Mark Cuban is a blogger that rarely disappoints in the content department. His posts are usually long, detailed and passionate with his most recent entry dispensing investment advice being no exception. He offers three basic tenants for investing:

1. If interest rates stay where they are or go higher, look at 5 year or shorter maturity vehicles
2. Evaluate your lifestyle.
3. Invest in yourself.

Most financial experts — and Mr. Cuban seems to take exception with most these people in his piece not really being “experts” — are saying interest rates will rise in 2006. Of course they don’t really know, as Cuban also points out. If this does happen, then Cuban’s #1 comes into play and short term investments would make sense.

I don’t offer specific investment advice here, beyond saying that those choosing to invest should invest in something they know. For me, technology is my field of not only business but interest. I monitor what the technology companies that I own stock in are doing very closely. For those reading who don’t know what those technology stocks are, they are listed at the top of the finance category.

I wrote a small PHP script that grabs the daily activity of each of these stocks, logs it and then creates and saves the image. This way if I want to know the activity for any particular day of the year I can copy this image.

Let’s look at GOOGle stock performance images that were generated on the last financial day of Q2 - Q4 2005:

Q2:

Q3:

Q4:

Man, if only ever stock worked like that. But if you look at what Google actually did over 2005, you can see why their stock did well:

- Google Adsense and Adwords updates
- improved Gmail and promised to add storage space that never stops growing
- started blogging more regularly and with some actual substance instead of just marketing fluff
- added Google video
- offered Google Analytics for free
- several Google Earth enhancements, and being the first choice among many developers for map mashups
- numerous updates to other services

In a single word, Google was busy. Problems? Yes, they had a string of underwhelming first generation launches plagued with load and scaling issues, but what did they do? Google did what they always seemed to do: went back to the drawing board and worked on the problem, quietly and dilligently. At least as far as the rest of us outside the ‘plex, Google wasn’t caught up in its own hype, they went back to work to fix or innovate.

You bet I can get behind a company that behaves that way. And the newest Google news is something many folks, myself included, have been speculating about: a GoogleOS on a Google PC:

Sources say Google has been in negotiations with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., among other retailers, to sell a Google PC. The machine would run an operating system created by Google, not Microsoft’s Windows, which is one reason it would be so cheap — perhaps as little as a couple of hundred dollars.

Any bets that if this actually happens it will be a Linux variant with Python featured prominently as the scripting language of choice? The LA Times has more:

Bear Stearns analysts speculated in a research report last month that consumers would soon see something called “Google Cubes” — a small hardware box that could allow users to move songs, videos and other digital files between their computers and TV sets.

As long as they aren’t as scarce as the Xbox 360, I’d buy one . My guess is this alleged “Google Cube” could be officially announced and moved from the mere rumor and speculation camp by Larry Page at his keynote address at CES in Las Vegas this coming Friday.

Meanwhile, Bill Gates sets to kick off his opening keynote tomorrow night. Does Microsoft have any big announcements up its sleeves? If I were a betting man, I’d say yes. They aren’t going to just show up at CES (like last year) with relatively little to announce. Telling us ad nauseum that Vista and Office 12 are on the way along with many more Xbox 360 this year will not be enough.

In order for me, and I suspect many other tech stock investers, to start buying Microsoft stock, we need to see a real committment to activity and the game starts now, this week. Let’s hope 2006 is the year that Microsoft gets back in the game because I’d like to add them to my portfolio at some point in 2006.

Update 1/4/2006 9:49am PST: Google denies GoogleOS rumors.

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