Seeking Alpha by Adding Beta

Past few years on Oscar Sunday, I have wrote blogs titled "and Oscar goes to..." and most of the times my prediction rate was above 50-75%. This year Oscar event seems to be creating more and more controversies and overall event seems to get boring (as compared to other choices available to spend Sunday evening). Nevertheless, I love movies so here are my predictions for this year's Oscar winners: Best Picture - Roma (this would be historic recognition to streaming world) Best Director -  Alfonso Cuarón,  Roma Actor in leading role -  Rami Malek,  Bohemian Rhapsody Actress in leading role -  Glenn Close,  The Wife Actor in supporting role -  Mahershala Ali,  Green Book Actress in supporting role -  Regina King,  If Beale Street Could Talk Unfortunately I had not seen any of above mentioned movies (other than Roma) till now. No wonder there is less excitement about Oscars this year. The new category Academy tried to create (Po...

Earnings season is almost wrapping up with most of the companies announcing results and forecast better than feared in Dec. With Fed on hold, avoidance of shutdown, incremental but positive progress on trade talks and economy's "goldilocks" state, markets are responding well with 11% gain YTD (largest since 1991 and 1987). IMO, biggest catalyst of trade deal with China is yet to come in Spring. So markets has some more upside left before summer.  Apple has amassed nearly $250 Billion cash and everyone has opinions on what they should do with the cash. With its flagship product iPhone sales slowing down, its obvious that Apple needs next big market to move the needle. So let's look at 4 new markets and potential companies Apple can acquire to get started! Entertainment:   The entertainment industry is changing to streaming world started by Netflix and boosted by Amazon Prime. Netflix original movie "Roma" winning Oscar next Sunday will make it officia...

After stock markets had their Worst December since 1931 and Best January since 1988, one would wonder - what's next? As investors are always in dilemma, answering this question is important. Also while I don't believe in relation of market returns to Super Bowl winner or Chinese year, it's good to look at some of those predictors just for fun! The Super Bowl week of earnings just got over and as expected most of the companies announced decent earnings and forecasts (Amazon was major exception). That produced sixth week of market gains. Given Nvidia's dis-appointing pre-announcement and Intel's not-so-inspiring earnings, AMD's earnings were outstanding and it got rewarded for that. Finally the hypothesis I laid out in my blog about " AMD new A in FANG " 5 months back is playing out. If AMD continues its market share gains in datacenter CPU/GPU segment and holds its ground in server/consumer/embedded section with 7nm technology advantage, 2H2019 could ...