The seat owners of the New York Stock Exchange voted yesterday to buy Archipelago Holdings Inc. With this deal, it will turn the Big Board into a for-profit company. The estimated $9 billion deal was approve by a staggering 95% of the members.
This deal will form a publicly traded corporation call NYSE Group Inc., with [...]

ICANN, the internet’s governing agency, may release the remaining single letter domain names this week during the conference. These names are expected to fetch millions of dollars. [Forbes]

Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 console has the largest slate ever of new game titles ready for launch, eye-popping graphics and an online suite of gaming services – all available this coming week. That’s months before Sony’s PlayStation 3 console, which the company maintains will come to market in the spring of 2006.
While the devices today [...]

Homebuilder D.R. Horton (DHI) upped its earnings forecast for the Sept. 2006-ending fiscal year after reporting a 61% rise in fourth-quarter net income to $564 million, or $1.77 a share with revenue up 45% to $5.1 billion on a 38% increase in homes closed. Analysts polled by Thomson First Call were expecting an EPS of [...]

Homebuilder D.R. Horton (DHI) upped its earnings forecast for the Sept. 2006-ending fiscal year after reporting a 61% rise in fourth-quarter net income to $564 million, or $1.77 a share with revenue up 45% to $5.1 billion on a 38% increase in homes closed. Analysts polled by Thomson First Call were expecting an EPS of [...]

From hobby to business…
Bryant and his partner, David Dodds, started FootballGuys in 1999 as a free service that offered fantasy “cheat sheets,” newsletters that organized information about player injuries and match ups for each week’s games. The two were acquaintances and longtime fantasy players who were looking for more information than they found on traditional [...]

After the market closed, Target warned the November sales would be below forecast.
Discount retailer Target Corp. said on Monday its November sales at stores open at least one year would be below its forecast of a 4 percent to 6 percent increase.
[MSN Money]
But Walmart during its conference call are very upbeat about the [...]

Music, video, and now books will be slice and dice to your desire.
Google Inc. is discussing a plan with at least one publisher to all consumers to rent and view online copies of books for a week, according to a media report Monday.
[MarketWatch]
Amazon Pages will dole out the data in increments–by chapter, section or [...]

Beginning in January, In2TV plans to offer 300 episodes per month and about 100 shows in the first year on six channels ranging from comedy to drama, The Journal said, and Warner Bros. has cleared 300 series, or about 14,000 individual episodes, for use on the service. The streaming service will be available to users [...]

“Peter F. Drucker, revered as the father of modern management for his numerous books and articles stressing innovation, entrepreneurship and strategies for dealing with a changing world, died Friday. He was 95.”
[ABC News]

It looks like lower energy prices is triggering a year end rally for the World.
Europe, Asia, and United States

A computer security firm said Thursday it had discovered the first virus that uses music publisher Sony BMG’s controversial CD copy-protection software to hide on PCs and wreak havoc.
[CNN Money]

Hedge Funds, boys club…
Where are the girls? Is it skills, personality, or discrimination against her and her kids?
not surprisingly, is the notion that you can’t run a hedge fund and raise children. “The demands are not compatible with family life,” says one former (female) analyst who joined a hedge fund. Investors put money into [...]

Google’s stock price has been spectacular since the earnings release. It has also many new “possible” services offering recently. One of the service is a payment service, but at the moment we do not know the extent of how Google will use the service. The latest possible service is called a Google [...]

Senator Bill Frist yesterday called for a hearing on windfall profits tax on oil companies and price gauging. A republican called for a wind fall tax! What is this country coming to! Did we forget that the windfall profits tax enacted by Jimmy Carter in the 1970s exacerbated the energy crisis by [...]

Google map stirred political controversy in the way it named Taiwan.

Not sure the details yet, More to come. But I hope I’m wrong.
Update: No possible case. LAX is just creating a quarantine plan.

Tax panel is ready to submit its recommendation to the president. Some of the key recommendations include:
Abolish AMT
Abolish local and state deduction
Limit Mortgage Deduction ($300,000 in the propose mortgage limit)
Consumption Oriented Tax
Overall the proposal seem great, but how much of it is going to pass that’s another story. Especially the Limit Mortgage Deduction, [...]

Mid Day 10/17/2005

Since falling from grace in 2001, AOL is now a hot property. Everyone from old media, new media, old technology, and new technology companies, they all want to add AOL’s content and traffic to their own to increase market share and create synergy and most important of all make more money from the hot [...]

Samsung, the world’s largest maker of memory chips for computers and other electronic gadgets, has agreed to plead guilty to price fixing and pay a $300 million fine, U.S. officials said Thursday.
The penalty is the second-largest criminal antitrust fine ever and caps a three-year investigation into the largest makers of dynamic random access memory computer [...]

Microsoft is partnering with Yahoo on the instant messaging program. Their instant messaging program will communicate with each other. The combined user base (27.3 million from MSN, 21.9 million from Yahoo) will now rival AOL’s 51.5 million subscribers.
Microsoft appears to be in a trend to convert enemies to friends. The recent [...]

Google and Sun announced the co-promotion of Sun’s Star Office Suite. This will help Sun’s Java run-time environment and for Google to offer additional application service to bring users to Google sites. This should translate into additional traffic for Google, but possible decrease in revenue for Microsoft down the road. But why [...]

Current assessment of Gulf Coast energy production: 71.6% of natural Gas and 90%of oil is still out. This news has no impact on the market as we are beginning to accustom to the shortage news.

Sun Microsystems and Google will make announcement this afternoon around 1:30pm. The speculation will be a competing office product or server products.

Yesterday was Michael Eisner’s last day at Disney and I couldn’t help but feel sad about it. To me he was the face of Disney while I was growing up. He made me believe dreams can come true. I want to thank him for what he did for me and Disney and [...]