Month: January 2007

Categories
Stocks

What to Read from Insider Selling?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Last Updated on December 14, 2023 by stlplace

(Update 12-14-2023) Came across this issue again when doing some research on the Hashicorp stock ($HCP).

CEO David McJannet

Confounder Armon Dadgar 

I assume cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto has a shell company and didn’t use his own name for the shares he traded. I didn’t dig into it: it’s not something that I feel it’s productive for me to do. A while ago though, I did think about learn the Go lang and see if I can be one of the 1st 200/300 employees at Hashicorp (thinking the stocks pre-IPO). It didn’t materialize 🙂 Btw, I just learned Mitchell is leaving Hashicorp.

Again I feel we should not worry about insiders selling stocks? In most cases we don’t need to do, as the insiders would like to to cash out for their life style or charity, note Bill Gates, if he didn’t sell, he would be a trillionaire? Just look at Steve Baller’s $MSFT stock.

(Original 2007) Not too much. From time to time, the insiders of the company, a.k.a, the founders, the senior management, or even the venture capital, decided to sell their stocks in the public market. As ordinary investors I used to be worried about those kinds of events. Until I read Peter Lynch’s book One Up On Wall Street lately. Now I think we don’t need to read too much from this. Insiders are also human beings, they may want to buy a nice house, send their kids to Harvard, etc. In other words, they need to have some cash. From investment point of view, they don’t want to have 100% of their investment in their own company’s stocks too (Buffett is an exception because he is the Guru of investing/money management).

Last Friday New Oriental revealed that its CEO Yu Minghong and another director will sell a large amount of stocks. It’s no surprise the market reacted negatively. But I am not worried. I bought some more EDU stocks instead. At 33.00 (note its fiscal 2007 first 6 months earning $0.68, and its first quarter is the strongest traditionally), I believe it’s fair priced.

Continue reading “What to Read from Insider Selling?”
Categories
Site Info

Spam

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Last Updated on May 28, 2009 by stlplace

I got lots of spams (spamming comments) lately. Thus I decided to use the special anti-spam program for now. If you feel your comments have been mistakenly treated as “spam”, shoot me an email and I will manually revert it.

I will also check it regularly to make sure legimate comments don’t get treated as spams.

Categories
Fun

Post Office are Crowded

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Last Updated on January 20, 2007 by stlplace

Today I went to Post Office to mail something. I noticed there are lots of people, which is not unusual, because people want to get things done in the weekend. What surprised me a bit is there are many people applying for the Passports. This also makes sense to me because recently the goverment issues new rules that require US citizens carrying passports if they travel between Canada, Mexico, Carribean Islands and the States (they don’t have to show passports in the past).

But I think there is another reason. Did you notice the gas price dropped significantly lately? Today I saw unleaded gas as low as $1.87 per gallon. I don’t remember when I saw gas below $2 last time. Anyway I am not complaining here, nor do I try to predict how oil price will go next. I believe the lowering oil price means two things: more discretionary spending for consumers; (poentially) lower prices for airfare and cruise vacations. I think people are getting passport and vacation booked in advance to take advantage of this trend.

Categories
Saint Louis

Investing together?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Last Updated on June 10, 2009 by stlplace

Revisions
(July 9, 2008) Buy and hold will not work in this market. What I found interesting lately, is buy a fundmentally good (valuation attractive) stock at low (when the market hold a selloff, when everyone is panic), and then sell some when the market recovers and everyone is excited again. This way we will have a truely low cost of our holdings, and we can hold for longer term. I did this for RIM and WDC. I should have sold the BRK.B when it was up. Well, in stock market, there is no “should have”, “would have”. We anticipate instead.

(April 1, 2008) In VALUE we trust. Don’t fall into growth trap (growth companies mean profit growth as well as revenue growth).

(Feb 2008) Invest in business, not just the stock.

(Jan 31, 2008) All year 2007 gain is gone in this month. Lesson learned.

(June 2007) I will provide performance report of my own portfolio upon request.

(Jan. 2007) I am looking to form an investment partnership, very much like the early days of the Berkshire Hathway (a.k.a, Buffett Partnership). The investors need to meet the following criteria:

1) Free to put up minimum $5,000 without worrying about “withdrawl in a year” for house payment, nice car etc. We are looking for “baggers” (i.e. the stock will go up twice or more) in a few years, thus we could hold a stock for a long time; we will not sell a stock just because it ran up 10% in a day. We will only buy fundamentally good stocks (so that we can sleep well at night). We ONLY sell the stock when we believe its fundamental is shifted.

2) People are passionate and patient about long term investing; have some background in business, finance, technology, consumer proucts (fashion) or other industries, hands on exprience is perferred; knowledge about emerging markets (BRICs, Brazil, Russia, India, China; ROW, rest of the world) is welcomed;

3) People I feel comfortable to social or interfact with (I am an easy going and open minded guy).

Organization, Distribution of profit etc: the profit will be divided according to the money each investor put in. Investment ideas will be discussed between partners. However, the managing partner makes the final decision regarding investing matters.

I will be the managing partner (pending the approval of majority of the partners).

Name in my mind (ends with equity, Capital, Partnership, or Securities):

(June 19, 2008) Cougar capital, abaqus capital; I felt capital is better than equity(ies), investments, securities etc.

(April 21, 2008) 3D Investments, because investing should be multi-dimensional, e.g., Buffett’s investing in Amazon Euro Bond in 2000/1, he was looking for both the upside of Amazon and Euro the currency. An opposite example, Crocs has been fashionable and its stock did well in 2007 (until Oct. 31), when fashion dies, so does the stock. Avoid one dimensional stock.

Agile (min rui), Heartland, Olive, Vaux (Xuva), LTV (long term view), MX

(June 26 2006) I found out MR, Olive capital domain names are taken 🙂

Email me if you are interested.

Sincerely,

Major Xu

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

The following is a bit old. I am still interested in blogging and web 2.0 stuff, but not as passionate as investing nowadays.

(Jan 3, 2006 Initial) Besides comments, I welcome anyone who is interested in writing articles related to (but not limited to) the following topics:

  • Software development
  • China
  • Business
  • Living or working overseas

    • I also have a few interesting project ideas, but “idea is nothing unless gets implemented”. I am looking for people who are good at web development (PHP, Perl, JavaScript, CSS, XML and MySQL) to join me on those efforts.

    Please note at this time I don’t have any revenue and can not offer 6 figure salary or $30/hour for your work. However, we may work together and find a good business model in the future.

    Today I saw a bulletin board ad by AT&T (previous SBC), it says “blogging”. During lunch I heard people talking about “blog”, “My Space”. I don’t know if this is “bubble building” or “real big thing”. But I think we are living in interesting times.

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

  • My Portfolio (updated 6-10-2009)



    • Categories
    Stocks

    Yahoo Finance Goes Personal

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    Last Updated on January 21, 2007 by stlplace

    Yahoo launched its personal finance web site. Here is the link. Yahoo Finance already has lots of information about personal finance. But this time I think they are trying to separate it out from the “investing”. I think it’s good in the sense that ordinary people really don’t want to mess with stocks, they would be happy if they can keep track of spending, real estate, tax, saving, retirement fund/401K, etc. There are already a few good personal finance web site, such as fool.com, bankrate.com, let’s see how Yahoo plays out.

    yahoo personal finance picture

    Categories
    China Stocks

    HMIN Home Inns Update

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    Last Updated on January 18, 2007 by stlplace

    There are lots of praises for Home Inns (Rujia, most in Chinese). I saw this one in English. Actually from my own experience at four Home Inns in Shanghai I have both praises and complaints. So every coin has two sides.

    On serious side, I noticed after Home Inns developed the new hotels in Nanjing and Qingdao this year, they are developing very fast in Xi’an and Anhui. This is all good. But I still have couple questions for them: as they add more hotels, how many are company owned (how many are franchised)? From my understanding they make a lot more money from company owned hotels. Also, how about pricing power? (do they need to discount to get people to stay?)

    Note the stock hit all time high yesterday ($41.85).

    Categories
    Stocks

    Counting Crocs CROX

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    Last Updated on January 17, 2007 by stlplace

    This evening when I was in the TaekwonDo class, I counted the number of Crocs in my class. Out of 12 pairs of shoes, there are 3 pairs of Crocs. Seriously, I did a little analysis on the Crocs sales number in year 2005 and 2006. The growth is very impressive, but how long will the trend last?

                       2004         2005            2005 9m 2006 9m        9m growth
    Sales $13,500,000 $108,600,000 $70,741,000 $236,162,000 234%
    # of pairs 649,000      6,000,000     3,908,343     13,047,624 
    $ per pair   $20.80            $18.10        $18.10            $18.10 

    Note: for 2006 9m number, they did not say the actual pairs sold, I assume the same unit price as of 2005, and get the unit number by dividing sales by $ per pair.

    Categories
    Stocks

    Wall Street Rates Heelys HLYS

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    Last Updated on January 17, 2007 by stlplace

    To summerize,

    17-Jan-07 CIBC Wrld Mkts Initiated   Sector Perform
    17-Jan-07 JP Morgan Initiated   Overweight
    17-Jan-07 Bear Stearns Initiated   Outperform
    17-Jan-07 Wachovia Initiated   Mkt Perform

    The full story is here. I would not take their ratings too seriously (I would like to read their analysis instead). The 60% sales increase in California (No. 6 economy in the world if considered as a country) in 2006 is a good sign. Is California a mature market as the analyst suggested? I don’t know.

    Continue reading “Wall Street Rates Heelys HLYS”
    Categories
    China Stocks

    Mindray MR Pre-announce Fiscal 2006

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    Last Updated on January 17, 2007 by stlplace

    I summerized its year 2005 and 2006 (low end) number here. I noted that the revenue year over year growth slowed a bit (consider first 9 months growth about 41%). This can be attribute to the continuing “anti-corruption” campaign in China hospitals.

                      2005               2006              YoY

    Rev (CNY)  1,078,573,000 1,470,000,000 36.29%
        
    Income         205,089,000    360,000,000 75.53%
        
    Earning (CNY)           2.40                3.73 55.42%

    You can read the news here.

    Continue reading “Mindray MR Pre-announce Fiscal 2006”
    Categories
    China Stocks

    Bought Some EDU New Oriental

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    Last Updated on January 17, 2007 by stlplace

    I don’t know why the stock went down this morning after a good earning report. Anyway guessing stock price’s daily fluctuation is not my job. I did listen to the conference call (script by seekingalpha) and it seems to me Michael and Louis did well, although Michael’s English is not perfect. Some of the growth driver:

    1) Elite English, I believe this is more like “business English”, I know in Shanghai there are “WallStreet English”, “Webber English”, etc. Don’t know how New Oriental will do in this new space. But profit margin in this area is better because those customers are not price sensitive.

    2) Oversea English Test preparation: I believe things have not slow down because nowadays more and more Chinese high school graduates go overseas for undergraduate education.

    They also talked a bit on goverment regulation on “private education sector” and coming lock up expired period.