A great quote from recently released A's pitcher Travis Blackley

Blackley lamented his fate after a nightmarish spring in which he posted a 14.21 ERA and allowed 27 hits in 12  2/3 innings. Opponents hit .450 against him.

"I kind of saw it coming, just from previous experiences," said Blackley, 6-4 with a 3.86 ERA in 24 games last season including 15 starts. "You've got to be making a lot of money to get away with the spring I had and still make the team."

Incredible....another article from a brainless author concerning an analyst and his Apple rating.  Wait....this is from 2010.  Read carefully!!!

An ‘I told you so’ moment for early Apple bear

 

Has Apple analyst Edward Zabitsky finally been proven right?

By Quentin Fottrell

In 2010, when Apple stock was trading at $199, Edward Zabitsky, CEO of ACI Research in Toronto, was the only analyst on Wall Street to rate the stock a “sell.” Over the next two years, shares went on a tear, peaking at just over $705 and making Apple the world’s largest company as measured by stock-market value. Today, shares have fallen by more than a third from that high. Through it all, Zabitsky has stuck to his bearish call; and while he has since been joined by a couple other pros who have sell ratings on the stock, including Adnaan Ahmad at Berenberg Bank and Per Lindberg at ABG Sundal Collier, Zabitsky retains the distinction, and in some circles the notoriety, of having gotten there first.


COMMENTS:  How could this be an "I told you so" moment?  "Proven right???"  I realize too well that aapl stock has performed very poorly since Sept. of 2012.  Nevertheless, the price of the stock as of the end of 03/28/2013, is 442.66.  Is 442.66 still a higher number than 199.00????  (OH, I should have known, "analysts" math is JUST different).

I thought the other analyst giving aapl a $710 price target was bad enough.  Here, this analyst is being lauded and applauded for rating aapl a sell at $199 back in 2010, even though the stock price today is 442.66.  Unbelievable... :-))

Read the green highlighted section carefully and stop vilifying Marissa Mayer for her 100% correct, proper and justifiable decision to ban telecommuting at Yahoo, for now at least.  This should serve as a warning to all remote workers.  Remote workers doesn't mean turning on the television with your tv remote control and watching soap operas or talk shows.  It doesn't mean going to the gym or finishing up your weekend project on that lousy, crooked looking wood work thing, you call a cabinet :-)))

How Marissa Mayer Figured Out Work-At-Home Yahoos Were Slacking Off (YHOO, GOOG)

Nicholas Carlson, provided by

Yahoo banned employees from working from home.

How did CEO Marissa Mayer decide to make such a controversial decision?
According to a source, the only way Mayer is comfortable making any decision: with the help of data.

Like a lot of companies, Yahoo has something called a Virtual Private Network or VPN. Remote workers can use it to securely log into Yahoo's network and do work.
(LifeHacker has a really good explanation of what a VPN is.)

After spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were, Mayer consulted Yahoo's VPN logs to see if remote employees were checking in enough.

Mayer discovered they were not — and her decision was made.

Kara Swisher first reported the news that Mayer was showing executives Yahoo's VPN logs to justify her work-from-home ban.  Mayer is famously obsessed with metrics and data.

 

Once, a Google designer quit the company in a huff because he was tired of how Mayer, in charge of how Google.com homepage looked, would choose design elements like color or font not based on taste, but raw data.

For every design variable, she looked at how users inteacted with Google with one design — and then the other.

If the data showed users were using Google.com faster one way instead of the other, that particular design choice won out.

It's hard to argue that Mayer's process didn't work for Google. It was not the first search engine on the market, but it's just about the only one anybody uses now.

Likewise, we're hearing from people close to Yahoo executives and employees that she made the right decision banning work from home.  "The employees at Yahoo are thrilled," says one source close to the company.  "There isn't massive uprising. The truth is, they've all been pissed off that people haven't been working."

HELLOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!  IS ANYONE THERE?  LOWERED TO $710???  IS $710 A TYPO???.....IT MUST BE A TYPO.....

Why Charlie Wolf lowered his Apple price target to $710
By Philip Elmer-DeWitt February 25, 2013: 12:43 PM ET
The difference between Wolf and Wall Street may be that he values Apple's cash holdings

FORTUNE -- There's something about Charlie Wolf's approach to Apple (AAPL) that I find charmingly old school -- perhaps because he's been in the business even longer (14 years at First Boston and 15 at Needham & Co.) than I have.
Most analysts seem to change their mind about Apple's prospects every time the wind shifts; Baird Equity's William Power, for example, has issued seven different Apple price targets in the past 12 months.
Wolf, by contrast, recalibrates his targets on a strict biannual schedule -- once in February and again in August. And he tells you with some precision how he arrives at those targets, breaking down Apple's line items -- Trefis style -- by their contribution to what he thinks the company ought to be worth.
In his most recent reevaluation -- issued Monday -- Wolf lowered his 12-month Apple price target to $710 from $750.

Data: Needham. Chart: PED. Click to enlarge.

That puts him an even $100 a share over the Street's median target (as reported by Thomson/First Call) -- primarily, as near as I can tell, because he puts a value on Apple's excess cash of $142.48 a share. According to Greenlight Capital's David Einhorn, the market values the company's $137 billion cash stockpile at less than zero.
The highlights of Wolf's latest report: (I quote)
On the positive side, the growth in excess cash over the past six months added $18.70 or 15.1% to Apple's valuation.
A newly minted line item — iTunes, software and services — contributed $83.48 or 11.7% to Apple's valuation chiefly because of the outsized gross margins Apple earns on its software.
On the down side, the value of the iPad fell $11.83 or 10.8% to $98.11 chiefly because of the introduction of the iPad mini, which has a much lower gross margin that the full-sized iPad.
The value of the iPhone fell $14.56 or 4.5% to $308.64 because of our assumption that the iPhone's worldwide share would stabilize at 20% rather than 22% as before.
The largest decline occurred in the Mac, whose value fell from $100.50 to $57.42, a 42.9% decline, in belated recognition that neither Mac nor Windows sales would continue to rise at past rates because of the onslaught of the iPad and other tablets.
"The lingering risk in the Apple story," he concludes, "is that the company may no longer innovate at the same pace and with the same disruption that characterized the era when Steve Jobs was at the helm. With respect to our valuation model, any deterioration in the iPhone's market share or gross margin would have an outsized impact on our price target."
Below: Wolf's current valuation spreadsheet. The NAs reflect line items that Apple rejigged in January.