·
CarMax (KMX)
o
Funny that every analyst wanted to ask about
subprime on the earning call. I get that KMX is arguably a finance company. But
guys, falling subprime mix is a GOOD thing!! So what if revenue slows a little
bit, to the extent that customer base is more sustainable, that’s good news.
o
KMX does look expensive even with today’s drop
off. From lenders perspective though, it is good to hear that subprime players
are tightening standards.
·
Oracle (ORCL)
o
This Barron’s article
said that Oracle is threatened by Hadoop. Ironic considering that Oracle
oversees Java – the language that Hadoop is written in. I have also heard that Oracle
is hurt by freely available database options. Well, ORCL also owns MySQL, one
of the most popular free databases. If Hadoop and free databases are really the
downfall of ORCL, this needs to be a business school study on making your stuff
open-source and freely available.
o
Hadoop does not replace a database. The Hadoop wiki says as much. Hadoop
is great for unstructured data (for example if you’re mining terabytes of tweets)
while traditional relational databases are good for structured data (in the row/column format). Hadoop is
just a way to split up your job to various computing and data resources, each
of those could be different form of data storage, including a database. In
fact, Hadoop and database can be complementary - there’s just so much information
in databases that someone mining data will have to link up Hadoop with
relational databases.
·
Follow up on last week’s post
about housing stock – how to find true vacancy numbers?
o
I can’t stress enough that the reported “homeowner
vacancy” and “rental vacancy” numbers are just fake. There are substantial “other
vacancies” that are not included in those numbers – easily 30% or even 50% of
total vacancies depending on location. Here’s a helpful report
that US Census put out on “Other” vacancies last year.
o
How to find the true vacancy number then!? Those numbers are available in the American Community Survey. Unfortunately
the US Census does not make this easy. To be useful you’re really looking for local
statistics. FactFinders allows you
to get this by entering the MSA’s one by one. But if you want to figure out say
vacancies for say, all the exposures of some home builder, then this will take
a LONG time.
o
Ideally you want historical time series for each
local level so you get a sense of “normal”. You can try to download the ACS summary
files, but those only go back to 2005 on the Census website.
o
One way to do this is with Public Use Microdata
Samples (PUMS). The U. of Minnesota has a great
site that let you select the variables and the vintage years you want. Load
that into a database (it's easily in gigs of data) then process it however you
want. The results will not match the ACS summary data exactly because these are samples of the original survey. But at least you get a sense of the vacancy mixes going further back than 2005.
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