51% Off and Still Infinitely Overpriced

Coupon in Question:

"Print this $0.50/1 Frank’s Red hot Sauce coupon. You can use it at Walmart to pay just 48 cents for one bottle after coupon. Or keep an eye out for sales on this product at your grocery store. Use zip55555 to find this coupon." Available online at:

http://www.commonsensewithmoney.com/2011/07/franks-red-hot-sauce-coupon-save-0-50-off-one/

I don't believe much commentary (my position on Franks is well known, see "Dec Update: Disowning of my Sister" for more details) is needed other than the following two math equations.

(after-coupon price)/(original price)-1=Discount in percentage terms:

$0.48/$0.98-1=

51% Discount

(after-coupon price)/(true product value)-1=Discount to intrinsic value

$0.48/$0.00-1=

Conclusion: Despite only costing you 48 cents with the coupon, purchasing a Frank's Red Hot is an utterly deplorable decision and will cause extremely negative events to occur. In short, don't make a rookie move and buy something infinitely overpriced.

Party Music- Denver Style

Almost everyone in the world has a famous person story that they bring out on "opportune" occasions (i.e. weak attempts to impress the opposite sex) in order to make themselves look cooler.

"Oh yeah, Top Gun, that's a great movie. Cruise and I hung out in the Caymans last summer and played volleyball- dude was way too short to spike it in real life."

As someone who has no A-list celeb stories to tell, I resort to the "I don't give a sh*t about celebrities" route. That being said, I do know a Kickass DJ and I figured I'd take this opportunity to let my millions of blog readers get a chance to listen and download his newest jam that he just released. So without further ado or shameless plugs to how cool I am, I give you Press Play Volume 2.

http://soundcloud.com/dj-shares/press-play-vol-2

It's finally here!! Press Play Vol. 2 hosted by Far East Movement!!! This mix is a compilation of spring and early summer 2011 club bangers... Similar to "Press Play Vol. 1" the songs in this mix are most all Top 40/Commercial Dance tracks remixed or mashed up with a variety of EDM Genres. Enjoy!!

.:Stay Tuned:.
djshares.com
twitter.com/djshares
facebook.com/djshares

Release date: Jul 13, 2011

Look ma, no hands.... Waka Flocka and Wale would be so proud

P.S. Check out some of his other songs on Soundcloud. No Hands vs. Stereo Love and Take Over The Deep are badass.

http://soundcloud.com/dj-shares

Completely Disagree With the Opening Sentence!

As my previous post suggests, I'm a big fan of Google+. I had my first threesome last night on Hangout, and think the integration with Youtube to allow joint video viewing is really fun. (I had the honor of hanging out with two noobs that had never seen the Honeybadger video, so that garnered a pretty solid reaction...) In order to really get a feel for G+, I even have tried using the "Sparks". As you can see from the image below, I opted for Electric Vehicles (been working on TSLA/PPO/AONE), Hedge Fund (gotta see what the competition is up to), and Hot Sauce. So far I've been rather underwhelmed, but do think as more people start getting on G+ and start utilizing the +1 button that the quality of this feature could improve.

But anyway, I clicked today on Hot Sauce and the top story from the Berlin Dispatch was below with the opening sentence being:

"I don’t know about you, but I don’t think it’s a good sign when the condiment section at a pasta restaurant brandishes a bottle of Sriracha hot sauce "

All I can say is I'm glad the author put in the "I don't know about you" qualifier, because otherwise he'd have a G+/twitter/social media sh*t storm on his hands to rival the current $NFLX price increase outrage. Anyone choosing "hot sauce" as a Spark is certainly going to be a person that lives and breathes my mantra of "food is just a vehicle for hot sauce". As such, I could not be more enthused as to find a restaurant with a fine hot sauce selection. My only comment would be that if this Pasta Restaurant really wanted to get my repeat business, it should add sauces further sauces such as Mad Dog Inferno and Blair's Sudden Death to its repertoire!

Sadly, there is no -1 button yet on Google+; otherwise I'd be leading a campaign to drive this German drivel-filled article's score to the ground.

Testing Out the +1 BUTTON

While I've been bearish on virtually all of the recent social (i.e. overvalued) IPOs, I think GOOG+ is awesome and could actually be the catalyst that changes investor's perception of the stock. The company holds a dominant position in search, prints money, has $115 in cash, has a ton of smart nerds, yet the market doesn't care. The thing trades at a market multiple (closed today at 14.4x NTM PE) despite vastly better growth prospects and margins. Yes it's friggin huge and you can't give a company of that size a major growth multiple, but I think the current multiple is overly compressed. Anyway, GOOG+ just launched and I know my friends (the more tech savvy ones at least) are really embracing it. Circles are an amazing concept, and give you so much more control on who sees your content. As a result, I am much more likely to actually post and interact on the site, because while I obviously think everything I write is awesome and interesting, I know it only resonates with a segment of my group of "friends". Therefore, I only post stuff on $FBOOK that I think all 760 (sell-call!) of my friends will be interested. On G+ however, I have created different circles (work, high school guy friends, etc) and can post things that are relevant to them, and not have to worry about spamming the other 755 that would find my link about Star Wars dumb.

Anyway, it's hard to move the needle that much on a company like $GOOG with a $170bn market cap, but I think a successful launch of GOOG+ (which all signs are pointing to currently) could get some people a bit happier with Google's high opex #s, and allow them to see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel (i.e. a material revenue stream that is not their core search biz, which currently is >90% of revs).

Crude Comparable Valuation assuming 200mm (active gmail base) convert to GOOG+ :

Can justify a value of $70/share based purely on SOTP from converting gmail users. As the stock trades at around $525, this is only 15% of incremental value. Nothing to sneeze at certainly, but also not a completely trans formative business shift a la $TZOO for instance. The main upside comes from this being the first foray into social, and if they can do this successfully, it could then change investor perception which impacts the multiple.


But anyway, the real point of this post however is for me to try and integrate the +1 button onto my site, so I'll see if I can add it below. If it shows up, do me a favor and click it!

TSA: Stickler For The Rules?

I'm currently 26 years old, and on paper possess many adult-like qualities such as having a steady job, a car, a house, a retirement account, and a pet. In fact, the only thing that that really separates me from being a true member of the adult world is my lack of a life partner. (JD doesn't count...) But luckily for the Peter Pan in me, I am in zero hurry (i.e. have no prospects) to change that fact and am perfectly content to keep living the life of a young and immature frat guy (hi JoeCav!). But that's just me, and this past weekend I had the pleasure of going to NYC to celebrate the marriage of my friend Billy to his high-school sweetheart. It was a great (short) ceremony, and the party afterwards was awesome. And then the next morning, my "adult" friend Billy woke up early to head off to some Carribean Island with his wife, while I woke up late with a terrible headache, a lost cellphone, a dim memory of a girl in a blue dress, and a half-eaten pack of Starbursts in my pocket. Looks like I have some more time before I'm ready to transition from being an adult "on-paper" to being an adult in the real world...

But anyway, the point of the post (i.e. my weak segue as to how I'll be relating this to hot sauce) was that the weekend was also the birthday of my best friend JC. Despite a childhood devoid of spicy foods, he (I'm going to toot my own horn here and take a lot of credit for this) has really embraced hot sauce and now can take down 20k+ with ease. So for his birthday, I decided to buy him a bottle of my new favorite sauce (check out my really boring post from two weeks ago for more details).

As you can see on the label, the bottle is 5oz.


The TSA has their old 3-1-1 rule (which actually should be the 3.4-1-1 rule since you are allowed to have up to 3.4oz) which I knew would be a potential issue... But I felt there was a chance it could get through the X-Ray machine unnoticed, and at worst I was confident in my abilities to charm any agent and skate on through unscathed. Sadly, Eagle-Eyes on the security machine noticed the bottle, and a big guy was waved over and told to search my bag. He found the unopened bottle of hot sauce, identified the writing on the bottle where it disclosed the 5oz volume, cross-checked said volume against his 3-1-1 rule, and came to the determination that 5>3.4, and so the bottle needed to be destroyed. Tact One: Charm. I made a joke about the hot sauce's name (Smack My Ass and Call Me Sally), but was met with a blank stare, so I decided that charm was out of the question. Tact Two: Misinformation. I then proceeded to tell him to look at the ingredient list (Tomato Paste, Pepper Extract, Vinegar, Molasses, Soy Sauce, Salt) and that he would see that this was not in fact a liquid or a gel, but really was a vegetable in a bottle. He was about to go for it, but then a rogue neuron randomly fired in his little brain and he said "soy sauce.... that's a liquid". Tact Three: Simple Math At this point I was getting a bit perturbed and closing in on boarding time, so I decided to concede defeat and admitted that it was possible he was right. I then told him I would dump out half of the bottle, and then proceed on my merry way. At this point, the cretin looked at me blankly and said "the bottle still needs to be destroyed". I told him politely that the rule he was so gallantly enforcing was for liquids more than 3.4 oz. And if you dump out half of something that is 5 ounces, the remaining liquid is only 2.5oz. He still didn't understand why this was relevant, so I told him that "last time I checked, 2.5 was less than 3.4". At that point the same rogue neuron fired again, and he realized what I was suggesting, and also realized how stupid he was. But sadly for the Birthday Boy, Mr. TSA decided at this point that he would rely on the age old defense of "you are right but it doesn't matter", and that he was going to destroy the bottle anyway even if it only had 2.5 ounces.

Nothing like being a stickler for the rules as long as it suits you, and then throwing the same rulebook out the window a minute later when it no longer suits you. But hey, at least he is keeping everyone at Denver Airport safe from dangerous airborne scoville units!

The Biggest Event of the Past Two Months

I bought a house last month, so JD and I moved two weeks ago from the bachelor pad to the bachelor palace. So far, so good. But this post is about the biggest event in the past two months, and joining the ranks of the foolish homeowners is not it. Instead, said event occured this past Sunday when JD and I tried to mount our third roommate's flat-screen on the wall (he was conveniently out of town). The bach palace came equipped with a fancy mount in the living room, so it seemed pretty elementary for two college grads to mount his TV onto it. This sadly was not the case. First off, the TV weighed about a million pounds and had this crazy steel stand that was built into the base which we quickly dismantled and discarded. After scanning the back of the TV, I realized that the mounting holes were about 18 inches apart from each other, so I would need to buy another mount which I would then mount on the mount that was currently mounted on the wall. (that sentence was a thing of beauty). Anyway, the screws that came with the mount where not of the correct size in which to affix it to the existing mount. So JD and I got in the car and headed to ACE Hardware and bought four screws. Problem One solved. We then tried to attach the new mount to the back of the TV, but were unable to as the screws did not seem to have anything to screw into when we put them into the TV. After about an hour of aimlessly playing around with screwdrivers and making no progress (JD: "Todd for the 5th time, are you sure these are the same holes that you unscrewed these from???"), my brilliant roommate realized that the 150lb steel base piece that we removed actually had to be put back on in order to give the screws something to grip into. What a terrible design! Anyway, we put the damn base back on and tried again. Problem two solved. Which then led us to problem three, which is the screws were not long enough to go through the mount and still reach far enough into the TV to reach the metal base. So back to ACE Hardware for some longer screws! Sure enough, they didn't have screws long enough... But a smart employee came up with the idea of just giving us a long piece of threaded metal (think a screw but with no head), some nuts, and some glue. Problem three solved! At this point we had spent all day on the darn thing and it had reached 5 o'clock which meant it was drinking time (this is the third image that shows up when you search for drinking time, not sure how it is relevant but it is awesome at the same time; hence the inclusion), so we have yet to make any progress from here. But I am confident that we will be able to fix it this weekend. But anyway, back to the point of the post-

WHILE in ACE hardware for the 2nd time of the day, when I was feeling about as despondent and dejected in my skills as a human being as I've been in awhile, I noticed the hot sauce equivalent of the Holy Grail-

A bottle of Chet's Slap my Ass and Call Me Sally sitting in the grill section! (note, don't search for that in google images while at the office.... NSFW)

WTF, I've read about this sauce for years up in the hot sauce blog o'sphere, and have never once seen it in any store. And here we have it in ACE's hardware next to a bunch of propane grills? AMAZING.




Needless to say we bought a bottle, and then slathered it on our Wendy's spicy chicken sandwiches from the dollar menu. The sauce is really good, seemed kind of likes a mixture between mad dog inferno and colon blow, maybe around the 80-90k range. Good taste, but just spicy enough to cause real damage if you overdo it. Suffice to say we both significantly overdid it and had to suck down a six pack each to numb the pain. Nothing liking turning a terrible day of home-ownership into a highly efficient dinner/pre-game with the holy grail of hot sauce from the most underrated hot sauce store ever; ACE HARDWARE! #winning


6/9/2011 UPDATE: Since I know PH is dying to hear the conclusion to the riveting TV SAGA.... He'll be glad to hear we finally got it on the wall last night. #edgeofyourseatdrama

Broker Gifts that Don't Suck

I recently installed the new Google Chrome beta OS, and during the transition to this high-powered software I managed to lose my saved "login and password information". Luckily, this didn't impact any of the password-protected websites I browse since I check things like bank statements, gmail, twitter, facebook, credit cards, etc on a daily basis so the passwords are hard-wired into the subconscious of my typing fingers. Or so I thought, until I remembered that I actually had a blog as well.... and for the life of me I could not figure out how to log into this POS. Oh well, yet another monthly reminder that I should probably put more effort into blogging. Anyway.... I've reset the password so now there's the chance I start posting more than once a month- We'll see! Anyway, moving on to the point of the post:


The main determinant of how hedge funds allocate their trades between brokers- Anecdotal evidence provided by the low man on the totem pole of an unknown fund not based in NYC

The holiday season at a hedge fund is usually a happy time as an analyst for a couple reasons:

1) Senior people go on vacation for extended periods of time, allowing you to browse youtube and facebook for extended periods of time

2) Bonus season is close and the disappointment from last year has faded over the past 11 months, so you are naive and optimistic about the number

3) And most importantly, the broker gifts start arriving! All year sell-side firms vie for your firm's business, offering research, access to management teams, execution, etc. But it is a little known fact that none of these matter, and the only real way to distinguish yourself is through the holiday gift. I had the (mis)fortune of starting work in this industry in 2007, so really only had one good year of gifts before the recession hit and the presents went to sh*t. Oh well, I still fondly remember the 10 pound metal container of candy from GS that I stole out of the kitchen and kept under my desk. But anyway, ever since then the gifts have been awful. I can't tell you how many fruit baskets that have remained unopened and unloved (FYI Bulge-Bracket: a fruit-basket garners you no trades) in HF kitchens across the globe. So you can imagine my surprise when last week (Note: not a holiday season for any religion that I am familiar with) a broker gift came from the Barclays Capital. Barc holds a special place in my heart as it is the home to the top nat gas analyst on the street, none other than the esteemed AVP James R. Crandell. That being said, I can't say it is known for gifts. But anyway, I'll stop dragging this out and get to the chase and display the gift. I don't believe any commentary is necessary from me in order to explain how amazing (think +7 std devs) this gift was. Thank you Barclays, get ready for some trades!

"Hot Liquidity"- Habanero Hot Sauce, gift from the LX Liquidity Cross dark pool (fastest growing dark pool in the US in '10 with 120% growth!). Contact the Barclay's electronic sales desk for hot sauce samples.