Year: 2008

Categories
gadgets

iPhone, Blackberry

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Last Updated on February 24, 2008 by stlplace

Missing iPhones are found in China
According to InStat, a market research company, there are about 400,000 unlocked iPhone in China. Most of them are purchased in the US, unlocked and shipped to China later. An interesting side point is Chinese (smart phone) users are mostly for entertainment, while the US users focus on business functionality (email, etc., one reason Blackberry was so successful). Chinese translation from Xinhua:

根据市场分析企业In-Stat本周五最新发布的报告，全球共有80到100万台iPhone被解锁，使用在非苹果运营商合作伙伴的网络中。而其中仅中国就占到几乎半数。…

RIM lawsuit

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Categories
China

The ad everyone is talking about

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Last Updated on February 18, 2008 by stlplace

Heng Yuan Xiang, 恒源祥, a wool clothing brand started in Shanghai since 1927, is airing the following ad in China. This Olympics sponsor TV ad is reciting 12 Chinese zodiacs (like spam). I think that’s why it got attention and also how it annoyed people, and drew critism.

Well, annoying or not, you can make your own judgement 🙂

(video from tudou.com)

Categories
earning

Things to look for Crocs earning Feb 19

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Last Updated on February 24, 2008 by stlplace

Crocs scheduled the Q4 2007 earning report on Feb 19. Couple things I anticipated and will pay attention to:

1) I don’t think this will be a strong quarter due to seasonality: it’s winter in Europe and Japan, and in winter they don’t wear Crocs as the American do.

2) Inventory: if the 1) holds, the inventory (classics and Cayman) they built up last quarter will not reduce dramatically. The managment also said in last CC they expect those inventories to ship for Spring 08. This is not good news.

3) Cash flow: they will not have cash flow statement in press release; they will have it in the 10-Q, 10-K afterwards. But don’t expect too much from it. As I said in my earlier post titled “stock option helped Crocs cash flow”, this magic will not work any more now that the stock is beated down.

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Categories
China IPO

New Oriental EDU buy back

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Last Updated on February 14, 2008 by stlplace

EDU new oriental logo

A short while ago I decided not to short EDU. Today the EDU stock buy back program confirmed my reasoning. Here is their buy back plan (CNNMoney): New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc. (NYSE:EDU) Thursday said its board had approved the buyback of 1 million American Depositary shares. The program is effective between Feb. 25 and Dec. 31, 2008.

According to Yahoo Finance, EDU has 37.54 million shares outstanding, and 3.55 million shares float. I verified it: those are ADR shares (note one ADR is equal to 4 ordinary shares for EDU).

No I haven’t got the stock buyback information from CEO Michael Yu in advance.

I remember in last conference call CFO Louis Hsieh said they would buy back stocks when they can not find other compelling opportunities (a.k.a, acquisition targets). It appears the competition landscape of China private education has been intensified in last few years.

Categories
Shanghai Composite

China market, Ningbo Younger, Olympics

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Last Updated on February 24, 2008 by stlplace

The China doemestic stock market resumed trading after a week of recess (for the Lunar New Year). To the surprise of most people and an old Chinese saying “Kai Meng Hong”, the market opened down instead of up. It appears people are still nervous about the US economy and its fallout effect to China economy.

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Categories
gadgets

Blackberry down

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Last Updated on May 5, 2009 by stlplace

Yesterday one of the big news (Reuters) in the technology arena is the down of Blackberry (a.k.a., the Crackberry) email sevice in north America. This obviously has huge impact on the business and goverment users as they rely on device for email. But how could this happen? Isn’t blackberry supposed to be more reliable than the mobile phone network: one example is in 911, Dick Chenny got his Blackberry working while many cell phones users in White House and Congress stopped working.

Well, while the Blackberry is usually reliable, it is not perfect. According to the news, it appears the networking center of RIM had a glitch yesterday. As shown in the picture below, every email has to route through RIM’ networking center (or data center).

blackberry architecture pic
(source, Blackberry.com, a full size architecture picture can be seen here.)

Categories
Stocks

Tweaks for Dow Industrials

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Last Updated on February 11, 2008 by stlplace

Dow Jones Industrials Average (DJIA, Wikipedia), commonly referred as Dow Industrial Index, is widely perceived as the benchmark of the US stock market. This perception is not necessary a reflection of reality, as I said in my earlier post.

Today Dow underwent another tweak: from Feb 19 it will remove Altria (MO, today’s closing price $72.42) and Honeywell (HON, $57.64), at the same time it will add Bank of America (BAC, $42.14) and Chevron (CVX, $80.42). Since Dow is a purely price weighted, so the relative strength of Oil company as of late should help it, while the weakness of financials (BoA) will do the opposite.

Interestingly, if we add the closing price of two outgoing stocks ($120.06), vs. the new comers ($122.56), they are very close. An co-incident, or another factor considered by the creator of Dow 🙂

Categories
Master Series

Unofficial indicator of market bottom

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Last Updated on February 11, 2008 by stlplace

Peter Lynch once described our human’s psychology about stock market during different cycles, in his book One Up on Wall Street. I remember he used a party as an example, and he looked at the number of people approached him (people know he is a fund manager), and the amount of conversations about stocks, as an unofficial indicator about the market. So, for instance, in a red hot market, almost everyone came up to him and recommended his/her stock pick; while in a bear market, people will talked about “how is the weather”, and pretty much regard him as a dentist.

According to my observation, we are somewhere in between at this time. I mean, people think the stocks are risky, if not toxic 🙂

I would really be interested in learn how this plays out in the gatherings of Chinese New Year back home.

Categories
401k and Personal Finance Investing

Close AMZN puts, Portfolio update

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Last Updated on May 28, 2009 by stlplace

I closed the Amazon Feb $65 puts last Wed, when I saw the stock dropped to around $68, which is the low point the day after it released Q4 earning.

Lesson learned:
1) short/put a stock is much harder than I thought. I started this trade because I saw EDU, AAPL, and VMW all dropped big after missing earning. But I have hind-sight bias on them: things are always clearer on rear view mirror. I did not know EDU will issue a so-so guidance for this Q; I did not know iPod suddenly stopped growth, iPhone did not sell as fast as Steve wanted, and Mac computers are expensive considering consumer slow down.

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Categories
Stocks

Flip flopper

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Last Updated on February 18, 2008 by stlplace

It appears Politicians are not the only flip floppers. The reason we should not follow analyst blindly.

Citigroup Global Markets analyst Jim Suva, talked about RIMM on early Feb (source: seekingalpha):

“Overall, we believe the points brought up during today’s call are highly supportive of our bull case on RIM. Concerns regarding financial services exposure have been largely debunked, in our view, and we think investors should be encouraged by what seems to be a very low replacement rate at Citi, and financial services in general…”

Mr. Suva reiterates his “buy” rating on RIM, and maintains a $140 price target.

Today, according to Barron’s, CitiGroup analyst thinks RIMM will go down significantly. Let me quote:

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