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If you can't place nice, play roller derby

One of the world’s fastest-growing sports is making a comeback in the university gyms and school halls of inner-city Sydney. All-girl, flat-track roller derby revival is a punk, post-feminist, grrl power, contact sport with an emphasis on skill and safety. The competitors names reflect their on-track personalities like Miss Biff, Trippy Longstockings, Aprilla the Hun, Punky Chewster, and Surly Valentine.

I’ll be taking my daughters to watch the second bout of the new Sydney League (there are only 3 bouts in the inaugural league).

Bout 2: 28 JuneStarts 12.30pm, Doors open 12noon
Tickets from Sydney Roller Derby League
Tickets about $10.00/$5.00 concession
Sydney Boys’ High Stadium
Cleveland Street, Moore Park
NSW Australia

Wanna come? The bout will last an hour.

Like Tank Girl on roller skates with edge.

The Sydney Roller Derby League is bringing the wicked world of all-girl flat-track roller derby to Sydney and looking forward to taking on the globe – on the track and off!

What is roller derby?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_derby

Sydney Roller Derby League
http://www.sydneyrollerderby.com/

Photos from the SRDL
http://www.sydneyrollerderby.com/mod/slideshow/view.php?id=153

IF you believe mainstream media, Sol Trujillo is the most unpopular man in Australia and Telstra is the most unpopular company [full disclosure: I am the beneficiary of a Telstra shareholding]. I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven Telstra for its monopolistic behaviour back when it was Telecom and I didn’t have a choice of carriers.

When Telstra was booted out of the National Broadband Network tender process for submitting a non-compliant tender, pundits were eagerly predicting Telstra’s demise or other “dark and awful consequences”. Telstra had submitted a tender that suited their business model, aspirations and view of the future. They signaled the only way they’d consider lining up for the $4.7 Billion AUD the government was offering. I congratulate them for having the balls to stick to their guns.

Today the Federal Government announced none of the remaining tenders were “value for money” and instead would form a new company to build a fibre to the home network to 90% of Australians. Much ink will be spilled in the future on this deviation from the tender outcomes requested, namely 98% fibre to the node.

Here’s my quick take home analysis:

1. Submitting a tender of this size and complexity is a very expensive exercise.
2. No tenderer was awarded a contract despite complying with the guidelines.
3. Telstra spent a little money outlining the conditions they would accept.
4. Who looks smart now?

This seems like a brilliant use of game theory by Telstra. Sol and his team have been called arrogant and out-of-touch, I think they protected their shareholders interests well.

Just because a deal is on the table doesn’t mean it’s always wisest to take it.

How can companies still think what they do is top secret. Note I’m not talking about intelligence, research or military organizations here. I mean general competitive businesses in a competitive marketplace.

How many of the projects we’ve been sworn to keep secret really needed or benefited from that? How many top secret projects failed to launch? Again I’m not talking about early gestation with limited resources, there’s a time and place for keeping something under wraps until it’s time – however even then most people keep it too secret for too long.

Enthusiasm is the hardest attribute to sustain in any endeavor.

I’ve found many companies with a Culture of Secrecy are really staffed by people avoiding scrutiny or responsibility. If they don’t say what they are going to achieve, they can’t be held accountable when they miss.

Everybody misses from time to time. Me included. Looking at what went wrong often more valuable than succeeding by a fluke.

Fear is the other great cause of the secrecy cult. Every manager worthy of the title has had an employee leave to work for a competitor. Weak managers of weak businesses respond by limiting the flow of ideas and information to the team that drives the business. They hope a defection cannot harm them again, without reviewing  if that harm was more than a bruised ego. This is overprotective thinking. When you fell over as a baby while learning to walk, you tried again until you mastered it. If a business is only as good as its secrets it has no better competitive advantage in the marketplace. Are there low barriers to entry for competitors?

Find your competitive advantange. That may be worth keeping close to the chest, but I doubt it. Your success flows from knowing what you do better than anyone else – what others cannot take from you.

Think of great global brands and great businesses like Coca-Cola, American Express, IBM, Toyota, McDonald’s. While some part of their operations are necessarily private they don’t have a culture of secrecy. Where do you want your company to be in 20 years?

For another perspective check out what Robin wrote a while ago at Snarkmarket on iPhone, Secrecy and Excellence

One criticism I forgot to make in yesterday’s NBL Beyond a joke post was the absolute lack of transparency by basketball businesses, administrators, marketers and promoters.

Fans of all types love talking about their favorite things. Basketball has been in crisis for a long time both in Australia and the USA. However the people at the top act as if Basketball is the dominant sports entertainment business and they try to manage the message to the fans. All this does is turn fans off and drive them to other more engaging areas.

As one of the highest participation and interest sports available, how would basketball look if it had an engaged fan base? The only way to get this is to stop trying to spin a message to that fan base. Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Admit the problems, look for options to fix it and engage with the people who most care about the sport. That’s the fans.

I had lunch with a friend who likes basketball, but asked if it was still played professionally in Australia as he hadn’t seen anything about it in years. Those are the people Basketball needs to attract to fill venues at the professional level. In the nineties those people knew about their local team, were not die hard fans, but attended a couple of games per year to enjoy the spectacle. Normally they went because a fan invited them, not because they saw some advertising about a game.

Am I oversimplifying the problem? Do you agree, disagree or think I have no clue? Comment below.

Australia’s National Basketball League has become a joke. Now the Cairns Tiapans have gone into voluntary administration.

They join the Brisbane Bullets, Singapore Slingers and Sydney Kings in bowing out of the NBL this year alone. The Sydney Spirit (formerly the West Sydney Razorbacks) remain only because the NBL could not afford to allow the only Sydney team to stop playing mid season. To make this happen their players, coaches and staff reportedly took a 50% pay cut.

I have a complete set of 1995 limited edition NBL Car Collectibles (New in Box! – yes I’m that much of a geek). 10 of 14 clubs from 1995 are now defunct. Anybody remember: Canberra Cannons, Geelong Supercats, Gold Coast Rollers, Hobart Tassie Devils, South East Melbourne Magic, Newcastle Falcons or North Melbourne Giants? The Kings and Bullets were there too. Townsville were the Suns and not the Crocodiles (a pox on the Pheonix Suns for the trademark dispute). So only four of 14 clubs from 1995 are still around 13 years later, congratulations to Melbourne Tigers, Perth Wildcats, Adelaide 36ers and Illawarra Hawks – hat tip NLB stats.

The Taipans press release blames the international economic crisis for forcing Pacific Toyota to focus on core business and “no longer financially prop up the Cairns Tiapans”. Unfortunately Pacific Toyota’s executive chairman John O’Brien is also Cairns Taipans majority owner. So it sounds like another case of the sports team relying on the success or failure of the owners’ outside business to fund the team as a side venture. We’ve seen this happen with the Kings and the Bullets this year.

When a basketball club is run as a business in its own right, sponsorship deals are at arms length, cover the entire season, prepaid and enforceable. If the league cannot generate sufficient revenue to cover expenses the entire league is no better than an expensive exhibition tournament. Clubs then have sponsorship, merchandising and ticket sales targets to meet their projected expenses. Given the commercial changes occurring next year – possibly requiring a $1million bond for every team, it is not surprising that nobody is interested in keeping a team on life support in such an uncertain time. Why throw away money on a franchise that may not be around next year.

Lastly this season is a huge failure in sports marketing and sports administration. My initial reaction is the merger between Basketball Australia and the NBL is a bad idea. The elite professional game is about sports entertainment. BA’s concerns are sports development and grass roots. These two outcomes are complimentary but often in conflict.

I am currently reading the Australian Basketball Review Stage Two Report and will comment in more detail later. But I want to get this up now.

From today covered short selling of non-financial stocks is allowed again on Australian stock markets. Obviously if you are a short seller you’ve known this for a week. What does it mean to us?

The disclosure and reporting details are in this Market Advice. Australian Securities and Investments Commission – Requirements for disclosure and reporting of short sales from 19 November 2008.

So naked shorts are still banned. Naked shorts means the seller has not yet borrowed the shares before placing the sell order. The seller expects to borrow or buy the shares in order to deliver on the trade.

Covered shorts are allowed for non-financial stocks. Covered shorts means the seller must actually borrow the shares before placing the sell order.

The financial stocks that are still banned from covered short sales are listed at the end of this post. But of course there are some exemptions to that ban

From today all sell orders must be identified as either long sale, short sale (for non-financial stocks) or Covered short sale exempt (you knew there would be an exemption somewhere for financial stocks). Sellers are required to indicate which category their order matches.

As part of the Corporate Finance subject of my MBA we have to calculate the beta coefficient (aka Beta) of a company’s share price. The is applied economics and market mathematics, but it simply is a number which indicates how closely (or not) a company’s share price moves in relation to a broader market (or an index like the S&P ASX200 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average).

Anyway, part of the process is to create an excel spreadsheet to aid with the calculation. I’ve done it and thought I share it with you on this post on Monday 17 November 2008. See you then.

Porsche There is No Substitute!

The background:

• In September 2005 Porsche bought 20% of its larger but less profitable German rival Volkswagen.
• In March 2007 Porsche bought another 19.9% (to 39.9%) and launched a takeover bid.
• In October 2007 the law preventing the takeover of Volkswagen was scrapped.
• On 20 October 2008 Volkswagen’s share price fell 23% on short selling by global hedge funds who bet the price of Volkswagen was too high and Porsche could not economically acquire more stock.
• On 26 October 2008 Porsche announced it controlled Volkswagen through 42.6% direct holding and call options exercised over the another 32.4% (=75% !). As most of the balance is owned by the state or index funds, that left only about 5% on market to cover the shorts the hedge funds sold.
• On Tuesday 28 October Volkwagen became the biggest company in the world momentarily when the hedge funds had to buy “at any cost” driving the price to €1,005 (from below €200 a year ago)
• Late Tuesday Porsche agreed to release an addition 5% of stock to the market to maintain liquidity
• The hedge funds then complained to the regulators that Porsche built a stake without their knowledge.

The sheer arrogance of Hedge Funds crying foul over this should offend me, but it’s their modus operandi to bully, lie and sneak around to make a buck. They have been accused for years of selling naked shorts. Normally you or I must first borrow the stock we plan to sell short before we are allowed to sell it. We’d pay a fee to the lender of the shares. If you sell without borrowing the shares first you are naked. It’s riskier but often more profitable if you can buy the stock on-market after sentiment has turned against a company. Nothing turns sentiment against a company like a huge overhang of stock on the offer line of the quote screen.

So if you can sell a naked short because you think German Automobile Manufacturers are in for a tough time in this economy, it is in your interests to get that story out after you’ve sold. Short sellers told everyone they could that Lehman Brothers was in trouble after they’d sold.

Now naked short sellers represent a counter-party risk of failure to deliver the stock at Trade plus 3 days (T+3).

Take a look at the failure to deliver reports produced by various exchanges. Some companies are consistently targeted by naked short sellers and the sellers regularly fail to deliver stock without serious penalty.

Finally someone with the clout to take on Hedge Funds called their bluff and made a bundle. So the hedge funds cried to the regulators.

These are the same hedge funds ignoring T+3 delivery dates on equities. Imagine what happens if you or I fail to deliver.

What makes me assert these were naked shorts? If the Volkswagen volume was mainly covered shorts it is unlikely the hedge funds would all need to return their borrowed shares in the on Tuesday 28 October. The borrowing would all be on a normal distribution. So there would not be a spike on 28 October intraday to €1,005. The price would be elevated but it would shake sellers out to the market.

Similarly any index funds or active investor should have been reweighing their portfolio, so the impact should be relatively minor compared to the recent overall market malaise.

Sadly there is a cost to the punters of this lesson. Most hedge funds do not take retail investments from small investors. Instead our retirement and superannuation funds place some of our pooled funds into them. So a hedge fund’s loss does come home to its small investors.

It still felt good to see hedge funds take a hit.

A number of people have asked me if there is a simple explanation of the financial crisis. It is difficult to give a simple explanation that doesn’t paint the exclusive cause as naive greed. The credit crisis is one contributing factor to the financial crisis (I see these as two different issues).

I see four major factors as contributing to the credit crisis.

1. Poor quality loans on high risk mortgages and lending practices
2. Securitized high risk loans tainted asset pools that investors purchased
3. Easy money to avoid a recession since dot crash
4. Unchecked naked short selling in the market (allegedly by hedge funds)

When the asset inflation driving US housing bubble stopped, it’s like the music stopped in musical chairs. The scramble to get out drove prices further does and undermined asset prices further.

Here is a funny and slide show that explains the first point

As part of my Corporate Finance class, Warren Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway came up. Nobody had checked its stock price recently so I volunteered to do it. In doing so I came across the following op-ed piece Warren Buffet wrote in the New York Times.

For the record BERKSHIRE HATH HLD A (NYSE: BRK-A) closed on 23 October 2008 at $115,100.00 USD per share with a 52 week range of $105,300.00 – $151,650.00 USD. The company does not pay dividends.

Anyway on the Sage of Omaha’s words

Buy American. I Am.

THE financial world is a mess, both in the United States and abroad. Its problems, moreover, have been leaking into the general economy, and the leaks are now turning into a gusher. In the near term, unemployment will rise, business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary.

So … I’ve been buying American stocks. This is my personal account I’m talking about, in which I previously owned nothing but United States government bonds. (This description leaves aside my Berkshire Hathaway holdings, which are all committed to philanthropy.) If prices keep looking attractive, my non-Berkshire net worth will soon be 100 percent in United States equities.

Why?

A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leveraged entities or businesses in weak competitive positions. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now.

Let me be clear on one point: I can’t predict the short-term movements of the stock market. I haven’t the faintest idea as to whether stocks will be higher or lower a month — or a year — from now. What is likely, however, is that the market will move higher, perhaps substantially so, well before either sentiment or the economy turns up. So if you wait for the robins, spring will be over.

A little history here: During the Depression, the Dow hit its low, 41, on July 8, 1932. Economic conditions, though, kept deteriorating until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933. By that time, the market had already advanced 30 percent. Or think back to the early days of World War II, when things were going badly for the United States in Europe and the Pacific. The market hit bottom in April 1942, well before Allied fortunes turned. Again, in the early 1980s, the time to buy stocks was when inflation raged and the economy was in the tank. In short, bad news is an investor’s best friend. It lets you buy a slice of America’s future at a marked-down price.

Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

You might think it would have been impossible for an investor to lose money during a century marked by such an extraordinary gain. But some investors did. The hapless ones bought stocks only when they felt comfort in doing so and then proceeded to sell when the headlines made them queasy.

Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts.

Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”

I don’t like to opine on the stock market, and again I emphasize that I have no idea what the market will do in the short term. Nevertheless, I’ll follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: “Put your mouth where your money was.” Today my money and my mouth both say equities.

Warren E. Buffett is the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, a diversified holding company.

Update 10:50am ET 24 October 2008 Of course just after I post this, the Dow takes a bath as Wall Street panics. BERKSHIRE HATH HLD A (NYSE: BRK-A) Real-time: 110,903.00 Down 4,197.00 (3.65%)