IBM's Kyndryl spin off details

IBM Board of Directors Approves Separation of Kyndry

Apple or IBM: 1 year later

AAPL IBM May 9th 2017

1 year ago I sold 100 shares of IBM and bought 100 shares of Apple. I chose wisely!

IBM And Its Deceiving Dividendhttps://t.co/0WLUeVrnNC

— James Peet (@jrpeet) May 8, 2018

IBM or Apple? Revisited at 4 Months

4 months ago

Comments: Will IBM ever turn around?

IBM or Apple? Which would you buy and why?

IBM and AAPL are basically at parity in price (a little more than $ 15,000 for a round lot). So presuming equal parity (hypothetical to be sure but they are close), given either of these choices (and you MUST invest the $ 15K and it must be in one or the other, which would you buy and why?

See my comment for my view but be sure to add your own

Bad Day at Black[berry] Rock

Did Apple and IBM just kill BlackBerry?

Excerpt:

Apple (AAPL) and IBM (IBM) announced a partnership that will let Big Blue offer souped-up iPhones and IPads to corporate customers. Shares of BlackBerry (BBRY) plunged nearly 12% Wednesday on the news

Comment: Image Source. What I've learned about Blackberry at work: workers don't want them! When I replaced my company phone this year, I was offered (and it was pushed hard!) a Blackberry. I took a dumb phone instead. Upper execs have IPhones. I use my own personal IPhone for business calls when out of office.

IBM ... please split your stock

IBM

Comment: 52 week high!

I ♥ Big Blue and Big Iron

IBM Goes Big on New Mainframe with Fastest Chip, Flash Memory

Excerpt:

This system, announced Tuesday, includes a new 5.5-GHz, six-core processor, versus the 5.2-GHz, quad-core processor that shipped with the zEnterprise 196, announced two years ago last month. This may be the world's fastest commercial processor, say analysts. Despite this, it is not as big a jump in sheer clock rate as some of the earlier leaps in mainframe CPU speed. Regardless, IBM says this system has 25% more performance per core and some workloads will see performance gains by as much as 45%.

Comments:

• IBM's official announcement
• Image source = Flicker in above article.
• Most people never see them ... they are in some vault-like area protected with man-traps and security
• We had IBM stock way way back when we worked at IBM ... then sold it for a downpayment on a home we bought in Pittsburgh.
• Recently bought IBM again ... it's expensive (not Apple expensive ... but expensive). A great company!

IBM Should Split 4 to 1

IBM: A Stock That Should Split

 Excerpt:

To make things easier for retail investors and individual shareholders, IBM -- a $224B market cap company -- should split its stock 4-for-1. Under this arrangement the shares would each cost under $50. In a hypothetical investment of $500, an individual would now only be able to afford 2 shares with the stock priced at $194.62, leaving over $100 of un-invested capital. The same investor could buy 10 shares of the post-split (4 to 1) IBM stock (in our example: $48.66 per share), thereby investing nearly the complete $500. Small investors who wish to contribute $100 monthly to buy the stock could also regulary buy a couple shares where now they are prohibited by the share price.

Comment: The logo back when I worked for them (early '70s)

Smashing Moore's Law

IBM smashes Moore's Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms

Excerpt:

IBM announced Thursday that after five years of work, its researchers have been able to reduce from about one million to 12 the number of atoms required to create a bit of data. The breakthrough may someday allow data storage hardware manufacturers to produce products with capacities that are orders of magnitude greater than today's hard disk and flash drives. "Looking at this conservatively ... instead of 1TB on a device you'd have 100TB to 150TB. Instead of being able to store all your songs on a drive, you'd be able to have all your videos on the device," said Andreas Heinrich, IBM Research Staff Member and lead investigator on this project. Today, storage devices use ferromagnetic materials where the spin of atoms are aligned or in the same direction. The IBM researchers used an unconventional form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism, where atoms spin in opposite directions, allowing scientists to create an experimental atomic-scale magnet memory that is at least 100 times denser than today's hard disk drives and solid-state memory chips.

Comment: Literally very cool! "The experiment was performed at low temperature: about 1 degree Kelvin, which corresponds to about -272 °C (-458 °F). " | Wiki: Moore's Law (see interesting comparision between the Osborne Executive portable computer and an IPhone

Warren Buffett buys high-tech

Berkshire buys 5 pct of IBM

Excerpt:

Warren Buffett said Monday that his company has spent $10.7 billion to buy more than 5 percent of IBM's stock this year, a surprising move by the billionaire investor who has long shied away from investing in high technology companies.

Berkshire Hathaway also revealed several other new investments made during the turmoil of the third quarter. Besides the new IBM investment, Berkshire added much smaller stakes in Intel Corp., DirecTV, General Dynamics Corp. and CVS Caremark Corp.

Most of the details emerged from the quarterly update Berkshire filed with regulators on its $59 billion U.S. stock portfolio. Buffett disclosed some details in interviews earlier in the day.

Monday's filing doesn't offer a full picture of Berkshire's holdings, however, because the Securities and Exchange Commission allowed the Omaha-based company to keep some of its investments confidential.

Buffett has long refused to invest in high-tech companies because he has said it's too difficult to predict which technology businesses will prosper in the long run.

But he said he recently realized his view of IBM was wrong based on what he read in the company's annual reports and what he learned by talking to information-technology departments at Berkshire subsidiaries. He said he should have realized years sooner that hardware is no longer the heart of IBM's business.

"Now they're very much a services company, and they're very intertwined with their customers," Buffett said. And he said IBM's customers are reluctant to change once they start working with IBM.

So Berkshire has bought about 64 million shares since March, or about 5.5 percent of IBM. Buffett says he believes IBM has a sound plan for the future.

Comment: We bought into IBM earlier this year and it has been our most positive stock of the year. Just starting to buy INTC

"A billion transistors per human"

IBM Tops Microsoft in Value for First Time Since 1996

Excerpt:

“Computing is now found in things that no one thinks of as ‘computers’,” said Palmisano at a trade show keynote in February. “Today, there are nearly a billion transistors per human, and each one costs one ten-millionth of a cent. Yes, some of these transistors are going into servers, PCs, smart phones, MP3 players and tablets. But an increasing number of them are going into appliances and automobiles, power grids, roadways, railways and waterways.”

Comment: The headline wasn't of that much interest to me but the quote above

IBM: A stock I would buy

IBM

Why I would buy it:

• A strong technology company ... not just hardware but services!
  
• A little (really little) sentimentalism because K and I used to work there. But sentimentalism is the wrong motive for investing. A close relative makes this mistake with A.T.&T. (too heavy in the stock!)
  
• The dividends are 1.8%
  
• But the real strength is the earnings of $ 11. per share. (11 / 145 = 7.5%)
  
  

The downside is the high entry price. If one buys a round lot of 100 shares, the investment has an entry cost of $ 14,500