Finance Geek

The almighty dollar ain’t what it used to be.The decline of the dollar was one of the topics of debate Sunday night when St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder faced off against longtime gold bug and doll

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Evil geniuses aren’t to blame for most breaches of personal data. Usually, the information is all but handed out, thanks to carelessness or stupid decisions.

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Who really killed Bear Stearns? Did Wall Street create 2008’s spike in gas prices? Does Goldman Sachs secretly run everything? Read on and find out.

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The greenback’s decline has cut deeply into Americans’ buying power over the past 10 years, raising fears of a complete collapse. But here’s why it could turn around.

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In a race against reform, banks are using all their dirty tricks to grab every last nickel they can from their customers. You can help fight back.

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Biz Stone says next year is when Twitter will start making money, and “non-traditional” advertising is how.

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There IS plenty to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. We’ve certainly come a long way (baby) from a year ago.   Let’s not forget, avoiding a second Great Depression was no foregone conclusion in the immediate wake of Lehman’s collapse. Then there’s o

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Gold soared to yet another new record overnight as the dollar slumped again after Tuesday’s release of the minutes of the Fed’s Nov. 3-4 meeting.While FOMC members raised concerns about “negative side effects” from a zero rate policy — includin

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As the stock market continues its winning streak from March levels, cries against the evil speculators and short sellers have subsided — for now. If any cracks in the recovery story emerge, beware of attacks against short sellers, says Robert Sloan, mana

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This quote is from Mike Scott, President of Apple Inc in the late 1970s when the company was still tiny.  He was reflecting on how they all worked together in those early years.

When you’re working on the big topics which you don’t know all the answers to, it’s easy to switch to something else really teeny that everyone can get their teeth into.

Too right.  Realising when you are indulging in a bit of displacement activity and switching back to the most important tasks is one of the keys to being personally effective.

I got this quote from Mike Morritz’s history of Apple, Return to the Little Kingdom, which also tells us that Steve Job’s personal cure for relieving fatigue was to massage his feet in the flush of a toilet bowl!

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I’m giving a talk on venture capital to a class of MBA students at the Cass Business School on Friday.  I suspect some of them will be there to learn about venture capital as a career option and some of them will be there because they are (or plan to be) entrepreneurs.  That is a pretty good match with how I think about the readers of TheEquityKicker, so I thought I you might have some good ideas about what I should cover.

I’m currently planning to structure my talk as follows:

• Introduction – 5 minutes
• Limited partners and the venture capital value chain – 5 minutes
• Making investments – 20 minutes
  • Approaches to finding new deals
  • Deciding to make an investment
  • Investment execution
• Exiting investments (aka portfolio management) – 10 minutes
  • Helping companies to succeed
  • Making the fund a success
• How a VC fund manages itself – 5 minutes

Please respond in the comments with any ideas.  E.g. things you would have loved to know before you started, things you would love to know now, common misconceptions I should dispel, things that irritate you about venture capital, things that you love, in fact anything!

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WASHINGTON–It’s Thanksgiving, the start of the holidays, the season of giving-and getting-and many labor union officials have a lot to be thankful for. Some members of Congress are thinking about giving the union bosses a multi-billion dollar gift-a bailout of failing, collectively-bargained multiemployer pension plans.
No matter that this would increase the federal deficit, putting even more pressure on the American taxpayer and the economy. After the $787 billion “stimulus” plan, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Plan, and the potential $1 trillion health care…

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Reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, an account of the voyage of the Pilgrims and the settling of Plymouth Colony, what strikes me most is not simply the extraordinary suffering of those who made the crossing, or how close to failure the entire venture teetered for years, or even the author’s recounting of the first celebration we’ve since dubbed Thanksgiving.
What leaps out from the pages of the history, probably because it’s so little a part of the common narrative of the Pilgrims, is a crucial decision by the colony’s governor, William Bradford, to change the…

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A fifth-straight monthly gain for the Case-Shiller Index Tuesday and Monday’s stronger-than-expected existing home sales report is giving renewed hope to the housing bulls.”Disregard them,” says Barry Ritholtz, CEO of Fusion IQ, who notes the ex

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From The Business Insider, Nov. 24, 2009: The FDIC fund that insures bank deposits is $8.2 billion in the hole.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. released its latest set of grim
banking data moments ago. The FDIC had to set aside $21.7 billion for
ex

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