ...
I had a love-hate relationship with Wells Fargo. I have been a customer of theirs for a long time. When I was an account-holder and a student, I used to be upset that they wanted to nickel-dime me for every little thing – like withdrawing your own money [without using the ATM ]. Anyway, as ...
Intuitive Surgicals needs no introduction. The company’s daVinci surgical robot is allowing the company to grow at a heady rate, and added to this, ISRG makes a gamut of disposable tools [which serve as the "working end" of the robotic arm used in surgery] which need to be “renewed” for every surgery. The tools provide ...
Back in the early 1980′s Andy Grove famously got Intel out of the much larger [in revenues] memory business, and put all of Intel’s eggs in one basket and propelled INTC to the #1 spot in the semiconductor industry. But lately, there have been chinks in INTC’s armour. For starters, the perennial also-ran in the ...
There have been a lot of road-kills in the graphics business [Chips & Technologies, S3, Cirrus Logic, Tseng Labs come to mind], which is always cyclical, and “owned” by a player or two. For now, nVidia is one of the big two, and will continue to be – till the next major breakthrough in graphics ...
Since I wrote the Altera vs. Xilinx article, I have had multiple requests asking me what the other niche in semiconductors is -that has generated gross margins in excess of 60%…… the answer – Analog/Mixed Signal chips. Devices that perform functions like analog to digital and digital to analog conversion, power supply regulation, DC to ...
In the semiconductor business, there are two niches that have had gross margins in excess of 60%. One of them is programmable logic. I worked for ten years in companies that wanted to emulate the success of Xilinx and Altera. It took me ten years [and a $35 million dollar judgement against my last Programmable ...
Amgen thinks that it is a scrappy little biotech. They sure are a biotech company, maybe even a little scrappy, but definitely not little. In fact, their growth numbers look anemic [they need a shot of EPO ]. Amgen was a duopoly for fifteen years – during this period, they sold two drugs – Epoetin ...
Intuitive Surgicals [ISRG] is a company that I have a deep amount of respect for. Much like US Surgicals – that revolutionized minimally invasive surgery [MIS] in the 1990′s, ISRG is definitely revolutionary. It is the first robotic surgical instrument with “wrists” and hence a surgeon can – after a years’ training, perform surgeries which ...
Today’s [Monday, August 4, 2008] LEX column in the Financial TImes recommended that investors get their feet wet w.r.t NT. I respect the Lex authors a great deal, and their analysis is always based on thorough and excellent research, and often have insights that baffle me, and has me nodding in agreement. But this time ...