The Citi Rally

You may have noticed the market rallied some 6.4% today. Why such a big move? An internal memo from Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit was made public. In the memo, found here, Vikram extols the solid profitability of Citigroup so far this year. In fact, he says “we are profitable through the first two months of 2009 and are having our best quarter-to-date performance since the third quarter of 2007″. Well, that’s good news indeed. If Citi is on the mend, then the governments fixes may be working and/or perhaps the economy is not deteriorating as fast as feared.

Dot Com Week – a personal history

If you didn’t guess from Julio’s post, we decided it is “dot com week” here at TLRB. Actually, we are a week early- the true top of the dot com mania was officially March 10, 2000. We used the NASDAQ’s all time peak to call the date. More specifically, the index stood at 5,048.62 which is a stunning figure compared to today’s 1,321 and 2,000 around Thanksgiving, 1998.

Just one word. Are you listening? Silicon.

“I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Silicon.”  That’s what Benjamin would have heard thirty years later. Forget about the “new economy.” Don’t worry about who’s going to win the processor wars or who will dominate the Internet and the World Wide Web. It doesn’t matter who wins as long as it drives infrastructure. The Silicon machine tool industry seemed like a pretty good place to be in 1995.  And for the most part it was, until the dot.com bubble burst and Sarbanes-Oxley came along.