Well, it’s a good thing for the bulls that last night’s debt ceiling vote came right before the usual “1st of Da Monf” program trading rally that Bespoke, myself, and others have pointed out so often… because I think if the same news came out on a Friday morning we could have seen some serious selling. The new new new economy is fantastic and I am not putting down anyone that has “evolved” into a web 2.0 guru here, it’s just that in the world of the blogosphere and google analytics there are so many ways for bloggers to “game the system” and get a better Alexa ranking. Using said ranking one can jockey for even more traffic and eyeballs and throughh the use of spam create a billion dollar enterprise. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a blogger by day and I think there is a huge social benefit to the tech revoultion but I also realize that every bull market has corrections along the way and that “eyeballs” and traffic based stock valuations are not concurrent with private valuations of web sites on a Flippa.com for example… So why are people with TD Ameritrade accounts so rushed to purchase shares of LNKD and TZOO even though this movie reel is about 30 years old? Because there is a perception that Bernanke will not let this sector of the stock market drop… All of these program algo names do fine until they don’t… None of this is new at all, in fact, it’s the same thing that happened back in 1987 — check our Video page for a good watch on this…

In any event none of that matters… Nice to get a blurb from James Altucher this morning over at WSJ.com Blogs… I must admit the guy has been spot on on many of his calls for the past few years and I am actually rethinking my LNKD intraday short idea because of his admonition that he “couldn’t disagree more” with my take on this name… As for AMZN and NFLX, I use short calls against these for an overall market hedge, but readers should consider a bear call spread instead of my more aggressive style… In any event, I will be posting more often today and appreciate your views on my ideas…

One thing is for certain, blogging, new media, social shopping sites like www.giantnerd.com, and the trend toward online everything is a good thing for the most part — it’s just that bubbles often cause far more problems than they are worth… If you want to buy web traffic or stock in a web site, don’t pick up OPEN shares in your E trade account because it may turn out to be the next Classmates.com and trade at 8X earnings… Instead head over to Flippa.com or the other private brokers and buy a real company for a real price… I assure you that you can find many interesting concepts for far less expensive valuations than 40X sales or 1000X earnings, and the private/public disconect is what I like to play in the stock markets both long and short!

When I was in M&A advisory we used to say that companies were worth 1-1.5X sales, 3-5X EBITDA, 8-10X earnings, or book value… Now, this is for a certain industry group, but in general over the decades these multiples seem like a reasonable proxy as to what companies are worth… Overpaying just because shares are liquid on your level 2 account is still overpaying in my view!