Linked List: December 28, 2015

Monday, 28 December 2015

A Visit From Saint Nicholas (In the Ernest Hemingway Manner) 

Classic 1927 James Thurber piece for The New Yorker:

The children were in their beds. Their beds were in the room next to ours. Mamma and I were in our beds. Mamma wore a kerchief. I had my cap on. I could hear the children moving. We didn’t move. We wanted the children to think we were asleep.

“Father,” the children said.

There was no answer. He’s there, all right, they thought.

“Father,” they said, and banged on their beds.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“We have visions of sugarplums,” the children said.

(Via Kottke.)

Doomsaying Apple Analyst Loses Job 

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

It’s been three years since Berenberg Bank analyst Adnaan Ahmad began predicting doom for Apple, setting a split-adjusted price target of $60 a share and — five months later — flipped the stock’s rating from Buy to Sell.

This spring, with the iPhone 6 selling like hotcakes and the stock trading above $124, Ahmad raised his target (to $85) but not his rating. “We sense,” he wrote, “that the company is over-earning, over-loved and, in our view, the stock should be ‘over-and-out’ soon.”

Email from Ahmad this morning:

As you may already know, Daud Khan and I have unfortunately been let go at Berenberg. It has been a pleasure debating and discussing the sector with you all. I have strived to be as honest, independent and give a high level of integrity in my research as possible throughout my career. As many of you know, my views have been controversial in the global tech space and I have taken a fair amount of abuse but I have enjoyed the two way dialogue immensely.

Where by “controversial” he means “totally wrong”.

Ahmad can take solace in the fact that his record doesn’t hold a candle to, say, Per Lindberg’s. In 2010 Lindberg was, according to this report in The Globe and Mail, “the only sell-side analyst covering Apple Inc., out of roughly 40, who has a ‘sell’ rating on the company”. As I type this today, Apple’s stock price is about 8 times higher today than it was in 2009 when Lindberg called it a “sell”.

Benedict Evans: 16 Mobile Theses 

Benedict Evans, surveying the state and future of the entire industry. Here, on the “Internet of Things”:

Our grandparents could have told you how many electric motors they owned - there was one in the car, one in the fridge and so on, and they owned maybe a dozen. In the same way, we know roughly how many devices we own with a network connection, and, again, our children won’t. Many of those use cases will seem silly to us, just as our grandparents would laugh at the idea of a button to lower a car window, but the sheer range and cheapness of sensors and components, mostly coming out of the smartphone supply chain, will make them ubiquitous and invisible - we’ll forget about them just as we’ve forgotten about electric motors.