The World of Google (and Molycorp)

I again share with you all that I am about halfway through the brand new and very interesting book about the history of Google: In the Plex (Steven Levy), I highly recommend it to you all.  Reading this book has absorbed some of my time over the last few days, as I have kind-of neglected my blog.

I may write an article on Google sometime soon.  The other day, someone at zerohedge posted a link to a couple of pages "up in Google's cloud".  I eventually (as many of you know) may write a rolling bearing blog, and I may put Google spreadsheets (bearing interchange numbers for example) and other documents up there in the Cloud if appropriate).  I want to learn how to do that, there is a LOT to learn about the world of Google.  

(Slightly O/T ramble: I will tell you exactly when Google captured me (in the book that is): when early on I had read that in their very early history they used some matrix algebra to calculate (and then use) eigenvalues and eigenvectors, two mathematical constructs used in "Factor Analysis" one of several types of multivariate statistics.  My old SPSS program will not run on Windows 7 (I thought all of this was supposed to be "backwards compatible").  SPSS was taken over by IBM, and now they want a HUGE $1800 for their statistics package, forget it.  I am now forced to download a statistics program "R", which is free but hard to use and complicated...).

There are a number of fascinating things about Google and its services I want and probably need to learn.  

Google is a stock that I had never seriously thought about buying before, it just seemed kind of ridiculous to me.  Not now.

Observations from you about "The World of Google", kind readers, would be most welcome.

*** Also of great interest to Junior Database and Statistical Analyst Robert would be if anyone who is REALLY GOOD AT MATH who could tell me how to calculate eigenvalues and eigenvectors using MS Excel 2010 (which has a barebones set of matrix calculation tools, but not those two...)  ***

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Since I brought up a company and its shares as a candidate purchase, I will share some thoughts about Molycorp (ticker symbol MCP, I use stockcharts.com to look at stock price movements), the rare earths miner in California, near Las Vegas.

Back in the old days, they had the largest rare earths mine in the world.  Until China came along and found, mined and processed (all dirty and expensive to do) the rare earths such that they have 95% or more of the rare earth metals market, and are being very strict on exports lately.  And the state of California came down on them re environmental restrictions.

The then owners of the mine then shut it down.  Eventually four groups (one was Goldman Sachs) wound up owning it.  They then went to work to prepare to rehabilitate the mine and work to IPO the company.  Which they did, at about $14.00 per share, roughly a year ago.  I had been a veteran of several months there at Zero Hedge and firmly believed that you should not buy what Goldman Sachs is trying to sell...  So, I did not buy any shares in those early days.  Big mistake!  I believe the stock is in the high 50s now...  It has come off its high around $70.

Molycorp has announced that it has plans to become more vertically integrated (that is where the real money is, in the costly value-added separation of the chemically similar rare earths and subsequent processing (before magnet manufacturers can use them in permanent magnets), the USA has extremely little capability of doing this, the one little company that can do this here in the USA is owned by Great Western of Canada, they RIGHT NOW are the closest thing there is to a "vertically integrated" rare earths company).  Molycorp recently bought an old Soviet era facility in Estonia which they will bring back on-line to do this kind of processing.  Molycorp maybe ought to look at purchasing a junior miner (like Avalon Rare Earths) that has the much more valuable "heavy" rare earth metals.  If Molycorp has the $money$ and expertise to put all the pieces together, they probably have a great future

I will likely write (and maybe get others to write) about rare earth metals in the future.

Here is a link to a nice website, with news pretty much every day, about rare earth metals about the rare earth metals industry:

http://www.raremetalblog.com/