Year: 2007

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China Stocks

Focus Media FMCN is hotter than BIDU

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Last Updated on January 24, 2007 by stlplace

It seems not very intuitive that Focus Media (FMCN), a LCD media advertising company, has done better than Baidu (BIDU), the No. 1 search engine in China. After all , putting up the LCD screen, soliciting the advertising customers, and creating those short films are not high tech as “search engine”, which involves creating a large number of clustered computer, and complicated search algorithm. But this is the reality, Focus Media (FMCN), closed above $80 today amid the new offering of $500 m, the PE (ttm) is about 76, market capital 4.4 B. Since its debut in July 2005 (at 20s), it’s up about 300%.

SH_elevator_ad

How about Baidu (BIDU), it debuted on August 2005 at about $120, and it closed at $124.50 today. Here is the chart. The PE is about 165 and market capital 4.2 B.

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Stocks

Home Inns HMIN on Seekingalpha

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Last Updated on January 24, 2007 by stlplace

I published an article about Home Inns HMIN on Seekingalpha (Yahoo Finance) today. This was loosely based on my previous post in this blog on Jan 3.

Seekingalpha is a financial (stocks in particular) blog platform, and it’s a Yahoo Finance partner.

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China

Starbucks in Forbidden City Beijing

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Last Updated on January 23, 2007 by stlplace

There are lots of talk about the Starbucks store in Forbidden City in Beijing these days. It started in Chinese demestic media, and now it speads all over the world (tonight I saw it on BBC). I happened to take a picture of that Starbucks store during my 2005 visit to Beijing. Personally I also felt it’s in appropriate to have a Starbucks inside the forbidden city. I think they can move the store outside.
China_Trip_Part_1 057

Categories
China Stocks

Home Inns HMIN Yahoo Message Board

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Last Updated on January 24, 2007 by stlplace

Yes. It’s up and running now. Here is the link. I don’t know exactly how new IPOs got the message board started. It usually takse many requests, and lots of patience.

Oh, don’t take the discussions (especially the price target) too seriously. Because if you believe it and trade accordingly, you may regret later. That being said, I did see some intelligent analyses on the message boards from time to time. But a lot more emotional rants too. You are warned.

No message board for New Oriental (EDU) yet. The funny thing is that Mindray (MR) board was inherited from Morgan Food (used to have ticker symbol MR), and the board works 50% of the time. No wonder Yahoo stock did not do well lately 🙂

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Categories
China

Living Cost in Shanghai

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Last Updated on January 27, 2007 by stlplace

Wang Jianshuo, the famous (yet low profile) blogger in Shanghai, wrote an excellent series about living cost in Shanghai.

Categories
China Stocks

Chinese Companies’ Earning Calendar

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Last Updated on January 23, 2007 by stlplace

SNDA (Shanda): Feb 12

BIDU (Baidu): Feb 14

NCTY(the9):   Feb 14

Note Feb 18 is the Chinese New Year.

Categories
Stocks

Buffett is in Shopping Mode

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Last Updated on January 23, 2007 by stlplace

Fruit of the Loom, a whole owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway (Buffett’s company), bought the intimate apparel business from VF corp. Here is the deal.

fruit of loom picture

Categories
Stocks

What to Read from Insider Selling?

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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.

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Site Info

Spam

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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.