For a value investor’s stock the four most important days of the year are when the company quarterly results come out. This is the time of the year when public companies take a break from their secrecy and announce to their holders what they’ve achieved, through webcasts and conference calls, and often, what they expect to achieve in the future.

Having switched to using Google’s great calendaring service, I found that it is a little bit difficult to keep track of the quarterly meetings on any of the calendar apps, web or not, unless you add them one by one yourself. This should come as a surprise, as both Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance have your portfolio saved and should present you with the option of adding the information directly to your calendar.

Having not found anything that even remotely accomplishes this, I’ve written a public service that will do just this: configure once, and forget for all eternity.

This is essentially an earnings announcement calendar aggregator. I’ve named it MyEarnCal for short for now. You don’t need to create a portfolio, account, pay me any money, or anything like that at all (it’s free.)

You can use it right away through any calendaring service that supports iCal, like Google Calendar. Subscribe to the following calendar:

http://cmichae.acm.jhu.edu/myearncal/MSFT+AMZN

Substituting MSFT+AMZN for any list of stock tickers you’d like. For example

http://cmichae.acm.jhu.edu/myearncal/GOOG+GE+JNJ

will show earnings announcements for Google, General Electric, and Johnson and Johnson. And you don’t have to do anything at all for the next batch, it will automatically show up.

This is still in beta; the only missing feature, is accurate reporting of the time of the press conference. Right now, all After Market conferences will show as 4:30 events, while Pre-Market events will show as 9:00 events. For now, it accomplishes the essential feature, allowing you to add your share’s earnings announcements and corporate actions to the plethora of calendars that take the iCalendar standard, such as Kontact/Korganizer, iCal, Google Calendar, Evolution, and Outlook 2007.

Here is the calendar for some favorites stocks to watch, as imported by Google Calendar:

Update: I’ve noticed that sometimes, it takes a while to load one of these calendars on Google Calendar. This happens because Google Calendar indexes the calendar at the address once, and will cache it for later. So one way to get around any error messages Google Calendar reports is to just wait a few hours and retry again with the exact same URI address.

Jaminid (Java Mini Daemon) is a very small HTTP/1.1 server written entirely in Java, and meant to be embedded into java programs as a builtin server, usually to substitute a graphical GUI with a thin-client HTML interface.

Due to an increase in interest from people lately, I’ve released a new version containing the impovements I’ve made to it since it’s first public release. The improvements include several bug fixes, and even includes a nicer example.

Admittedly one of the few ways the Bloomberg Terminal distinguishes itself from the rest of the pack of financial data reporting, is the excellent News tracker. When you are viewing any chart, for example historical prices of a share, you can click on any point of the chart to view the news stories that occurred at that particular date and time.

I liked this little feature so much (it can make a lot of trends immediately obvious) that I’ve implemented my own little version for my news-equity correlation project, which could capture emailed Bloomberg stories and save them in a database. This was soon extended to capture stories from prespecified Google Alerts, and the task at hand was to learn to predict trends in the share price based on patterns in the news stories.It looks like Google has been busy. The all new, Google Finance site has this amazing little feature, and though it might not have as much content as Bloomberg, it is slick, functional, and appealing. I will be using this often.

Apple shares declined a whopping 6.33% today, possibly on rumors that sales for new macs might be hampered by a lag from software developers to switch to the Intel (INTC) platform, as well as news that CBS will be bypassing iTunes and will provide direct downloads of the show Survivor.
I have been watching the decline on intraday trading today trying to figure out why the sudden selloff - but I could find no major coverage on either one of the above possible explanations on the regular sources, among them the Dow Jones newswire, which only covered the CBS story.

The Survivor news might reflect a reasonable fear that the iTunes dominance might be short lived; I find that unlikely:

1. Survivor is the only show with which CBS is experimenting with direct downloads; it looks like its iTunes for everything else.
2. iTunes’ revenue is still primarily music, to the best of my knowledge.
3. People are used to iTunes; it’s easy, highly available and accessible, and works well with the iPod.
As far as the Intel switch goes, it looks like the primary concern was Adobe. This is nonsense; Adobe must have been waiting for years for this switch. Its products sell well for Macs, but they sell the very same identical products for Windows. Eliminating the PPC support will allow Adobe and all the companies that sell for both platforms to consolidate their codebases. This is easier than you might think - worst case, they can run their software under an emulated mode, and speed concerns might not be an issue since the Intel processors are, if you were to believe the hype, 4 times faster than their PPC `equivalents’.Let’s consider the other end on the other hand. The move to Intel allows a myriad software providers to publish on the Mac. Should things work as planned, we could see PC games being ported to the Mac, allowing Apple to tap a whole new market that has been ignored for years.

Apple shares jumped 6.3% today on news that iPod sales were 3 times better than expected, but the only people to be surprised were the analysts and those who listen to them.

For everybody else with common sense, there has not been a success story more visible than that of the iPod. Just try and count the white earphones next time you take the subway. Or walk into an Apple store and witness the line of people waiting to walk up to the registrar with nothing in their hands - they are almost certainly buying an iPod, a mere 2 minute, simple trade that brings in an average of $250 for the Apple register. If you paid attention to the retailers, there was one buzz word this quarter - iPod, iPod, iPod. Amazon.com has their top 10 sales in electronics; I am sure it must have been delightful for Apple investors to see almost every incarnation of the iPod rank among the top 10.

Three years into Apple’s great run, there have been countless reports of its impending doom, yet today their financials look solid (albeit the stock is a little bit overpriced, but for many, well worth the premium) and the world’s appetite for their products, inexorable. Their mac line is improving, and Steve jobs has done an amazing job addressing the Apple fans regarding the Intel switch:

That’s exactly the kind of enthusiasm that will ease the anxiety of Mac loyals around the world.

Technology wise, however, many were dissapointed today. There were no new iPods, no iPhone, no big content deals, and no buzzword worthy innovations. I think they’ve given the street plenty to think about for a couple of weeks before they throw us another bone.

Regardless of what you use on your personal computers, you should be certain of one thing: Microsoft (MSFT), the stock that has been stagnant throughout the bull market of 2002-2005 will rise again.

Windows Vista, set to launch with much fanfare sometime in 2006, will bring about a few interesting changes: a fresh look since the tired Windows XP look, built in search features, and Urge.

Urge is Microsoft’s reply to Apple iTunes (AAPL), however, it seems to be similarly minded with Musicmatch, Napster and Rhapsody that offer ‘all you can eat’ subscriptions, unlike iTunes. Arguably the largest setback to its wide adoption is it’s lack of support for the iPod, which monopolizes portable digital player sales. This is a big handicap which means that unless a new music playing device becomes mainstream (perhaps one that has runs Windows?) the iTunes lead for music downloaded for portable use will remain.

However in our fascination with iPods, we might be forgetting one thing: we still listen to a lot of music indoors. And this is where Windows reign supreme. Given the easy accessibility that Urge is bound to have from the operating system, it should be easy to see how the service will shine just like Microsoft Windows Media Player has shined since it launched with Windows XP, to the dismay of RealNetworks and the European Union that has an outstanding fine against the company for its media player monopoly.

This is not the first time the company has done something late in the game but has managed to beat the competition nonetheless. The Windows operating system, to name one, is based on concepts pioneered by Apple and Xerox. Microsoft may enter slowly into new and untested areas, but has managed to secure its position in each with relative success.

An exception to this rule has been internet search, as critics will point out. I personally switched to Google (GOOG) from MSN Search several years ago, when MSN Search decided popups might be a good idea for their site. Ever since then, I’ve not used it much except to test their revamped services, but needless to say it has not managed to budge Google’s market share much. To do so, it needs to provide users with switching incentives, like easy accessability, say from an operating system into which it was seamlessly embedded. To succeed with MSN Search, Microsoft has to address a growing misinformed bias that it does not do Internet technology well, loosely based on the Internet Explorer shortcomings, and best exemplified during the MSN-Inktomi years, when Yahoo! and MSN Search were run by the same engine yet users would rank (identical) results as worse from MSN than from Yahoo.

This can all change with Vista: Microsoft gets an opportunity to show innovation is still a priority with the software giant, upgrade Internet Explorer and enhance its security features, and the accessibility of MSN search in Vista as well as its proximity to the new Desktop Search will give it a fresh advantage. For Microsoft, 2006 is promising - and MSFT might even break out of its stagnant $25-$30 window where it has been stuck for the past years despite its rising profits and relatively low P/E ratio.