Vitaliy Katsenelson's blog

"Microsoft is near a deal to buy Skype for $8.5 billion." Microsoft is pulling another "Microsoft", though this time it may actually succeed. Private equity and eBay, which still owns 30% of Skype, may actually sell, unless Google or someone else rushes in with a competitive bid.

I was quoted in FT
about David Sokol, CEO of a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, buying
shares in Lubrizol a few months before Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway
bought Lubrizol at a significant premium, which made Sokol 3 million
dollars on his $10 million purchase.

Nothing defined Alan Greenspan’s tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank more than his wholehearted embrace of capitalism. With early roots in his 30-year association with the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, that faith grew into an unconstrained confidence in the free market and deregulation to steer the economy and ward off crises.

Shouldn’t average profit margins be higher now, as the U.S. economy has transitioned from an industrial (low-margin) economy to a service (higher-margin) economy?

John Mauldin, who wrote a wonderful foreword to my Little Book of Sideways Markets, published an excerpt from the Little Book in his latest newsletter, so here it is:

The world today is riddled with unique economic, political, and demographic risks. Finding attractively priced assets that will perform well in spite of these challenges is excruciatingly difficult. For investors, though, one segment of the market – the highest-quality stocks – still offers attractive risk-adjusted returns.

Earlier
this week we saw reports that “Beijing
authorities plan to build a "seven-star hotel" modelled after Dubai's
Burj Khalifa -- the world's tallest building -- in a $1.3 billion joint project
with Saudi Arabia.”  Yes, the same
building that symbolized Dubai’s $20-plus billion in malinvestments and
required a bailout by Abu Dhabi. 

Here are my 10 most favorite/important articles from 2010, all of them are still relevant today.

Manual of Ideas Interviews Vitaliy Katsenelson

We are in a Cowardly Lion market, whose occasional bursts of bravery are
ultimately overrun by fear that leads to a subsequent decline.