Amy Pascal’s departure isn’t the only good news at Sony

• Commentary
• Posted By Cody Willard

Sony (SNE) reported strong numbers earlier this week, in part from growth in their content licensing business (think Netflix and Amazon and Apple TV paying up for content in their streaming wars) and in part from weak Yen, both of which is why I’d built up a long Sony position in the teens.

Social networking still in its infancy

• Commentary
• Posted By Cody Willard

Social networking is here to stay. In fact, it’s still in its infancy despite having created hundreds of billions of dollars in market valuations for social networking stocks from LinkedIn to Facebook to still-private Snapchat.

Sell oil, buy gold and invest in tech revolutions

An old friend of mine who recently died had started as a oil field hand back in the 1950s. He worked his way up over the decades and eventually bought and sold some of the same handful of oil companies several times. He’d get out in the boom times and inevitably buy ‘em back out of bankruptcy years later.

Don’t buy energy stocks until the bankruptcies start

• Commentary
• Posted By Cody Willard

Consumers, especially poor consumers, will benefit and so will transport companies and any energy-intensive business. Oil companies, energy companies and countries that depend on energy and oil will be hurt badly and many will go outright bankrupt in coming years.

Why the currency wars are likely to hit the stock market

• Commentary
• Posted By Cody Willard

Governments of developed and developing countries have been manipulating their fiat currencies for my whole lifetime and I don’t expect it to stop any time soon. The entire Swiss GDP is about $650 billion, about equal to the market cap of Apple. So it’s not like the Swiss franc is ever going to replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Google, Apple face trouble but remain must-own stocks

• Commentary
• Posted By Cody Willard

What’s the next great Revolution? Wearables are a continuation of the App Revolution, and they are going to be even bigger than smartphones. So while I might be cautious about the broader markets for the near-term, I continue to stay all-systems go in the App Revolution.

The stocks to buy if the Greek crisis hits U.S. markets

• Commentary
• Posted By Cody Willard

As a long-term investor in stocks like Apple, Google, Facebook, Sandisk and so on, I would probably look to start to scale into some of my favorite such Revolution Investing names on an opportunistic basis. I’ve also trimmed most of my personal positions so a major Greece/EU crisis-driven sell off would enable me to buy some of those shares back.

Top 5 companies that Apple should buy now

• Commentary
• Posted By Cody Willard

When Facebook has done its huge acquisitions of WhatsApp and Oculus Rift and Instagram, it’s used stock for about 75% of the deal and 25% cash. Apple used $2.6 billion in cash and another $400 million in stock to buy Beats. Why not structure these deals in a similar fashion, with Apple using 50-60% stock and 40%-50% cash structures to get them done.

Why Google Glass and Apple Watch matter so much

• Commentary
• Posted By Cody Willard

You’re not going to sit around tapping your email address and passwords into your wearables — that’s what the smartphone in your pocket or the computer on your desk is for. But you will talk to and motion gesture and otherwise command the apps on your wearables — on the platforms that Google Glass and Apple Watch are creating presently.

How to invest in the Social Communications Revolution

• Commentary
• Posted By Cody Willard

Twitter, Facebook are the two social networks that everybody thinks of when it comes to sharing news. I have been a long-time investor in Facebook and recently started buying Twitter in part because of their powerful reach in disrupting the control of media. SnapChat, Pinterest, my own Scutify, and thousands of niche social networks are gaining huge traction too. And don’t forget the huge reach of sites that started as independent blogs like DeadSpin, Zerohead, and Ritholtz.com to name a few. We’re communicating with each other more directly more often across the planet than anybody could have thought possible just a couple decades ago.