stlplaceAll right, ever since the Chinese regulators found the silver bullet and pulled the trigger, the Shanghai composite index lost more than 500 points and a lot of people lost money or gave back the gains they already made, some of them are “crying foul” for the goverment action. Well, in stock market, just like in NBA, complaining to the referee usually won’t help. We should focus on what we can do to “stop the bleeding”, or “protect the gains”.
Hit new low in May. Here are the number of IPOs the first half of this year:
Jan: 9
Feb: 11
Mar: 5
Jan to Mar subtotal CNY 67.5 b
Went to St. Louis Jazz and Heritage Festival 2007 at Shaw Park at Clayton yesterday. The weather did not cooporate, but the music was good. Note St. Louis has a very strong heritage in Jazz and Blues.
Went to Chesterfield mall yesterday. Something new (at least new to me):
1) Journeys is expanding there. The regular Journeys got a new place (first floor, at the intersection), the old Journeys store is “Journeys Kids”. Journeys is a subsidiary of Genesco (GCO). Foot Locker is trying to take over Genesco but was rejected for now. We know in business “No” does not necessarily means “No”, just like sometimes when girls say “No”, it’s not really “No”.
We often heard story like that someone made $5,000 in stocks in one month. Cool. But that does not tell the whole story. Why?
There are a few questions I like to ask:
1) How much did he/she make the month before and after (that particular month)? Did he/she make more money (less money) or lose money in other months. We are looking for consistency here. Also in investing we typically measure performance in longer terms, e.g., by year, at least by quarter or 6 months.
2) More importantly, how much money did he/she started with? Is it $5,000 or $100,000. The return will be 100% or 5%, respectively. Big difference.
I thought Chinese colleges like to change their names, such as my undergraduate alma mater, Huazhong Institute of Technology (HIT), changes its name to Huazhong University in Science and Technology (HUST) during 1987-1988, it changed its Chinese name again in 1990s (From 理工Li Gong to 科技Ke Ji).
It seems some US schools like name changes too. My graduate alma mater, University of Missouri at Rolla, is going to change its name to Missouri University in Science and Technology, so it will be a MUST for short. The main change is replace Rolla with S&T. I can understand the rationale behind this change, but I still prefer UMR to MUST. Although I have been in St. Louis for 7 years now, I miss my days in Rolla (the Wal-mart, Hardeer, Tokyo’s, and friends there).
Ad is everywhere these days, from Newspaper, TV to Internet. In China there is such thing called LCD sreen ad. Focus Media (FMCN) made big money out of this, although recently some residential home owners got a bit tired of this because they want some peace in their apartment’s elevator.
In the US it appears to me TV is coming to Internet more and more, I mean, the video clips, such as this one from Fisher Investments, a wealth management firm managed by Ken Fisher. I used to receive (junk) mails from them, now I can see the ad on Forbes. Fisher was a columnist on Forbes.
Here it is. You still get an hour or so to see it at its home page. In case you did not see the image below, go to hi.baidu.com and you should see it.
Is that inspired by Google? I mean, isn’t Google the first guy does logo for various holidays?
But I don’t regret it. I noticed J. Crew (JCG) IPO last summer, and started pay attention to its stock. I have been their customer since my friend’s recommendation in early 2006, bought some shirts and pants at discount, been happy with them. But, I did not buy their stock at discount last year (it has been at 25 for a while). Why I didn’t pull the trigger? There were two reasons:
1) I found the ladies’ products made up majority of the sales at J. Crew. I don’t know about ladies’ trend.
Here is a link at YouTube. I vaguely remember Microsoft developed the “Excel” program first on Mac, but I did not know Bill Gates personally worked on “Basic language” for Mac and made 30,000 from Steve.