Thursday Tidbits

Two quick items this morning.

First up, I find it intriguing that PayPal, the former add-on/logical compliment, seems to be growing into being the primary business at eBay. It's bit early to expect the company to change its name to PayPal just yet but the revenue was just over $1 billion versus $2.76 billion for the entire company and I am quite certain it will change the name in a few years.

Quite a few times I've made the comment that the actual internet has exceeded the hype even if the stocks were not priced correctly. The space has been incredibly unpredictable, I think, in that Google and Amazon appear to rule the world and Yahoo appears to be desperate and on the path to being marginalized.

This makes the newest crop of stocks like LinkedIn, Pandora, Zillow (did you see that drop from $60?) and the potential IPOs of Facebook and Dunkin Doughnuts (just threw that one in to make sure you're paying attention) simply the latest phase of the market trying to figure out what to do with internet stocks.

The other thing to mention is the Bloomberg piece on Michael Burry. He is the former cancer patient with a slight case of Asperger's, former doctor, former hedge fund manager who made his mark shorting the housing market (shortened explanation).

The thing that struck me about his story was his conviction in the thesis, the extreme discomfort it created for his investors and his ability to look out over a period of several years. A multi-year thesis is unlikely to look correct after three months and so the occasional performance lag goes with the territory. Complicating matters is that investors must be able to discern between a lag and a broken theme.