Are Financial Services and Telecom merging? And British Airways 100K is back!

Some of you may be familiar with the AccountNow prepaid card, and some of you may even have obtained one at some point for the sake of earning points and miles. In light of the recent announcement that T-Mobile is offering a prepaid card, this news from AccountNow is especially interesting:

Jim Jones, CEO of privately held AccountNow, Inc., one of the nation’s largest prepaid card companies, today announced the acquisition of www.prepaidwireless.comfrom Generis Group and www.babblebug.com from Fuze Online, Inc., providers of wireless telecom products and services, primarily top-ups for prepaid phones.

So in the last three weeks we’ve had a telecom move into prepaid and a prepaid provider move into telecom. Which seems odd at first, but when you think about it, the core competencies are pretty similar: both industries revolve around getting people to put money into your product every month, often in the form of plastic cards purchased at a third-party provider. And in both industries you need a good-sized customer service operation to deal with irate customers calling to complain when things get screwed up, which they inevitably will in either industry.

This isn’t the first time one industry has dabbled in the other. My first job out of college was with AT&T Universal Card, which is now a mostly forgotten product at Citi. It is hard to imagine now, but once upon a time AT&T was one of the ten biggest credit card issuers in the country.

BA 100K IS BACK AGAIN: Here’s the link. Do any of you reading this not know why Avios are so great for short-haul flights? And why they’ll get even better on March 31?

GREEDY BLOGGERS RUIN EVERYTHING, PART CLXXVII: Apparently it’s not only people in the points-n-miles community who fuss about bloggers (or Flyertalk posters, or whoever) ruining everything. Check out Nate Tobik’s post, “The fallacy of exposing ideas” over on Oddball Stocks:

If it hasn’t happened to you yet it’s just a matter of time.  Right now you read my blog and love to see some of the strange stocks I profile.  That is until I profile something you like, and something you “found”.  Then my site goes from an enjoyable read to an unmentionable.  Everything is great except for that one post that you wish I’d rescind.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but I don’t believe that keeping ideas secret, or not sharing ideas is the best course of action.  By writing this blog I’ve established for myself that I find value in giving ideas away for free, and I don’t believe talking about investments or potential investments is bad.

The fallacy of exposing ideas is the name I give to the idea that great investment ideas should never be shared, especially shared publicly.  In this view a great investment idea should be hoarded and kept to the person who found it.  I believe this desire derives from the fact that investors fear that once an idea is shared it will suddenly appreciate in price and they’ll never be able to purchase another share.

There are no hidden investments.  As Proverbs states “There is nothing new under the sun”, or the more modern expression “what was old is new again.”  Every investment is known by someone, if a company has shares it also has shareholders.  Sometimes the group of people is small who know about an investment, and other times the group is large.  Sometimes what is a hidden investment to us is really well known to a variety of people, it’s just not known by us yet.

If discussing and exposing ideas were such a bad thing we wouldn’t be happy to tell friends about value investing.  Why not hoard the knowledge in Security Analysis to ourselves?  Maybe Seth Klarman tried to put the cat back in the bag when he took his book Margin of Safety off the market.  The problem is if an idea is compelling we can’t help but share it with others.

If you’re intrigued, read the whole thing here.