Rumors abound that my beloved Boston Red Sox plan to bid vigorously for the services of free agent Mark Teixeira and Japanese pitching phenom Junichi Tazawa. Although I’d like to see the team take the challenge of developing and sustaining a winning team in a major market with a Moneyball philosophy, I’m actually excited by the possibilities of these two signings. I’d rather see the team stay competitive while reducing its overall payroll, but if we’re going to spend money in the free agent market, then we should spend the …

Even the mighty are falling. The last two major independent investment banks on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS), have received permission from the Federal Reserve to convert from traditional investment banks into commercial banks or bank holding companies. Plenty of ink, digital or otherwise, has been spilled about the disappearance of investment banks so I won’t dwell much on that. We’ve seen the collapse of Lehman Brothers (LEH) and Bear Stearns. Still somehow, I’m sure there were some who sentimentally held out hope that the two …

Earlier this month, Macquarie Group Limited (ASX:MQG), announced record profits on higher fees earned from deal making and strong equities trading. Macquarie is the leading investment bank in Australia and has intrigued me for quite some time because of its strength in the infrastructure industry. The megatrend of globalization means that infrastructure will play an increasingly important part of a global investment portfolio. Macquarie has carved itself a valuable niche as the leading investment bank for infrastructure assets and is consistently found all over the world making direct investments or …

I get up very early in the morning to prepare for the markets’ open. The usual routine involves checking my inbox for important emails from friends or respected professionals, quickly poring over all the news, running through my RSS feeds, tracking my investment ideas through Google (GOOG) Alerts and some proprietary software that automatically populate my database of companies to investigate further. I find that having a discipline or process helps me to keep my mind focused, sharp, and ready to generate new ideas.
Early tomorrow morning, I’m changing my routine …

Tight US immigration forces outsourcing: Bill Gates – Microsoft (MSFT) chairman, and no longer the wealthiest guy in the world, makes some interesting points about our immigration policy regarding skilled workers. At SocialOptimize, we’ve been outsourcing some of our work to Guatemala and the Philippines.
Google could be superseded, says web inventor – Tim Berners-Lee shares some wisdom about the semantic web. He talks about how a new company in the future could exceed everything Google (GOOG) has done up to this point. Wouldn’t Google just buy that company?
Japanese government investigates …