Some days, you just have to be happy to be a Fool. We do our best to churn out daily content that is distinctive and varied. But on some days and some weeks, the opportunity for a few signature pieces just comes and knocks us over the head.
Take this week, for example. Due to the confluence of two important events -- Mother's Day and the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting -- we're able to put out some work that you'll only find at Fool.com.
First is our annual Stocks for Mom special. What other financial website would you come to looking for stocks your Mom would like? Our writers toss out their best ideas for mothers (and all investors) the world over.
Second is a report straight from the mouths of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger themselves. Fool writer Selena Maranjian got off a plane from Omaha, Nebraska -- where she'd been making her annual pilgrimage to Berkshire's shareholder meeting -- last night and started typing... and typing, and typing. All told, we've run over 12,000 words of Selena's notes from Q&As with Berkshire's managers.
Excessive, you say? Extravagant? Perhaps. But we'd like to call it generous (at least, that's how our editors rationalize it). If you've never been able to attend a Berkshire meeting, this is the next best thing.
So, kick your shoes off, relax, and start reading. You've got a small novella starring Warren Buffet ahead of you, and some potential gifts for Mom that far outpace any bouquet of flowers. Enjoy!
The Motley Fool 50 spent the day reading Selena's Notes From Omaha. No surprise, the index listed aimlessly for hours and finished up just about even.
In today's Motley Fool Take:
Swiss Drug Maker Defects to U.S.
It's the defection of a great baseball star from Cuba or ballet dancer from the old U.S.S.R. Swiss drug maker Novartis (NYSE: NVS), 1 of the 12 big pharmas that rule the health care world, announced that it would establish research operations in Cambridge, Mass., with the intent to make it Novartis' worldwide research hub.
With $21 billion in trailing-12-months sales and a $110 billion market capitalization, Novartis is quite the new elephant in Cambridge's bathtub. The company will initially invest a cool $250 million and rent 255,000 square feet on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus. The American head of cardiovascular research at Massachusetts General Hospital, Mark Fishman, has been named to lead the operation.
With Novartis' move, a star in part leaves its birthplace for another with greater opportunity than Europe's less-competitive and less-lucrative drug market (that's not jingoism, but the focus of a soon-to-be released European Commission report). And though Novartis retains its newly expanded HQ operations in Basel, the move is not only bad for Europe, but also highly symbolic for the Swiss. For years, Swiss drug makers ruled the roost, dominated by famous but now absorbed names like Ciba, Geigy, Hoffman, La Roche, and Sandoz (where LSD was first synthesized). The powerful Swiss drug industry so influenced politics and the economy that it could preserve its hegemony by restricting the availability and price for natural remedies we take for granted in the U.S.
The Cambridge operation joins two others for Novartis in the U.S., one near San Diego's biotech belt and in New Jersey. What is it about New Jersey? French-German drug maker Aventis (NYSE: AVE), which moved its global research HQ there in 1999, and erstwhile Swedish Pharmacia (NYSE: PHA) moved its entire HQ to the same state from London after merging with Upjohn in 1995. The Cambridge move is easier to understand. Novartis' latest success is Gleevec, a protein kinase inhibitor for chronic myeloid leukemia, and to find more protein kinases, in 2000 Novartis inked an historic $800-million drug discovery and development deal with Vertex Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: VRTX) -- which just happens to be in Cambridge, too.
Welcome, Novartis, but there is one vexing question for Americans. Is your name pronounced Novartiss, or Novartee? Perhaps, like Baton Rouge, Chicago's Goethe (gothee) and Devon (de-VON) Streets, or Minnesota's New Prague (guess), it just don't matter.
eBay Targets Big Businesses
eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) is making another big push to expand the boundaries of its service. Remaining true to its mission statement ("To help practically anyone trade practically anything on earth"), the company is teaming up with Accenture (NYSE: ACN) to help large businesses sell off excess inventory. The Associated Press says details will be released today at the NetWorld+Interop conference in Las Vegas.
According to the story, Accenture will operate the "Connection to eBay" service. It should help businesses overcome the biggest obstacle to actually selling goods online -- namely the logistics. After all, it takes time and expertise to identify excess inventory, price it, and list it for sale. After that, there's the question of processing the transactions and collecting the money.
Presumably, with companies relieved of these burdens, they'll be much more likely to utilize the service. eBay will collect its usual fee, with Accenture also taking a cut. And with businesses looking to unload $80-billion worth (Accenture's estimate) of such merchandise each year, big rewards await the service that captures the lion's share of the market.
After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing, and prospering in the world. -- Calvin Coolidge
Lie About Making 80 Grand!
"What do you want? A beach house? A new sports car? Your own private jet? It could all be yours in the future!" With the Instant Money Invention Plan, you can have it all -- or, rather, you can learn to lie about having it all.
Leave it to the cheeky humor site, The Onion, to take on the sleazy multi-level marketing business. Writes fictitious columnist Ronny Falciglia in I Lied About Making $80,000 From Home... And So Can You!: "I'm almost 40 with NO SKILLS, NO COLLEGE EDUCATION, and NO CREDIT. Well, that's precisely why I developed the Instant Money Invention Plan."
Simply make up a story about how you made $7,000 in one month, locate a gas station with a copy machine, and you're on your way! "If you can say the number, you can tell people that's how much money you make!"
His breathless column goes on: "Could you imagine seeing your glowing recommendation for the Instant Money Invention Plan in a mass e-mail originating from an untraceable location?" Falciglia asks. "Everyone will hear about the fortune you claim you made!"
In true Onion form, the scam is spelled out by the unwitting columnist. "Wouldn't it be great to work from the comfort of your own living-room couch, sitting back and watching the money roll in? Of course it would. Unfortunately, there's no such thing. But I'm not talking about some get-rich-quick scheme. I am talking about FOOLING PEOPLE into THINKING you've gotten rich quick."
Unfortunately, not all such scams are so obvious (though the overuse of exclamation points is usually a dead giveaway). Learn to spot the baddies for real and avoid getting taken for a ride.
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No news is good news for the market -- at least as far as the Fed goes. Hoping not to upset the economy's wobbly recovery, the Federal Open Market Committee voted today to keep interest rates unchanged for the time being. That means the rates will remain at their lowest levels in four decades at least until August.
Like the rotund overeater in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is never short on appetite when the opportunity presents itself to consume. The company announced that it had closed on its purchase of Danish software maker Navision in a stock and cash transaction valued at $1.3 billion. After-dinner mint, anyone?
The third-quarter report at Piccadilly Cafeteria (NYSE: PIC) has been taken off the menu. The push tray eatery was supposed to report its financials this morning but abruptly announced that results won't be in until next week. While recent accounting rumblings at other companies may have shareholders wondering if Piccadilly has too many cooks in the auditing kitchen, it's important not to read too much into the vague announcement. Consolation prize? Tapioca pudding and a side of beets.
Credit card provider Providian Financial (NYSE: PVN) is charging ahead this morning after the company posted a small profit after analysts were expecting a loss. This doesn't mean that the plastic specialist is out of the woods yet. Back in October the company outlined a five-point strategic plan to get itself back on track by strengthening its balance sheet and shoring up its credit risk profile. The company is clearly making headway in that direction and also managed to add 460,000 new accounts during the quarter.
Sorry Regis, no lifeline for you. The once trend-setting Who Wants to be a Millionaire game show is getting a new host for its upcoming daytime syndicated version as Disney (NYSE: DIS) tries to milk the flagship quiz show that had propeled its ABC network to the top two years ago -- only to fall back due to overexposure. The View star Meredith Vieira will replace Regis Philbin for the new daytime version, though obviously not in Philbin's signature suits. With The Weakest Link already working both sides of the day, the move isn't original. Still, wasn't overexposure what prompted the show's demise from the top of the ratings book?
With business in the dumps, Waste Management (NYSE: WMI) missed its first-quarter targets on a slowdown in revenue. The trash hauler has some cleaning up to do, even as the company is optimistically pointing to a recovery in landfill volumes last month and upbeat trends in its recycling business. Until these factors result in top and bottom line improvement, Wall Street is bound to consider the pep rally garbage.
And Finally...
Today on Fool.com: The Motley Fool Manifesto presents Declaration #5: Employees deserve independent advice regarding their retirement plans.... In Rule Breaker, Tom Jacobs finds some e-commerce survivors from the Internet revolution.... Matt Richey says Stamps.com might yet benefit from new technology in generic Internet postage.... In Fool's School, it's never too late (or too early) to start investing.
Contributors:
Bob Bobala, Robert Brokamp, Jeff Fischer, Tom Jacobs, Bill Mann, Selena Maranjian, Rex Moore, Rick Munarriz, Reggie Santiago, Dayana Yochim
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