Exile From the Herd

Mark Jeftovic onstage with the Parkdale Hookers at Toronto's Lula Lounge - Nov 2007 - photo by Mike Streeter
The guitar is an Epiphone FlameCat, a.k.a "Satan's Guitar"

For some reason, PrivateWorld.com, the domain name I recently moved my personal blog to, a domain I've owned since 1997 and used to house the company website from a previous partnership (Private World Communications) was delisted from the Google index. I'm not sure when it happened as I was receiving traffic from google via this domain almost immediately over the cutover.

To avoid a possible penalty for duplicate content I began using a 301 redirect from my previous Mark.Jeftovic.net blog hostname. No good deed goes unpunished, they say. Once PrivateWorld got dropped from the index I was gone completely since the 301 redirect had basically transferred all my pagerank and indexed pages to the now dropped name.

I think way to handle a situation like this is to ask around on the Google webmaster groups and ask about your particular domain, because Google staffers tend to read these and can sometimes address your site's particular circumstances.



Then watch this video and follow the steps therein. If you haven't already used the Google webmaster tools , there really is a wealth of information and diagnostics there about the Search Engine visibility of your website. I added my sitemap there so I could see what Google saw, I've requested reconsideration - which is supposed to take weeks, but after a few days I seem to be tricking back into the google index.

One of things I did notice under the webmaster tools is the keywords associated with my site content looked pretty "spammy" and I think those were old and dated back to a brief time when I just had the domain parked with a commercial domain parking service. If this is what got my domain dropped from the index, it is mildly startling to say the least. I'm used to seeing parked domains not appear in the google index, but I have also routinely "unparked" domains by developing them and found them appearing in the index within reasonable intervals (less than a few weeks) without seeming to be penalized for their past "parked" status.

So it's a mystery, but an unsettling one when it's unknown why it happened. When my personal blog gets dropped from the index, it's not the end of the world. But had it happened to a domain more central to my business interests, like say, easydns.com, it would be a non-trivial event that would really impact my business - and that scares me. So even though I seem to be re-appearing in the index, I'm hoping my reconsideration request produces an explanation on what caused this.

Some time ago Tucows (AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC) issued a press release reminding the world that they hold a sizable portfolio of premium domain names, the subtext to which was ostensibly "look at us, we're undervalued". Jay Westerdal over at DomainTools commented in his blog in essence that the premium domain portfolio of Tucows was not priced into the stock and in his estimation he could see the stock doubling within 2 years. Jay's assessment was an estimate. After looking at this in detail, I personally think Tucows has an intrinsic value between 0.94 and 1.58 per share (currently trading at .60) - Note that everything that follows is based on the CDN listing price.

Ad from Craigslist:

Pro Day Trader (Millions_) (Toronto)

Pro Day Trader Looking for venture capital
High return possible (potential Millions)Glad to negotiate
Several years experience in equities,futures
Only serious inquires !200k to do it right
Thank You Don

I've seen ads like this many times. It begs a few obvious questions:

• Why seek outside capital to daytrade? The risk premium to the investor would make the cost-of-capital quite prohibitive
  
• If these daytraders are so good, where is their own pile of cash that they've taken out of the market? And why aren't they using that to stake themselves?
  
• What kinds of gains are these guys promising? I've talked to daytraders advertising on craigslist, some of whom claimed consistant, repeatable returns of 20% per month but couldn't explain to me why they weren't several orders of magnitude wealthier than Warren Buffet or George Soros who have managed 15-20% annual returns for decades (and who eschew daytrading like the plague, btw)
  

I have been following a couple of high-end daytraders (Wall St. Window and The Informed Trader) over the course of this last bear market after the credit markets locked up. They are both saying the same thing: this has been one of the toughest markets to trade that they have ever seen. They've both spent most of their time sitting on the sidelines, in cash watching the market for some feel of where it's going.

As professional daytraders know, "cash is a position" - often the best trade is no trade.

My suspicion when I see ads like this is that I'm reading the ad from a guy who's addicted to daytrading, gone bust and looking for somebody else
to stake him so he can wipe out again.

I've come to the conclusion that the only way to become a successful daytrader is to do it fulltime. You can't run a business and daytrade on the side. So personally I don't daytrade (anymore). But I do highly recommend The Investors Quotient: The Psychology of Successful Investing in Commodities and Stocks - which teaches us that the most important aspects of trading are having a coherent system one sticks to, mental discipline and other psychological factors. In other words, becoming a successful trader is not about conquering the markets, it's about mastering oneself.

In a couple weeks I'm off to the The Search for Value seminar at Western for a week where I hope to hone my acumen at fundamental analysis and value investing.

I have known for some time that the practice of "slamming" was not exclusive to the domain name industry. In my business we are well acquainted with outfits like Domain Registry of Canada and others. There are other related "business models" in the online space: trademark monitoring "services" that look like they come from an official source, nebulous business "directories" you're supposed to "renew your listing" in. These often look like invoices, run several hundred dollars and probably bank on the fact that a certain number of accounts payable departments will just treat them as such and remit payment on them.

We almost got stung in an offline counterpart to the domain slam: A company calling themselves Ontario Energy Savings came to our door and nearly slammed us over to their company for a 5-year contract on gas.