Cameron's shared items
Filed under: Coupe, Performance, Nissan
The thing about a halo car is that it needs that pretty little halo buffed and shined every single year to be sure the machine is kept at the forefront of consumers' minds. Nissan has been doing a pretty good job with its GT-R over the last few years in this regard, bumping power here and adding new techno-goodies there - all in an effort to give its giant slayer the tools to continue properly slaying.
That trend looks to continue for the 2012 model year, as the hive mind from GTRBlog.com has managed to score enough information on the upcoming machine to put together a nice little preview. Starting with the exterior, the next GT-R will get a revised front fascia complete with new (and sure to be controversial) LED driving lights frenched into new canards at either corner of the front bumper, lowering the car's coefficient of drag from 0.272 to 0.268.
There's also a new rear diffuser that adds 10 percent more downforce at the business end and a set of forged wheels from Rays cut 6.6 pounds of unsprung weight at each corner for a total loss of over 26 pounds. Impressive. There are reportedly two new colors for both the wheels - Hyper Blue Black and Hyper Titanium - and for the car - Aurora Flare Blue Pearl and Nebula Opal Black.
Expect price increases for both the base model, which will now be known as the Pure Edition, and the Premium Edition. Naturally, we're also told to expect some additional horsepower. We'll keep our eyes and ears peeled for more.
[Source: GTRBlog.com]
2012 Nissan GT-R changes appear on web originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Continue reading Back to the Future Blu-ray trailer revealed
Back to the Future Blu-ray trailer revealed originally appeared on Engadget HD on Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | Email this | CommentsI wrote a whole series of articles warning people about the stock market over the years. You can see them here. It’s gotten worse. So I thought i would write some more about why you should probably avoid putting any new money into the stock market…
If you haven’t noticed, individuals are avoiding the stock market in droves. There has been an enormous exodus from equity based mutual funds. Why ? Because people buy stocks for only one reason, they want them to go up in price. If you don’t believe the market is going to go up. If you don’t believe you can find a greater fool to buy your stock, or the stock your funds own, why would you buy either ? You wouldn’t and people aren’t.
The amazing thing is that doing nothing in the market is the smartest approach to the market. It is pretty much impossible for some man or woman or child who devotes a couple of hours per week to the market to outperform the professionals who spend 24×7 doing this for a living and when they are asleep, they have a workforce full of people doing more of the same. In this day and age, none of us are smarter than the market.
I didn’t always think this way. I didn’t ever think there was a truly efficient market until just recently. What changed ? The availability of capital changed. While we can argue about whether or not the market is efficient because everyone has access to the same information, I would always argue that they didn’t efficiently use that information and even if they did, capital was not always allocated correctly to every market segment.
Capital found its way to where people/funds thought they were smarter than the rest. Some people thought they understood the tech markets better than others. Some thought they understood retail better, etc. The belief that an individual/fund had an advantage drove where capital was allocated. People posted good performance or identified macro opportunities and put their own and others money to work. Others saw the success and followed. Like the saying goes “first there were the innovators, then the imitators, then the idiots”. Fortunately for market participants over much of the history of the stock market, if you were the innovator that was smarter and faster than the other guys, you could make money on the long and / or short side of the market before the imitators and then the idiots flooded the market.
The door was open to opportunity in the past simply because capital was relatively expensive. It was expensive to raise, it was expensive to borrow. High cost of capital creates scarcity of capital. The more expensive the scarcer. The scarcer the capital, the more untapped opportunities just waiting for innovators to exploit and the longer it took the imitators and idiots to chase the same opportunities and close them. Which is why you found funds and smart people posting great returns over a long period of time.
But a not so funny thing happened on the way to and through the Great Recession. Capital became progressively cheaper. It became the opposite of scarce. It became readily available. To anyone.
The innovators had put together unique mortgage programs. The imitators made it a little easier to partake. Then the idiots took over. Capital was so easy and suckers and idiots so prevalent, everyone believed that there was always going to be a greater fool to buy their house and /or give them refinancing money. Until the idiots couldn’t collect on the mortgages they lent or pay the mortgages they took out. That de-levered the system and we know what happened next to the banking, mortgage and housing industries and the entire economy.
In response to that great de-levering, the government stepped in and I truly believe they saved us. Sure, they watched as the idiots dragged us into the mire. Sure they allowed all those mortgages to be guaranteed and that was a key culprit in the Great Recession. Our government has never been very good at being proactive at anything. Reactive… thats another matter. That gets the votes.
So the government reacted and poured money into the system. They allowed just about any bank with a pulse to borrow money. To this very minute it is incredibly cheap to borrow short term capital. Particularly if you are in the business of trading/hacking the stock market. If you are a big fund or investor, money is cheap. Unfortunately for the stock market, it is cheap for everyone. In other words, capital is not longer expensive and it is no longer scarce.
When capital is so cheap that everyone with a pulse thinks they can make money once they borrow it, the stock market is in trouble.
Remember the rule about first there are the innovators, then the imitators, then the idiots ? It is why the stock market is truly in trouble.
There is SO MUCH CAPITAL available at so little cost to so many that the timeline from innovator to idiot is measured in days, hours and probably even milliseconds. The guys who are actually smart and uncover new opportunities can’t even get in a position large enough to make it worth their while before the imitators and then idiots pile in right behind them.
Remember the Flash Crash and the discussion about how trades are made in milliseconds, what I called hacking the system ? I don’t know for certain, but Im willing to bet that those innovators that made money by trading in milliseconds, now have so many imitators and idiots that have piled in behind them , putting servers right next to theirs and hiring their algorithm coders away from them, that there is no longer any advantage, or not enough of one for any of the players to make any real money.
There is so much capital chasing so little return that big time players are getting out of the business.
So what does this mean for you ?
It means that I don’t know if the market will go up or down, or by how much. My guess is that it stays in a trading range for a while. There isn’t much money coming in, but enough of that easy to come by capital has so much ego attached to it, that the same people will get in and out of the market over and over again and trade amongst themselves.
Until something happens. What that will be, I have no idea.
But I do know that I have continued to add to my cash balance or sovereign debt from around the world (that I have owned for a while now and has been profitable and is very, very liquid.) The stocks I still own for the most part pay me a nice cash on cash return, or I have owned them for a long, long time and have more in gains than I want to pay taxes on. But in total, I have been a net seller of stocks for more than a year. The only investments I am making are small buys into private companies. I want as much “powder dry ” as possible for when something happens.
I’m not saying you should get out of the stock market. What I am saying is that it is not a bad thing to accumulate cash right now. Retention of capital is a good thing. Don’t go chasing stocks. Something is going to give in this market. Like I said, I dont know what it is, but I want to have as much capital available as possible for when it happens.
Baron Rothschild said “the time to buy is when there is blood in the streets”, Warren Buffet said it differently when he said ” you pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus”
This is the time to start saving for a “bloody day”. There will be a time when capital regains its scarcity. When it becomes more expensive. When it does , what do you want to have in as great an amount as possible ? Capital.
So save your money. Pay off your credit cards. Put your money in the bank where it is insured. Be patient. Get a good nights sleep knowing that your money is not going any where and just wait till your capital is in demand and you get paid for it. When everyone is complaining about the money they lost, you will be ready to step in and buy.
That is how fortunes are made. Having money when no one else does. And you can take that to the bank !
Filed under: Coupe, Performance
An interview and walkaround with McLaren's Antony Sheriff
It takes a lot to stand out during Monterey Car Week, yet one vehicle that came up in nearly every conversation was the McLaren MP4-12C. Making its first appearance since debuting at the Goodwood Festival of Speed earlier this year, the MP4-12C was trotted out for prospective buyers and champagne-slurping journalists adjacent to Pebble Beach's photogenic 18th hole so those of us in the States could finally see what the fuss is about.
If you're not already up on the stats, here's the pertinent information: The MP4-12C packs a twin-turbocharged 3.8-liter V8 mounted amidships, with 600 horsepower and 443 pound-feet of torque delivered to the rear wheels through a seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox. And this isn't an off-the-shelf drivetrain from another automaker - the entire car, from the engine to the window controls has been developed in-house. The result is a 2,800-pound exotic that - on paper - has the potential to rule the segment.
We spent nearly two hours poking and prodding the 12C, all while interviewing McLaren's Managing Director, Antony Sheriff. He answered our questions, laughed at our stupid jokes and came equipped with an encyclopedic knowledge of nearly every facet of McLaren's new baby.
But more than the power and the looks, it's the 12C's overall concept and execution that stuck with us. Rather than go with an aluminum spaceframe, McLaren opted for a carbon fiber monocoque weighing a mere 176 pounds. An aluminum structure is mounted fore and aft, and the body work is simply draped over the structure to aid aerodynamics. Nobody does this. (And we now want a bare chassis to mount on our wall).Get inside and it's obvious that the act of driving is the sole focus. The seats are molded to the individual buyer's body, the steering wheel is infinitely adjustable, the tachometer sits front and center with two configurable displays flanking it. The paddle shifters work like a camera shutter switch: hold the downshift paddle halfway, the gearbox recognizes you're about to select the next gear, dials it up and as soon as you pull back past the detent, it engages. And the headroom. We wouldn't be surprised if the McLaren had more of the stuff than a Rolls-Royce Ghost.
Other interesting tidbits: You can option the 12C with a three-camera video recording system to document your on-track antics. Carbon composite brakes are optional, but unless you're heading to the track every weekend, the steel units are said to stop the 12C in the same distance (and don't squeal). Three wheel options are available - forged, lightweight forged or ultra-lightweight - the latter of which came into being after McLaren execs told the engineering team to just design the lightest wheel possible - they didn't care what it looked like. We saw them on the concept car lawn at Pebble and the ten-spoke design looks fantastic.
There's much more, but we'll let our interview with Sheriff take it from here. And if you're interested, McLaren plans to make a total of 1,000 MP4-12Cs next year, with sales in the U.S. beginning in August. McLaren hasn't announced pricing, but we expect something in the $250,000 range. Hit the jump for the interview and check out our two high-res galleries below.
Photos Copyright (C)2010 Drew Phillips / AOL
Continue reading The Mac is Back: Getting intimate with the McLaren MP4-12C
The Mac is Back: Getting intimate with the McLaren MP4-12C originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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[Thanks, @Loomis2]
Continue reading FOX starts framing the NFL in 16x9 and letterboxing the laggards
FOX starts framing the NFL in 16x9 and letterboxing the laggards originally appeared on Engadget HD on Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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New Exilim golf-friendly digicam hitting Japan; the Pro from Dazaifu never had it so good originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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