Year: 2006

Nothing to lose

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Last Updated on October 16, 2006 by stlplace

Google buying YouTube is a big news for the web 2.0 community. Its effect is felt more than that (I got two emails from friends regarding this :-). Interestingly, I recalled just a few weeks ago, Mark Cuban, the outspoken billionare investor (who made a fortune in the 90s dot com era), said “anyone who buys YouTube is a moron”. Now Google buys it. So according to his comments, and a little bit reasoning, Google is a xxx. Just kidding. When Cuban made this comment, he meant the potential lawsuit fallout because the copyrighted materials are all over the YouTube. And I believe there is some merits to his comments. But Google guys are not crazy either. As matter of fact, they have probablly the smartest people both in business and technology (and laws maybe). There are lots of analysis regarding why/how YouTube thrived amid all these competitions. Or how lucky they are ($1.65 billion payout). But I am not going there. I think they are genius, both with their technology and business model. But they would not accomplish without the “nothing to lose” attitude. Why would I say that?

About 6 months ago I found out YouTube from another web site. It’s a video titled Meat on a stick (lamb kebab, 羊肉串).

China

Home Inns IPO Update

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Last Updated on October 13, 2006 by stlplace

This is official, Home Inns (Ru Jia) filed its F1 Form to the SEC.

(From routers) It will be priced between $ 10 to 12. And from IPO home it will debut on the week of Oct 23. Pacific Epoch’s Paul Waide said “it will get out of the gate this year“. I believe it’s more imminent. It will be traded under the symbol “HMIN”.

I will write some of my thoughts later on.

home inns

Saint Louis

Power is back

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Last Updated on October 12, 2006 by stlplace

It’s not pleasant to have power outage, but it’s cool to check the power status from the web. Not to mention that the power is back. Now go Cardinals (against NY Mets in NLCS)!

==============================

Recent Outage (Restored in the last 48 hours.)
Outage start date/time:   Wednesday Oct 11, 2006 5:28 PM
Outage status:   Power is back on
Cause of outage:   Tree contact
Actual restoration time:   Thursday Oct 12, 2006 9:40 AM
Number of customers out:   …

China

Passport renewal

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Last Updated on October 11, 2006 by stlplace

It’s that time again. Note from Jan 1, 2007 the Chinese consulate or embassy no longer take the renewal (due to the new passport laws taking effect). Here is a link for the Chicago Consulate. Note you need the Adobe reader Simplified Chinese Patch to read the PDF form.

China Passport

BTW, the Nov. 2006 visa bulletin is out, and here is the link. I used to subscribe to the email list but it did not sending out the email as soon as it put on the web. At one time, I even received an email which is a question asked by somebody on the mailing list. OK so much for the reliability of their email system 🙂

Saint Louis

Great River Road

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Last Updated on October 17, 2006 by stlplace

Drove along the “Great River Road” from Alton to Grafton yesterday, the Missisipi River and the changing colors on the mountains looks great. No wonder there are so many people in the bars and grills at the town of Grafton. I also saw people with boats enjoying the water before the winter chill – this is probally last good moment for this year. I took some pictures and put it up in Flickr. And here is one:

China

New direct flights to China

Post author By stlplace
Post date October 7, 2006
No Comments on New direct flights to China

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Last Updated on October 12, 2006 by stlplace

The following are some of the proposed new direct flights from US to China.

AA is applying for the new direct flight from Dallas (DFW) to Beijing (PEK). Here is the link to sign up for the petition.

Northwest is working on the Detroit (DTW) to Shanghai (PVG) route. Here is the link.

Last but not least, United is bidding on the Washing Dulles (IAD) to Beijing (PEK) route. And here is the link.

You can support them by signing up the petition letter. Only one route will be approved by USDOT next year. Please note I am not advertising for any of the airlines because what I really want is a Saint Louis (STL) to Shanghai route 🙂

Life Technology

Instant Message Scandal

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Last Updated on October 6, 2006 by stlplace

OK, I will take a break from the stock lesson today. I am going to talk about the TV media here. I bet president Bush doesn’t like what he sees on TV these days, not just daily casualties in Iraq and Afganistan, and the conspiracy theory of lower gas price. Being a president, the president can not be a winner on this gasoline price issue. When the price goes up, people complains; when the gas price goes down, people are suspicious why the price goes down exactly before this congress mid-term election. Of course the biggest headache for him and republican party, is this “Foley” scandal. Yes, it’s not Shanghai had the big scandal lately. These days when you turned on the TV (say, CNN, FOX, or NBC), you will hear and see the Florida congressman Floey’s scandal (criminal investigation is under way). The center of the matter, is Mr. Foley sent instant message to under aged boy who works for congress. So let’s call it “Instant Message Scandal”, or “IM Gate”?

Many people think the instant message does not have any record. And I think that’s one reason people say stupid thing in IM. Wrong. It turns out many IM providers keep copies of conversation on the server. Also the participants can save the conversations on the computer. More specifically, the Google talk (by default) stores the chat content in your Gmail account.

I remember Warren Buffett once said : when he was not sure about doing something in business, he will use the criteria “can this be put on the front page of local newspaper”. He certainly meant put be on the paper as a good story. Ironically, Mr. Foley’s story did show up in a lot newspaper’s front page, in a totally different tone.

Stocks

Stock Lesson IV

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Last Updated on October 4, 2006 by stlplace

I started this “stock lesson” series because I want to write down some of the mistakes I made on the stock market in the past few years. I hope I can avoid making the same mistakes in the future; I also hope others can learn from my mistakes.

OK, back to the subject. I have talked about enough about “Grass is not always green on the other side”, find your own rythm (stocks and trade pattern), the investment goal and plan, all these good stuffs. Now comes the practical question: when to buy? when to sell?

This seems like an easy question. I think we all want to buy low and sell high, so that we can make money. But how do we know whether a stock will go down or up when we buy it? Remember our good friend Warren Buffett once said “buy when others are scared; sell when others are greedy”. Fair enough. But there are some caveats on this one. I have done this: in Spring 2004 I bought some Nokia (NOK) stocks at $17.xx when it released earning below expectation. And I bought more at $14.xx a week later when it said it would miss the next quarter earning estimates too. The main reason is Nokia is a bit slow releasing those Flip phones which are more popular in the US market. They lost market share to competititors. So here is the mini lesson one: don’t try to catch a falling knife. When the earning is bad, and everyone is selling, why would I fight against the market? So what was my results? The stock went down as low as $11 before it recovered to $17 in one year. By that time I already lost patience and sold it at a loss.

Life Stocks

Stock lesson III

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Last Updated on October 3, 2006 by stlplace

Set a realistic goal, e.g., 20% return in one year. Don’t get too carried away from other people’s success and try to emualte it without learning its risk.

I have some hefty goals in the past two years. To be more exact, although I don’t have a number (for percentage gain), I know I have some wild expectations from time to time. When I bet on the earning reports of Netease (NTES) last November, I have two chances to make 10% gain but I was expecting more. Eventually I lost 20% instead because the actual earning report is not as good as wall street expected. Note the “Wall Street expectation”. We know the stock price is ultimately determined by the earnings (how much money the company make), but in the short term, it is also related to the Wall Street expected earning and the actual earning. If it beats (like Google did in last few years), the stock soars; if it misses, the stock tanks (like DELL did lately).

OK so much for the expectation. Back to the goal, besides the percentage gain. I think we also need to determine how much money we want to put in the stock market. This is important because we also need to pay bills (food, cars and house), and save for retirement. I like Jim Crammer’s “mad money” definition on this. Basically as the name suggests, we should only put the money we don’t need to use for a while (maybe 6 months to a year), a.k.a., the mad money into the stock market. I made mistakes on this because twice I had to sell the stocks because I need the cash for something. We should never let this happen. This is just a sign of poor budgeting. We should sell the stock only if “we think the stock price peaked, or we are confident there are other investment opportunites with better return/less risk”.

This planning and expectation thing also applies to other aspects of life very well. I think a lot times we feel disappointed about someone or something because we had too high expectation. Another good example, Saint Louis Cardinals won the 1st division series games against San Diego Padres this afternoon. Because a lot people expect Padres will win (low expectation for Cardinals), I feel very happy now.

China Stocks

Getting RMB in China

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Last Updated on October 5, 2006 by stlplace

Bring the green backs and exchange it at Bank of China or other banks is the common way. They do require the passport though. And sometimes the wait time could be long (I found out Friday is usually bad). But it is not very safe if you have large amount of cash. So I tried the Citi Bank card this time but they charge me 1% fee. There is a way to get around it.

Open a checking account from Bank of America (BOA) and get a Visa Check card. BOA has agreement with China Construction Bank (CCB). It is said that you can withdraw RMB using the Visa Check card (market conversion rate for USD to RMB) at CCB ATM machines. Better yet, if you open a checking acct from BOA, they will credit $50 or $100 depending on the account type. Pretty cool, huh?

CCB pix