To summarize the weekend’s editorial commentary, picked from the usual and varied sources, nobody knows, everyone waits, and when in doubt, we go with the safe selection. It’s only the end of the first whole week of the year, so way too soon to draw conclusions. There was much anticipation at the end of 2009, a year of economic uncertainty, that 2010 would be the year in which clarity, direction, and a normal environment, would return. And maybe this will be the case, but not yet. There was much anticipation heading into CES, the consumer trinket show that is a foreshadowing of upcoming trends in consumerism, but with CES come and gone, the only debate is whether the iPhone has really been improved upon by the Nexus One, or not. If not, then what just happened… and if yes, does it really matter… In any case, the differences between the two phones are not monumental enough to cut down on the explaining and debating, so really it seems more a matter of interpretation, and perhaps some inherent bias: in short, the CES paralleled the state of our broader economy.
Now, whether the marketing approach that has been introduced by Google, indeed novel, is a disruption or a bust, depends on demand for the underlying product, without which the rest is still academic. Whether there is a bigger elephant in the room, namely Apple’s January 27th revelation of whatever it is that Apple will reveal, is impossible to know. By the same token, there are bigger economic unknowns, such as employment results that may or may not signify what these might appear to signify, and in any case these signify so many different things. Few, perhaps no one, really understand.
I hear the lack of confidence whenever I talk to active investors, whether private- or public-market oriented, and what compounds the issue, what magnifies the concerns, is that despite all of the great matters of consequence and potential news, there is very little on the horizon that is likely to change anything materially. Just as the Apple tablet is unlikely to suddenly revolutionize consumer computing and open up a new wave of technology, any national employment or real estate data updates are unlikely to either signal the “all clear” or tell us that things are getting much worse.
And thus, we’re in a scattershot horizontal pattern. This is the trickiest of all patterns for investors, business managers, entrepreneurs, because one doesn’t get easily lifted or dropped by waves. There are no waves, or rather, there are many small waves of inconsistent, if not contradictory, and almost random nature. So one has to be particularly nimble, one has to learn to navigate with extra dexterity, and one has to learn to operate with minimal weight. Weight comes in different forms for different types of operation or investment, and perhaps I can follow up with further ideas about this subject in a subsequent post. A general suggestion is alright for now, keeping the discussion light.
