Larry Macdonald at The Globe and Mail writes:

IAN ST. MARTIN

AGE: 43

OCCUPATION: Software engineer turned professional investor.

PORTFOLIO: Astea International Inc., WPCS International Inc., Optelecom-NKF Inc., Ceradyne Inc., Excel Maritime Carriers Ltd., Span-America Medical Systems Inc. and lots of cash. Mr. St. Martin’s portfolio is very fluid and may be different from when he described it as of March 31.

INVESTMENT RESULTS

Mr. St. Martin, who resides in Vancouver, has a virtual portfolio on Marketocracy.com that has long been in the top 100 of more than 50,000 portfolios tracked on the U.S. website. Although growth has tapered off in the past year, the portfolio has an annualized return of 32.2 per cent since inception in May of 2001, compared with 2.6 per cent in the S&P 500 over the same period.

HOW HE STARTED

“I started dabbling in stocks in the 1990s, when I started to have some extra income from my job,” Mr. St. Martin says. “However, I never took it seriously until after the crash of March, 2000. That event led me to a much deeper investigation of the market. I wanted to see if I could find any rhyme or reason to the seemingly wild gyrations of the market.”

HOW HE INVESTS

“My search took me to William O’Neil [the founder of Investor’s Business Daily] and his CAN SLIM system. From there, I developed my own style,” he adds. The new approach proved to be enough of a winner to help him land a position as chief research analyst with Vancouver-based Asset Logics U.S. Long-Short Equity Fund (until February of this year).

He screens the earnings reports of public U.S. companies daily, looking for strong revenue and earnings growth, increasing margins, robust balance sheets, and modest valuations when compared to peers. For companies meeting his criteria, he looks at their press releases and filings to see if growth is sustainable.

That leaves a smaller number of prospects, all of which go on to a watch list. He’ll pounce if he sees a spike in trading volume and an upside price move - especially if valuation is still reasonable.

The decision to buy or sell is also informed by the current state of the market. “I don’t try to predict changes in the market trend, but I want to understand where it is right now so that I don’t fight the trend,” Mr. St. Martin said.

Tags: Marketocracy

Tags: Cake

Just a reminder that we’re aggregating news & views here, both positive & negative.

Ivan Ristic writes:

I first encountered (and used, in production) Spring Framework in its pre-1.0 days, and it was love at first sight. I loved it because of its vision, a very good design of its MVC and database libraries, and, most importantly, quality (I am yet to encounter a single bug in it, actually). The licence, Apache Software License version 2, was right too. I had even wanted to join the development team, but ultimately decided to focus on ModSecurity instead. Spring had a lot going for it: the Java server-side programming was in a state of disarray. We needed a beacon to guide us.

Fast-forward a few years, and we have Spring firmly established as the leading player in server-side programming. Then, a few more years down the road, the bloat is starting to appear, after the development team (apparently) decided small and focused is not beautiful after all. In parallel with the evolution of the framework, Rod Johnson (the author of Spring) grew his consultancy business, Interface21.

Then, the inevitable happened. The success of Spring became too tempting. Interface 21 sought venture capital, changed its name to SpringSource, and went on to buy Covalent (or merge with, depending on whom you ask), a quiet but persistent company, also in good standing with the community.

My fear, when I heard the news of funding, was the same as Corby’s (from a post at InfoQ):

If anyone had the ability to grow organically, I thought Interface21 did.
VC don’t give you money unless they’re going to grow you 20X. I am very
concerned about seeing an explosion of Spring subprojects that lack the
quality or the relevance of Spring core. And VC don’t give you money
unless you’re going to cash out. I don’t see Interface21 operating as a
standalone IPO, so that means they will be actively seeking
acquisition. I hate to see one of the big guys get ahold of this very
independent entity.
I wish the Interface21 folks great financial success, but I hope Spring
does not turn into a bloated, slow-release monster. I have already
heard rumors that Benchmark Capital is pressuring Rod Johnson to change
his name to something more kid-friendly.

Things started to go wrong after SpringSource had decided to experiment with their licensing strategy. They introduced a number of proprietary products and started using other open source licences. Their most recent product, SpringSource Application Platform, is licensed under GPLv3, in stark contrast to ASLv2 used for the framework itself. (GPL allows business to essentially retain control of the code base.) The changes made many members of the community feel insecure, and lead to heated exchanges on the forums. Prior to the changes the company was often called a darling of Open Source (it sounds like something I would have said too), because they were a rare example of someone building a business (Interface21 consultancy) around the restriction-less Apache Software Licence. I can only conclude that, under the changed circumstances, their business was not growing fast enough, and that they felt that they needed to do things differently.

This story is a clear demonstration of the challenges facing open source commercialisation. Where we previously had a clean separation of the project and the company, now we have a company that is using the project to build a proprietary business model around it. They may still be contributing to the open source parts–today–but do you trust them they will continue to do so? SpringSource are saying they are on the same path they have always been. Maybe they believe that, but they are not, and users see it. SpringSource are saying they will keep the Spring Framework alive and open source. I actually believe they are being honest when they say that. But I also know that people come and go and that, eventually, the prosperity of the company may matter more at some point in the future.

Let me be clear when I say there is nothing wrong with making money of your work, be it open source or not. It’s the change of direction that’s making everyone nervous. For many people open source is about freedom and certainty. They don’t want to have vendors to depend on. They’ve chosen to work with Spring Framework on the basis it’s vendor-free. So it’s not surprising that they are starting to feel twitchy now that they’ve realised the company behind their favourite project is a vendor too. If SpringSource want to preserve their hard-earned credibility they need to act fast to insulate themselves from the core Spring Framework project. It’s certainly a tough thing to do (convincing the VCs, I mean), but it’s the only thing that would bring the user trust back.

Tags: SpringSource

Dion Almaer of Ajaxian.com writes:

The Bay Stack: Ever notice how Silicon Valley stacks up just like technology?

I was sitting in a session at Web 2.0 Expo last week with Salil Deshpande, one of the original investors and advisors to Ajaxian and a former boss at CustomWare. (Salil is now a VC at Bay Partners, and you can follow his new blog here).

We started on the observation that the bay stacks up with technology somewhat similar to a stack of technology itself. We then took the analogy to the extreme as we plotted it out, as seen below.

At the bottom of the stack you have the hardware crud, such as chips (Intel), networking (Cisco), disk drives (Seagate) and hardware (Sun). The operating system should go next, but that was a tough one to squeeze in. Oracle and the database is up in Redwood shores. BEA is further down in real geography, but Oracle has now bought BEA, so it also lives in Redwood shores (phew, thanks for the purchase!).

Then you get up into the city itself, where the hipsters define Web 2.0 (Twitter) and design cool things (Adaptive Path).

Tags: Salil Deshpande