Invest your own money, let compound effect be your leverage, and avoid debt like the plague.
- Manlobbi
Stocks A to Z / Stocks B / Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A)
No. of Recommendations: 19
Maybe Brooks Running should take a lesson from Allbirds which pivoted from a shoe company to an AI company with its stock skyrocketing 700% today
I asked Gemini to explain this remarkable "feet" ;-)
The rumors hit the Silicon Valley grapevine like a heavy footfall: Allbirds wasn't just rebranding; they were "pivoting to intelligence." As a tech skeptic, I smelled a wool-en conspiracy. I headed to their flagship store, expecting sneakers, but found a "Neural Processing Hub."
The clerk didn’t ask for my size. He asked for my "compute requirements."
"We’ve moved beyond footwear," he said, his eyes glowing with the fervor of a true believer. "Why just walk when you can algor-rhythmically pace? We’ve embedded LLMs—Large Leather Models—directly into the soles."
"But these are made of eucalyptus," I countered, poking a pair of what looked like shimmering, fiber-optic loafers.
"Exactly," he whispered. "They’re Tree-based Architectures. Every step you take performs a micro-calculation. We call it 'Proof of Walk.' By the time you get to Starbucks, you’ve trained a chatbot."
I tried on a pair of the new Cyber-Runners. They felt suspiciously light. "Are these even durable?"
"They have high data-retention," he promised. "And don't worry about the fit; the fabric is self-correcting. If you trip, it’s just a glitch in the pavement. We’ll push an over-the-air update to your left pinky toe by Tuesday."
I looked at the price tag: $400. "That's a lot of cache for some shoes."
"You’re not buying shoes," he corrected, "you’re investing in a wearable cloud. These sneakers use natural language processing to talk to your pedometer. If you stop moving, they send a 'Heel-o World' ping to our servers."
I walked out, my old-fashioned, non-sentient Nikes squeaking on the linoleum. The hype was a perfect fit, but the logic was full of soles. Allbirds hadn't just changed their business model; they’d reached a run-time error. They thought they were the future, but I knew the truth: it was just another case of artificial in-toe-ligence.
No. of Recommendations: 8
BIRD at $19.27, up 675% so far today.
Just two questions...
In terms of market cycles, is this the AI equivalent of the shoe [shine] boy giving you stock tips?
What's the short borrow rate?
Jim
No. of Recommendations: 10
One day in 1999, right in the middle of the dot-com bubble, I noticed a huge price increase in a little-known company called Euroweb. As the price kept going up, I decided to buy some shares first and try to figure out the reason for the substantial increase in price later (yes, I know … I was young and stupid those days … now I am only stupid).
So, with some Euroweb stock now showing up in my portfolio, I started my research. I couldn’t find any news at all to justify the sudden interest in the company, nor could I really find any general information about the firm itself. I did find however a telephone number from NY and a name: Mr. Frank Cohen, CEO, 212-xxx-xxxx. I realized that they would probably be extremely busy with all the attention they must have been getting that day but I decided to give it a try and see if I could find someone in the company to give me some info. The call went more or less like this:
Me: “Hello”.
Speaker: “Hallo” (with a heavy eastern European accent)
Me: “Is this Euroweb?”
Speaker: “Yah, yah… diz is Euroweb.”
Me: “Hi… I am an investor in the company … I was wondering if you could tell me a little about Euroweb’s operation?”
Speaker: “Our Operation? Vee do communication stuff, you know on ze telephone, und ze, und ze, vat is it called… yah yah und ze internet.”
Me: “Hmm… ok, ok … well the price of the stock is going up today substantially … I was wondering if you could share what is happening”.
Speaker: “Ohh… its going up?? Vat do you know! Some days up! Some days down!”
At that point I pretty much imagined I was speaking with the janitor.
Me: “Could I please speak to Mr. Frank Cohen?”
Speaker: “Vat do you mean? Diz is Frank Cohen!”
Of course I hanged up and immediately sold my shares.
- - - - - -
Reading about Allbirds today brought me back to those days. I am sure the veterans here remember some of the companies that changed their name to a dot-com or internet sounding version and immediately saw a huge price increase.
My LLM had these examples to share:
Egghead Software → Egghead.com (July 1998)
Egghead was a classic brick-and-mortar chain selling computer software and hardware in physical stores. In early 1998 it announced it was closing nearly all its retail locations, laying off hundreds of employees, and shifting entirely to online sales under the new name Egghead.com. Within a couple of weeks, its stock soared 175% amid the dot-com hype. (It was a textbook example of a non-tech retailer suddenly rebranding as an “Internet company.”)
MIS International → Cosmoz.com (January 1999)
MIS International was a tiny, unprofitable company that had done essentially no business and had no Internet operations. It simply renamed itself Cosmoz.com to signal “dot-com” aspirations. Its stock jumped from trading below 50 cents per share to $5 (a more than 10× gain) almost immediately, before cooling somewhat to around $2.
Mecklermedia → Internet.com (1998)
Mecklermedia was a traditional publishing and trade-show company focused on technology magazines and events (not an Internet business itself). It rebranded to Internet.com, instantly giving itself the premier domain-related name in the space. The stock reacted very positively to the Internet association; the company later rode the wave further (and even saw another pop on a subsequent name tweak).
- - - - - -
Current super high valuations? Allbirds-like stories? Does is not look like a duck and sound like a duck?
No. of Recommendations: 2
I looked at the price tag: $400. "That's a lot of cache for some shoes."
Your posts absolutely crack me up. Some say puns are the lowest form of humor. I say "bring it on!"
No. of Recommendations: 0
Mecklermedia → Internet.com (1998)
Mecklermedia was a traditional publishing and trade-show company focused on technology magazines and events (not an Internet business itself). It rebranded to Internet.com, instantly giving itself the premier domain-related name in the space. The stock reacted very positively to the Internet association; the company later rode the wave further (and even saw another pop on a subsequent name tweak).
If I remember correctly, they actually did set up an early internet portal called MecklerWeb that got some traction and then got killed by Google.
No. of Recommendations: 0
From the Sherwood News …..
————————————-
“Flipping the BIRD”
“Before the latest pop, Allbirds had a miniscule market cap of some ~$22 million. Yesterday, some $3.8 billion changed hands in BIRD — with the company’s market cap ending the session at a still small $148 million.
That means that the company turned over more than 25x its market cap in trading volume. Indeed, there were no other stocks with a market cap less than $1 billion that traded more than $1 billion yesterday — something of an outlier, to say the least.
Allbirds trading volume
Sherwood News
Two of the stocks that Allbirds out-traded were none other than the world’s largest bank (JPMorgan) and America’s largest oil company (Exxon Mobil), which only turned over $3 billion and $2.3 billion, respectively. And those weren’t even particularly low-volume days for those two corporate giants — Allbirds’ insane activity was way ahead of the average of the last 120 days for each.”
ciao
