Are we recovering from the recession?

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view, I am. Not at my own job, but I am for my funded project. Not the stock prediction engine of course, but the project I actually did get interest in.

Last year around the same time I interviewed people. Back then all the crazy, desperate sounding emails came from companies overseas.

Now they are all coming from Norcal and Socal. Not from H1B holders as most of them have gone home or are locked into sub-salary positions, but from locals and people that moved here from other states to work at companies like Sun or Microsoft.

The venture money for the great SaaS insurrection has dried up and so have the ad dollars. It's funny how plans that had no real chance at ROI were accepted by way of a trend then got dumped just as easily.

Investors are now taking the mailing lists and data from nearly all of those failed services and selling it off wholesale to recupe their lost dollars. All those people that signed up for X, Y trendy SaaS web app will soon be, or are already the targets of mass spam.

The tech bubble is getting smaller every time around before it pops. Dr. Lee is no longer interested in Google or Microsoft(with very good reason). People are getting wiser world wide. I think we will come out of this recession in Q3, dive back into a new smaller aftershock recession in late Q4 after xmas sales aren't high enough. Then we will start our real recovery at the end of Q1 2010.

I think that the global strategies of tech conglomerates and multi-nationals will be foiled by their own current employees. Not just Dr. Lee, but many others as well. No Chinese person wants Microsoft to be a tech giant in their country. They want TCL and their own brands. They will eventually push back and destroy the insurrection.

The ones that couldn't get new work to stay here are going or have gone home.

The ones that are trapped in the jobs that applied for the visa to get them here are still underpaid and taking up seats that should be filled by some of these people I interviewed. They are not skilled enough to bootstrap a startup, but they are probably skilled enough to be QA testers or Unit testers.

The last guy I interviewed from Sun told me about the "awesome" unit testing he did there. I didn't dare ask him about annotations, because I was already fed up with answers to prior technical questions.

http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/480961-2-interesting-stocks/

CT was 1.57 the day I posted it.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=ct

It's 2.67 now. Had you taken my investment advice and invested a few hundred grand, you would be a millionaire right now.

I can hire a small team on my trades alone. And this is on top of working a 9-5 programming job for a large company, and building a large scale system for a startup.

I do have an unfair advantage, as it would seem that most investors can't read forums or news, or that their brokers can't. But that's not really my problem. I am very on top of financial news and I took economics in community college.

To those curious, I am trading in Zale now. The earnings report/conference call was delayed for a week. It comes out this Wednesday. It was an absolute steal this past Sept 1, 2009 when people "got scared" again.