Some new names

[Grieve]

We've haven't talked about much on here recently except Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Netflix, so let's try a few more names. Here's some I've been dipping into:

SKUL - Skullcandy, the cellphone accessory/headphone company. They keep growing and beating estimates, but 81% of the float is short. I love companies like that, because when a short squeeze comes, it's huge. I bought some Dec 2012 calls (which are cheap) as a bet that happens, as we move into the holiday shopping season (i.e. people buying lots of crap for each other as gifts)

VHC - VirnetX, a bunch of filthy patent trolls. But they have a pretty good case against people like Cisco and Apple, and I'm betting on their chances of extorting a bunch of cash from the big guns. Jan 2013 calls.

YHOO - Yahoo, the company that Google made irrelevant. Still, I like that Marissa Mayer chick, and I'm betting she improves things. Jan 2013 calls.

Kind of tempted to get back into gold and/or silver, with more stimulus on the horizon. But silver in particular has been a bit of a widow maker recently...

What else out there is interesting?

[Breand]

I will say I bought a pair of skullcandy earbuds and they are the best I've ever owned.

[Vanraw]

I have been shying away from individual stocks, as Ive mentioned before. From a 401k perspective Im strong in equities but they are some really large funds that are not avaiable on the market. The return has consistantly blew the market away.

However.

Ive made some money on some individual stocks as I saw opportunity arise.

- Currently I own TM Toyota and it has done very well. frankly I think its still a good buy on dips. in the end these guys will continue to kick America's ass, because they are not focused on the next quarter like GM.

I did very well with Broadsoft BSFT. These guys are staged to be the premier telephony provider in the new VOIP space. They are a software house that makes SIP Proxy and applicaions suites that cant be touched by anyone else. They IPOed at 14 and have been swinging between mid 20s and high 30's. Every major global carrier out there is using them for business / enterprise offerings. They aree trying to break into Wireless. If they do, Look out.

ACME packets. These guys make Session Border Controlers. (SBC) for enterprise and telecommunications carriers. I dont own the stock, but they have a great product.

I have jumped in and out of PFE Phizer and made money in the last 12 months.

[Grieve]

Another one I've been dipping into - FIO (FusionIO). I think flash memory is going to be a huge business over the next few years, as flash memory replaces spinning disks everywhere. It's already happening in laptops (e.g. MacBook Air and Retina Pro, as well as Ultrabooks), and it's happening more and more in data centers as well. It's a massive changeover, and I think anyone in the business will do well.

FIO has a forward PE of over 48, but they are also a prime takeover candidate, and they should have very high growth for years to come.

[Vanraw]

Im leery on things like flash drives, as I think the memory technology in general has almost become a commodity.

[Slamz]

The only thing that would make me nervous about investing in flash drives is that it seems like the technology is moving fast. 15 years ago it was optical media and tape drives in data centers. They got wiped out as hard drives got cheaper and larger. Now hard drives may be getting wiped out by solid state. Maybe there's really nowhere to go from here, or maybe in 10 years solid state will be dead and we'll be storing our data in portable wormholes or whatever the next technology is.

Investing in tech always feels a little risky to me. Your best bet is the hot new startup with the awesome technology with the hope it doesn't end up causing cancer or getting replaced by something else next spring. (Whereas IBM is not really a tech company so much as a service company and Microsoft isn't really a tech company so much as a patent holder, so I hear. Samsung is a tech company, I guess, but they're so diversified. "We make flash technology" is narrow enough to be worrisome.)

[Grieve]

Next is almost certainly the cloud...once bandwidth is fast enough for everyone, I'm sure almost everything will be stored off-site. But...even in the cloud, the data still has to end up somewhere. That's where FIO is - server-based flash (rather than consumer flash). It's not a long term investment (in fact it's options), but I'm hoping they got bought out within a year. Also, fun fact...their chief scientist is...Steve Wozniak! So I get my Apple fix from investing in them.

[Vanraw]

The cloud is here and has been for 10 years. The marketing term "cloud" is starting to take shape, but the players are pretty well defined.

SSD's are going to drive spinning disk of any kind out of business. But SSD is nothing but Ram with sustained memory. The players are all well defined. Technology can change in the memory chip business but the big players are not.

[Vanraw]

By the way, on BSFT listed above. Here is a interesting little telecommunications fact. Only about 5% to 8% of the countries telephony is now on VOIP infrastructure / transport. The rest is still on TDM / PSTN. About 5 years ago it was a fraction of a percent. Companies like Broadsoft are staged to be the replacement technology of migrating the rest of that 90 plus percent to VOIP.

Telecommunications in general is a pretty bad investment area. But the infrastructure of the TDM networks in this country are aging fast some of the more then 60 years old.

[Grieve]

The cloud is here and has been for 10 years. The marketing term "cloud" is starting to take shape, but the players are pretty well defined.

The cloud is and has been here, but it's still at the very early stages. Most consumers and companies still have most of their data on-site. I think that is going to start changing much more rapidly. You won't make (big) money from it through the big established players, but you can still profit very well from the little guys like FIO.

Of course, the other good play is the infrastructure to carry all that data...