I renewed my subscription service to Jim Cramer's ActionAlertsPlus.com. I signed up with him initially for a few reasons. 1) He was very successful running his own hedge fund; 2) He still runs a charity portfolio, of his own money, successfully; 3) He seems to know what he is talking about on CNBC. Putting your own money where your mouth is is important, imho, for those who make a living out of managing other people's investment money.

I sold ENTU after its recent run-up, but CVTX will likely take longer to rise to its true value. It has several phases II and III applications with the FDA and/or the EU. In the meantime its sole FDA-approved drug is selling relatively well, offsetting a large portion of its expenses.

MSFT dropped further with the overall IT sector, while YHOO moved up. YHOO's board rejected MSFT's offer. It seems the market believes this deal will eventually happen, and probably at a slightly higher price from MSFT. I continue to believe that MSFT doesn't deserve to go down due to this offer and will continue to hold the shares I bought the day the $31/share offer was announced. Based on what happened with Oracle's offers for PeopleSoft, Siebel, and BEA, the final price could either go up, or down, primarily based on the target company's financial performance in the interim. I don't see any obvious catalyst improving YHOO's performance in the near term, although as a Valley resident I do hope YHOO will do well (and that MSFT will drop its offer, sending MSFT share price up.)

Microsoft announced an unsolicited offer for Yahoo last Friday. I first longed Yahoo because its market price was $2 below MSFT's offer price. I soon closed the position for a small profit and longed MSFT instead, which was down almost 10%. The risk/reward ratio for YHOO just seems much higher than MSFT. This move would almost surely help MSFT in the long run, and if the offer was turned down by Yahoo or the acquisition was rejected by the regulatory bodies, MSFT would almost surely see a short term bounce.

The consolidation tide continues in the software industry, with Oracle leading the way so far. MSFT would top Oracle in total amount if this deal were to go through. Who is still around standing alone in the Valley? Tibco, VMware (still majority owned by EMC), Intuit (MSFT tried to acquire it earlier but failed), Adobe, Salesforce.com, and NetSuite.

I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years there are only Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, HP, and, who else, Google, left as legitimate players in the enterprise software market.

With the recent introductions of Unbreakable Linux, and Oracle VM, Oracle has effectively completed its software stack. Anybody who says Oracle is just a database vendor is just, well, outdated.

SAP has been growing a lot more slowly than Oracle in applications license growth, and its NetWeaver platform, although improving steadily, is probably never short listed unless a customer is already running SAP applications. But it's still twice as large as Oracle in apps market share even after Oracle acquired PSFT and SEBL, and we all know that install base is mostly gonna be there for the foreseeable future.

HP's acquisition of Mercury Interactive seems to have made a lot of sense. Systinet seems to be the market leader in SOA governance. Will HP screw up Mercury? It might. Will Sun screw up MySQL?

The top 3 BI vendors have been gobbled up recently. Who's next? BPM and BRM vendors?