Today's diary - Day 3

Mid March and haven't had such a winter show-off for hundreds of years in this country. I'm sick and tired of the snow this year. It's pretty cold, but that doesn't bother me much, since I'm staying at home. Traffic jams all-time Belgian record was reached today with 1600 km of traffic jam during rush hour this morning. People took ages to get to work, where under normal conditions it'd  also take ages! The whole of Western Europe was actually screwed up big time, today. Just saw yesterday evening's footage from the Northwest of France. Poor buggers were left without electricity too. This morning train traffic here was in shambles. Passengers have been waiting their connections for hours. Awful. All this in bleeding March! What else? Frankfurt airport, down and closed for three hours. Imagine the chaos. It's good to be a pensioner in days like this. -10° Celsius is the forecast for tonight. Thank God, we'll stay dry though. No more snow. I hope.
I had not much to do to waste my time this morning, so I stayed protected behind my double glazing windows and 'enjoyed' other people's misery, going to work or school by car, on foot or on their bikes. I shot tens of pictures of pedestrians, bikers and car drivers. Link to flickr via the links supplied in the beginning of this paragraph to see for yourselves. Even the worst blizzard won't stop four and five year olds from going to school, in the arms of their dad or granddad, a few even carrying the school bags on a sleigh! The weather in this part of the world is really so bad, winter and summer included, that the last thing that'd stop people from going on with their lives is some snow weather. That reminds me of some other place where half an inch snow would paralyse the entire bleeding country. A good excuse to stay home and eat roasted chestnuts. Increased queues at the doctor's waiting room for a 'day's' flu certificate for the employer too. The TV reports this evening only had one subject. The snow chaos! Ever thought how the world would be like if water was freezing at -20° instead of zero degrees? Would that solve all our problems? Who knows... 

   

Today's diary - Day 2

Who knows, maybe this becomes a new habit of mine. I recently saw a BBC documentary from some time ago about Leo Tolstoy and was intrigued about how people 150 years ago kept daily diaries, even by both spouses in a household, that is. They also shared those between them as a token of devotion and eternal 'love'. I'm sharing mine with the world, regardless there will only be a handful who'd really bother reading them. No worries. Couldn't care less. Just expressing opinions...

Chavez cont'd. I saw a series of photographs by Reuters yesterday of Venezuelans mourning his death and taking it to the streets. Heartbreaking shots of unseen public hysteria. I made a selection of few among those pictures and sent them to my 'jokes' list of recipients. This is a list of folks worldwide, friends, relatives and close acquaintances that send me and receive from me all sorts of Internet wisdoms and jokes (some spicy, among other... don't we all do this?). Anyways, I got a reaction from Katmandu (yes, Nepal, no shit) and one from Athens, Greece, saying that we, in the West, actually know far too little about him (other than his populist bullying of the leaders of the West), and that he did a lot for his people. That's why they mourn him. Some of it must be true I gather. Good for him. May he rest in peace. That's what many Italians also say about Sylvio as well. Among ourselves boys and gals, I like Sylvio. His political opponents, traditional Italian parties, having failed miserably in the past on domestic issues (it's not only the Greeks holding that trophy, mind you), not being able to deal with him on the acute social and economic, let alone political issues that hold Italy awake these days, have turned over to a war of Tabloids instead. I have known of him as the President of Fininvest in the 80ies, when his company was a consulting customer of ours. Yep, Fininvest was one of our most important customer references. We did quite some work on ITC strategy for them, in times most other companies couldn't even spell the word properly. And Sylvio was on top of things, I remember. I was actually told that by one of our senior consultants who happened to have met Berlusconi in project meetings (that's good ol' Graham Price, an ex-Xerox Corp executive, RIP, passed in 1999). Yep, I was one of the 'lucky' ones to have heard about the Maestro before the rest of the world crowds came to hear and hate him. It was the time of the capitalist rebels in Italy, the likes of Berlusconi and Carlo de Benedetti. Against the traditional 'aristocracy' of the Agnelli's and others like them. Viva Sylvio? Why not?

AAPL: Motley Fool reports an Apple downgrade by Barenberg Bank, moving its target from 800 bucks to 360! Reminds me of those clowns who put the same AAPL target at 1111 bucks half a year ago! The BB analyst also moved them from Buy to Sell! Can you imagine this? This alone tells you the whole story about this idiot. A 'sell' recommendation is something you never see mentioned about blue chips, unless they are headed to disaster and everybody knows that from the actual facts, that is their financial reports. How can you recommend selling a stock of a company who still turns around margins of 40%, grows at the speed of light and dominates the world in everything surrounding our electronic being? Not to forget the mountain of cash they are sitting on, estimated at the best part of 150 billion US, as we speak. So, my recommendation is this. Stay away from Barenberg Bank. If that's the sort of analysts they employ, they are actually acting along the top clowns and comedians of the world, going after simple sensation alone; they'd be the last place on earth I'd trust any of my hard earned dough to. To talk about another bank, UBS of all people, published far more reasonable reports recently urging investor patience, by looking at the real facts. Well, that's what makes the difference between the Swiss and Americans. The Swiss love facts and solid foundations, whereas Americans are swearing by 'hot air rhetorics', TV preachers and sensation gurus! Pity that they still control most of the world's wealth in their hands. Not for long, I hope. Here cometh People's Republic of China!

Today's diary...

Chavez: The day started with the news of his passing. Radio bulletins here spoke of a populist socialist leader. The one who dared challenge George W. and called him, straight in his face, cowboy and a donkey! A South American Berluscone. He wasn't able to defeat cancer though. Cancer is the only solid way left to rid oneself of populist leaders, especially those calling themselves socialists. In a sense, Communists were at least less pretentious prats and called it what it was. A Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
We got plenty of them soft Socialists around, abusing in the name of democracy and freedom the wealth of the countries that trusted them with their leadership. Look no further than Greece for this. The ruling PASOK (thank God not anymore as ruling as used to be) created a new dominant class in the center left, inside which it elevated scores of incompetent apparachiks, many of whom came from rural territories with little knowledge of the real world, and turned into notorious abusers and champions of corruption. I hope they put them one by one behind bars for a very long time! Like they did to the 1967 colonels, 8 years later. At least, Hugo escaped the bars...

AAPL: The raid by the Hedgies on the best company ever invented by man continues. For the first time since a long time the company is valued at less than 400B. There is an increasing pressure by the hedgies to get some real cash out of the company, with wünderkind David Einhorn carrying the flag. I don't like hedgies and their ways too much, as they are increasingly destroying the markets, where neither fundamentals not technicals can give you any clues about whether to invest in a given name or stay away from it. They provide liquidity in the market, they say, by trading anything that moves from penny stocks to big caps, and at the same time they have been able to wipe out of Apple's valuation more value than the entire market cap of lame duck Microsoft, and Google too, taken separately however. Apple's management is much softer than His Jobness and therefore, think the Hedgies, let's put some pressure upon them to return some more dividend cash. The AAPL dividend yield used to be in the region of 1.5% and has now risen by one percent points solely due to its last six months downhill ride. Many blue chips pay in dividends more than that though, but others, with a shedload of cash too, like Google, are paying a diddle squat (but the 'market' is still forgiving them, until their turn arrives and their bubble bursts too). The entire world of wannabe 'analysts', tech gurus and 'business experts', who never worked in a 'real' company but pretend to know everything about running a business, are out there with doomsday scenarios for Apple every single moment for the last six months. The pile of crap I have read during this time about why Apple is 'dead' money and will be another Microsoft or RIM and NOKIA are beyond belief. What is the problem with these people? Don't they get laid decently or what? Thank God, the wisest man of the lot, good old Warren Buffett came out yesterday urging Apple Management to ignore Einhorn and simply buy back some stock with their mountain of cash. I'm not sure he's absolutely right on this, but the fact alone that he said something about it is important. The stock eventually moved up yesterday, along with the day's trend, following Warren's remarks. Any connection between the two? Who knows?

Windows 8: I read an article this morning about what a new revenue disaster area for Microsoft this one has been again. We thought we saw everything with Vista, but Windows 8 has done even worse. The article spoke about 8 to 10 reasons why Win 8 is crap, but who cares? Microsoft has lost it for more than 10 years now. Ballmer has got simply now clue. He's lost is a sea of corporate bullshit, he keeps making himself a clown with what he says, and even more so for what he does or doesn't do, and he couldn't tell (or spell) either 'strategy' or 'innovation' even if it hit him in his baldy skull! Unfortunately Bill and his charming wife Melinda are committed to 'saving' the world these days, and Bill is doing one mistake after another by keeping Monkey Boy in the reigns, so best thing we can all do is go sell any MSFT stock if we still hold any. This is simply 'dead' money. In 10 years from now, we'll still find Windows in technology graveyards. This time over Apple's ideas weren't stolen by Bill, but by Google's Largey and their squirrel boy chairman Eric Schmidt, not the Microsoft dinos: the latter stayed blindfolded by their own arrogance!

Publishing of the future: I'm helping an author friend with her third literary publication in two years, a poetry bundle this time, and came to consider the practices of this book (print) publishing industry all over again. On one hand you got the independent online publishers, like Lulu, Blurb and one from Amazon itself. You send them online your properly designed and formated book as a simple pdf, and they do the rest. Digital printing it is called. No obligation to print anything more than one single copy, mind you. No start up funding for offset plates and hundreds of books committed to print in the socalled 'First' edition. They will regularly launch attractive discounts for any number of copies and offer considerable volume discounts in the high double digit percentages. All in digital prints and with proper binding mind you, like I mentioned. Suppose you are a start up author of some sort. Or maybe an one time author, possibly so. You want to publish your book the traditional way. You ain't got a single penny to scratch your ass, but the large Publishing Houses, a bunch of T-Rex dinos relying upon pretentious selection committees with members from the tribe of sour critics that is, have you waiting for months or years for their accept/reject verdict. These folks only look for best sellers in fact, and the only way they'll cope with you is when you throw an attractive number of kilo dollars in their lap, for using their Brand Name and Good Reputation! That's one of the reasons even best selling authors ended up using obscure Publishing Houses that nobody knew, as a reaction, when they experienced the traditional T-Rex Houses wouldn't pay any attention to them. Sheer arrogance all over again. So, what do you do? Well, maybe the same as I did. Just pissed all over their thick skin by neglecting them altogether and selected Independence over Pretence instead. In the meantime, those 'traditional' ways are starving out as their businesses go broke and become increasingly extinct. Either adapt and grow or stay put and die!

Another painful experience in the business of authoring, especially for those writers doing this for a living, are the traditional outlets for selling their marchandise. The so-called 'bookshops'. Not only they taketh a huge cut off the value of the items they carry, for holding the 'stock' in their premises and displaying them in their windows, but above all, they keep those needy authors unpaid. Bookshop owners will carry the stock alright, and also require their own buyers to pay cash on the spot. Authors however, simple people from the normal authoring crowd (not the Dan Browns of this world), will have to wait for ever to get paid. This is quite a common practice everywhere, far more so in markets under the black clouds of the current 'economy crisis', like in my fatherland, it certainly is the dominant practice.

What do you do then as an ambitious new author? You just ignore the bastards. Desintermediation all over again. Sell directly to end buyers. Switch off those feckers and sell to the members of your trapline public, be creative thru social networks and spread the word of mouth. Long live Internet for this. eMail and the Web! You might not become a bestselling author right away though, but at least you are not enriching abusers and pretentious bookshop owners, and one way or another you are covering your expenses at least. My own experience of book publishing thru Lulu in print or electronic form has been superb. No financial risk, and a broad spectrum of services for designing, printing and making your goodies known all over the global village, Planet Earth. I even known of people, not especially talented literature authors themselves, who have been systematically publishing for years on Amazon, away indeed from the usual suspect celeb 'labels' or 'brands', and still managed to sell books in the millions. This is the name of the game for the years to come, kids. Current and future authors selecting the independent publishing business model will be singing their way to the bank, looking the other way when they come across incidental memorial ceremonies and obituaries in the graveyards of the Traditional dino Houses, that is...

Another fresh assault on Apple stock

Another day, another short. I'll eventually have to believe a recent article about manipulation of the Apple stock price. And it's not only the traders themselves that push the price over the cliff. It's the entire charade helping to make this happen, the specialised media, ambitious bloggers, and the Press (online and print) who altogether combine forces to doom the stock. The latter proved extremely volatile to similar assaults. In fact, Apple's fundamentals do not justify at all the extremely low E/P multiples, but despite what is true for every other company, it doesn't seem to hold for Apple these days. It's like a shedload of short-selling traders and other Apple haters decided to go after the company.

They then spread in orchestrated fashion all sorts of (untrue and unqualified) rumours, or exaggerate non events while choosing to mute important, and as premarket trading opens the assault is already under way. This morning the bad 'news' was spread by WSJ, and has been reinforced about three times every five minutes by Bloomberg's Betty Liu. Like she had nothing else to report, for crying out loud! All media seemed to repeat the same ol' song: Apple cut iPhone 5 component orders to its Far East suppliers. Thus, it's iPhone is gonna be losing grounds against rival Samsung and Android powered smartphones. Was this news at all? Apparently not. It was old news. By the time this torrent of negativity hit the market I got an internal UBS report on my email saying that the fact reported by WSJ has already been known for a month, and had been reported too, by UBS among others. It indeed hit the markets early December last year!!! Apparently this morning gambler traders wanted this to happen again and scare other traders away from the stock, force margin calls, and push the price as low as it can get. And all this happening only a breath away from Apple's announcement of 1Q13 results in the coming days. If those reports prove stellar again (which they will), then we'll witness a huge jump northwards, and those same gamblers shall eventually profit accordingly. It's all about making an easy buck, that is...

Before year-end 2012 the story went that the stock should drop because of the fiscal cliff risks. Now, with that phoney scare being out of the way, gambling traders need to pull other lies off their sleeves. As an example, I was reading a report earlier this morning saying that Samsung climbed from 8% to over 30% in terms of market share in smartphones, whereas Apple fell from 23 to 18%. All this is based on data of well 'respected' analysts, mind you. I wonder though. Is that so that all Samsung and other Android smartphone owners are so embarrassed about their tools that they never show them in public? Honest to God, I see iPhones everywhere, in all social classes and age demographics. I see nothing than iPhones. It's almost painful. How come I never see any smartphones of the South-Korean market leaders? TV sets? Fine. But smartphones? Lots of billboards and media ads! But the real thing? If you still doubt, do the math: Walk anywhere you can think of. A movie theater, a bar, a supermarket, a business meeting. Ask everyone to show their phones. Count them and calculate percentages. And then tell me who's the freakin' market leader! I believe this is a world-wide scam orchestrated by some extremely powerful 'unknown' money owners to turn their short-selling objectives into a self fulfilling prophecy about the greatest company our mankind has ever known. And destroy its valuation! To simply enrich themselves further by sheer gambling and not by any form of honest labour.

Apple is a company that actually has re-written the management science syllabus all over again. Harvard and Stanford hot shots must experience a serious frustration with this. Have an 'agnostic' smartass like Jobs, with no descent degree whatsoever other than high school, tell them how to build their teaching curricula?!?! Gimme a break, dude! But I am not surprised of the behaviour of nay-sayers. In their rather 'pretentious' anti-monopolistic free-market obsession Americans will always try to bring down their best homegrown entrepreneurships, first IBM, then Microsoft, now Apple. Google next. Maybe Amazon too. Who knows? Nonetheless, their list of billionaires keeps rising. We never had as many as now. Owning trillions of dollars in cumulative fortune and material possessions. It's during moments like these that I miss Steve the most. I don't know, Tim may be a great guy, but should Steve still be around I'm sure he'd have uttered something nasty that could turn the 4-month old anti-Apple tsunami back against those Apple haters themselves.

Another article I read this morning compares recent IDC reports claiming a volume shrinkage of US Mac sales during the last holiday quarter by 2% whereas the Gartner group reported a 5% growth. How can two such notorious and sophisticated analysts agree to disagree so widely apart on such simple and fundamental stats? Apparently, they often seem to disagree, it has been observed, being rivals of course. Who is right and who is wrong then? Answer: the one who serves your own personal objectives is the one you will select as the right one. There's no science about it. In the world of traders you can prove anything you like with numbers and reports. To the AAPL bearish it's gonna be the IDC, to the bullish it's undoubtedly Gartner. Question is, who pulls the strongest in this tug of war of short sellers vs long buyers during a day's trading? The rest is just fairy tales in print, feeding the masses with daily bullshit! So, keep cool and ride the wave at the 'right' moment. Don't panic, don't listen to them nay-sayers, use your brain and not your heart, and you'll exactly know when the moment arrives. Trust me on this...

Quality, hard work, and humility often go together...

'Notos' Chef and Owner, Constantin Erinkoglu

Constantin Erinkoglu is a remarkable individual. In February 2010 I wrote about him and his restaurant Notos in Brussels, after I saw him in an episode of a Flemish National TV programme about celebrity chefs and restaurants in Belgium, produced by Wim Opbrouck. I also posted excerpts of that episode on my Youtube channel, in which Constantin is shown to prepare two traditional Greek dishes and respond to Wim's questions. Watching that episode made me feel very proud of the man, Constantin, as I happen to be a native Greek myself and living in Belgium, just like him. He was born a few hundred kms from my own birthplace, I learned later. I also saw the remaining episodes of that TV series, and I can assure you that Constantin displayed something the remaining chefs in the series entirely lacked. He elevated the degree of intellect of the entire interview with Opbrouck to another dimension. In well chosen and simple terms he was able to explain his own philosophy and motivation for doing what he did. I felt quite moved. Wim's cameraman did an outstanding job too in capturing Constantin from the best possible angle and show us that very special sparkle in his eyes. It was the moment Constantin explained the role of food tastes and flavours not solely triggering our appetite but bringing us closer to our history, tradition and culture. I could tell then the man must have been a genuine outlier, somebody bound to be successful in anything he touched. I have seen this signal of talent in many occasions and in various roles and responsibilities during my long career that only a few outstanding individuals possess. You can tell quality when you see it, that's for sure! Constantin is such a person. With hard work, an eye for detail, creativity, and above all, humility he was able to shine. Eventually the local 'market' of Burgundian Belgians, traditionally passionate about quality food, 'discovered' Constantin and 'Notos', and he subsequently landed as primus inter pares in the world of quality chefs in this country. He's probably the best Chef of Greek cuisine outside of Greece, certainly in the European subcontinent. Somebody once called him the best ambassador for Greece in Central Europe, especially now that everybody thinks bitterly, to say the least, about the country of our forefathers, and makes those of us in the diaspora often feel sadness about the chaos Greek politicians and their tactics have led the country into.

Fleurs de Pontos - A traditional Notos dish

I never before felt so strongly about the concept of food preparation being linked to tradition and culture in the degree Constantin was able to explain. This was no regular Ramsey or Oliver stuff. That is sheer culinary poetry and art. Cross my heart, what came to my mind when I heard him explain his motivation for abandoning a safe and well paying job at the Commission, and start Notos as his only entrepreneurship were scenes from the movie Chocolat (2000), and an article I saw in April 2010 in the New Yorker magazine about the 'memory' of flavors and the cultural elements associated with traditional ethnic kitchen.

Since my 2010 blogpost I have dined at Notos twice. That second time was yesterday, when four of us came to the restaurant for dinner to celebrate the birthday of one of us. The previous time I didn't quite have the opportunity to talk to Constantin directly because he happened to be abroad for the day, but yesterday it was my lucky day. I spoke to our charming and utterly hospitable young lady waiter about my wish to meet him and soon later he came to our table. I was stunned by his openness, charm and hospitality. Not a single sign of success inspired arrogance whatsoever, but abundant humility and full of respect instead. But above all I was struck by the strength of his thought stream, his ideas and humble opinions concerning the current state of our country. His eyesight darkened when he referred to the state of our Greek economy and the fact that tradition risks to perish in the wake of current turbulences. He seemed to know Morocco quite well, and he admitted he enjoyed travelling to places like Marrakech occasionally, as well as to its neighbouring villages, where he could still experience the sights and sounds of the past but also the genuine hospitality of endogenous Morrocans, living in a discipline carved by a whole set of old virtues and past traditions, yet untouched by the perils of globalisation and the media. "We used to be like them before, in Greece", he said, but "we seem to be losing this gradually and for good".

He offered us a bottle of excellent Cabernet wine (2004) from the Peloponnese, and he chatted with us for a few more minutes enjoying a glass in our company. I asked him about the current course of his business (the restaurant of about 75 seats was packed at about 9pm) and whether it was still hard to assure a reservation and had to be proactive months in advance. "We used to be like that when we were located in a 25 seat space before", he said, "when people had just discovered us, and some attractive reports appeared in the press". After that we moved here and we don't seem to have a problem for years now. We seem to manage well, within reason of course. If you only called the day before or same day, well, then you naturally risk to face occasional unavailability, but under normal circumstances we can accomodate bookings rather well. Nobody should have to reserve a restaurant months in advance. What would be the point of such a thing?" he remarked. "No, we don't have a reservation problem", he said. "Spread the word".

As I was thinking about the title of this blogpost this morning, I replayed yesterday's scenes in my mind. And thinking about Constantin I concluded: Indeed, hard work and humility mostly go together with quality.

PS. I omitted to critic the quality of the dishes we had yesterday, as I would have to fall into a repetition of superlatives. If in doubt about my own opinion, as I might be considered biased being a 'DNA related' compatriot, ask Belgian ex-prime Minister and current MEP Guy Verhofstadt instead, a great fan of Constantin's, many other BVs (Bekende Vlamingen - Famous Flemish people), or the scores of past and current high ranked functionaries of the Commission. My choice of fleurs de Pontos were simply divine, and the main course of lamb with quince slices, what can I say, simply to lick your fingers, as we Greeks usually admit... Not to mention the pantespani as desert...(sigh)