$199

Price at WalMart for a 40-inch Element LED TV, in a new "Cyber Monday" campaign to drive interest and online activity heading into the holiday shopping season. $199 for a 40in flat-screen TV??! I feel like buying 15 of them and selling them on the sidewalk.

In other Halloween news, so-called "Halloween strategies" could have investors re-entering the market after October 31 as consumer spending picks up in 4Q and institutional investors reevaluate weights and investments in 1Q 2015. "Halloween strategists" will typically exit positions by springtime.

8.1%

Earnings growth in 3Q 2014 at 500 of America's largest companies. The growth is based largely on domestic demand in the US for "everything from beers cans to trucks to heating and cooling systems," as well as "pockets abroad such as knee replacements in Europe, car parts and helicopters in China." (WSJ)

$224 billion vs $221 billion

Market capitalization of Facebook vs market cap of JP Morgan, following FB earnings report earlier this week. As mentioned in WSJ's Heard On The Street, "no wonder recent college graduates are flocking to Silicon Valley over Wall Street."

21.4%

Average amount US households making less than $50,000 a year spent on energy in 2012. It is thought that a $0.01 decline in energy prices puts $1 billion into the pockets of US consumers. Economists are now saying that the current US boom in shale oil and gas may taper if oil prices sink below $75 a barrel; at current levels of $80, investment is still profitable at 96% of US wells (International Energy Agency).

The oil and gas industry now accounts for 1.7% of US GDP (17T total GDP*1.7%) amounting to almost $300 billion dollars a year.

Ken Langone's 3 Tips

1. Some kind words, every day.
2. A thoughtful gesture, every day.
3. Work with energy and passion--it's infectious.

Also, in a customer-facing business--treat your employees well first. Treat employees well, they treat customers well, and from there everything else follows.

$90 billion

The expected size of the mobile payments industry by 2017, up from $12.8 billion in 2012. (Yahoo Finance)

Southpaw

• Southpaws are so-called because ballparks, in being designed to have the sun out of the batter's eye in the afternoon, are arranged with left-handed pitchers' throwing arms always facing south. It has nothing to do with lefties propensity for being submarine pitchers, or lefty pitchers coming from the southern states.
• Chinese ESL speakers sometimes confuse "he" and "she," referring to women as "he" and vice versa. The difficulty stems from the Chinese word for he and she being exactly the same (ta). In discussion today, someone repeatedly kept calling the lady sitting beside her "he" this, "he" that. No one said anything as we understood what the speaker meant; the sense of lack of regard for gender was actually kind of cool.
• Canada can have terrorist problems, too. It will be interesting to see how shootings at the state house in Ottawa changes Canada's participation in the war on terror inside their country and abroad.

Tekmira

• Tekmira (NASDAQ:TKMR), Mapp Biopharmaceutical (private), and Chimerix (NASDAQ:CMRX) are all racing to develop better drugs to fight Ebola, and are presented with a rare opportunity to use experimental cures on human patients afflicted with the disease
• To meet its 2014 budget, Venezuela would need the per-barrel price of oil to rise to $162 (Business Insider)
• The lower half of US households ranked by wealth held just 1% of total assets last year, down from 3% in 1989 (WSJ)

Snapsaved

1. Firms choose FIFO to accentuate profits, as COGS is usually lower for older inventory, therefore increasing apparent margins. They choose LIFO to create favorable tax situations, as newer, more expensive inventory creates lower margins but a lesser tax burden. If given a choice, many firms will choose FIFO for accentuated profits and save explanations for the notes on SEC reports.
2. Nothing can ever be erased in the digital age. Snapchat just got burned by website Snapsaved.com, which apparently hacked SC servers and grabbed thousands of photos. Considering half of SC's users are between 13 and 17 years old and are known to use the service to send racy photos to one another, this puts the company--who was just valued by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers at $10 billion, in a very sticky situation.
3. The patience of the PRC trumps youthful idealism. Despite violence in Hong Kong last night, it looks like protesters are blinking first. HK government is pulling a Bloomberg and sending in fire hoses and hack saws to dismantle tent-towns and barricades. Flare-ups of violence are looking limited and not significant enough to grow protest crowds back up to last week's levels.

Bumbershoots

1. The term, "bumbershoot," when used in insurance, refers to a kind of umbrella coverage used to insure marine risks--which can extend well beyond blue and brown waterways into transportation and, basically, anything that moves. According to Investopedia, "shipyards use this policy for protection and indemnity coverage as well as liability protection under the Longshoremen and Harbor Workers Act." The word "bumbershoot" may be a portmanteau of the words "umbrella" and "parachute."
2. "Elbowing" for some people on Metro North includes brushing them with your fleece sleeve while trying to type on your laptop, three-aside during rush hour. The lady sitting next to me this morning would not have lasted long in Beijing.
3. 17M cars are slated to be sold in the US in 2014, approaching an all-time annual record. If the number of total cars to be sold globally continues to increase at a 5% YOY rate, we can expect about 87 million (new?) cars to be sold worldwide in 2014. Growth is being pushed by China, where people are now buying more than 20M new cars every year. That's about 3 cars per second, all year round.

Kaizen

1. "Fair day's work for a fair day's pay" comes from Frederick Wilhelm Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management (1909). You work a full day, you get paid for a full day. Not too flexible in terms of give and take. Reminds me of the way managers in Beijing will prorate monthly salaries by the day and even down to the hour and minute for late workers.
2. "Esprit de corps" would appear to come from Henri Fayol, an early 20th century Turkish immigrant in France and coal mine manager. It's one of his 14 principles of management. From military to modern management consulting, this phrase is all over the place now.
3. Beginning in the 1990s, Toyota has really been tearing it up in terms of management theory. Some vocabulary: "Kanban" refers to visual indicators of depleted resources on a supply chain that can quickly and easily signal a line manager that he needs to order up a new batch of a certain material, enabling just-in-time manufacturing processes. Kaizen might be translated as "good changes," the key to continuous improvement methodology; instead of momentary, sweeping change--which throws things into chaos--things should be improved modestly, subtly, and continuously to maximize retention, employee support, employee satisfaction, and ultimately, customer satisfaction.

Causation and correlation

1. In choosing stocks to serve as comparables/competitors to your target company, correlation does not always suggest causation. In evaluating Hertz, we saw enplanements being a key indicator of increases or decreases in rentals, and picked UAL as a comp. Because WYN hotels are all over the place, up and down market, price conscious folks might forgo a plane ride and drive to them with off-airport rentals. But people don't buy UAL and WYN with the same motivations they buy HTZ. They're connected, but they're not causes--they may be effects, or indicators, but that doesn't make them great comps. Gonna check out UHAL and some others tomorrow, then try to figure out what "psychometrics" means.
2. Just watching Shark Tank: after waling in and being laughed at while debuting their idea, the Hoodie Pillow is gonna be a $100 million product, all based on the force of the salesman and solid contextualization. Almost anything can be sold to almost anybody.
3. Bank loans are essentially a line of credit (similar to a checking account for individuals) offered to companies for durations somewhere in between money markets and repurchase agreements and longer-term debt. They can sometimes involve what's called a revolver--a loan "window" that can be accessed from time to time by the company, for example on a seasonal basis to purchase inventory, and then is quickly paid down again. Taking a look at the credit markets for a company's bank loans and bonds, and the prices of these instruments, can be a good way to get a sense of future equity share performance.