stlplaceYou know I am kidding, do you? We all know the bubble is there, but how much bubble do we got? Is bubble going to burst very soon? These are the questions the investors (more accurately speculators) in China should ask.
In my mind, there are fundamental reasons for this rising of Chinese equity values: over liquidity (too much money, too little stocks); improvement of company fundamentals including rapid growth; Gu Gai (the stock reform which remove cloud from the floating shares), etc.
I put it in my Yahoo calendar a while ago. But I have not added my positions because it did not fall to the range I wanted to pull my trigger. Although there are heavy insider sellings lately.
“Shareholders of record May 31 will get an additional share for each they hold on June 14”, see this announcement for more details.
I stopped by the Ted Drewes today, the best Ice Cream place in St. Louis. Surprisingly, it only has two stores in St. Louis, and the owners intentionly kept it that way. In other words, they don’t want to grow into Hagen Dazs, or something like that. By keeping it small and community-involved, they provided ice creams for St. Louisans and visitors since 1931. Today I saw the sign, where the Mayor of St. Louis declared Feb 17 as “Ted Drewes’ Day”. WOW.
I used to love new cars and gadgets. Some evidences: I can call out the make and model of most cars on the street; I bought the Dell 1st generation Pocket PC Axim, later returned it because it’s too bulky, bought the Palm Tungsten E instead.
These days I was looking for a LCD photo frame. I noticed this thing for a while, but it was until now I found this is a very lucrative business at this time. The reason? It’s still kind expensive. For a decent 7″ philips, it’s about $199 at sharper image. For comparison purpose, I found LCD monitor is very cheap these days, e.g., this Acer 22″ LCD display only costs $190 at Bestbuy.
I went to mall again during this weekend. There are many malls in St. Louis, the closest (to my home) also the most expensive one, is the Plaza Frontenac. When I first visited there years ago, I was amazed to see the price tags of stuff there, things such as Boss, Gucci, stores like Saks Fifth Ave., and Nieman Marcus. It made me think St. Louis is not a small town. The shopping experience is in deep contrast to other malls such as Galleria, which is meant for average people.
Anyway I only buy stuff at one store at Frontenac, that’s J. Crew., and I only buy when things are on sale and I found they fit me well. For instance, today I bought a broken-in zip fly chino for 14.99 (plus 1.14 sales tax), the listed price was 64.50.
The following picture was taken at Barbela, a popular Pizza place in Shanghai. One nice feature of Barbela is they offer the same quality food as Pizza Hut, but at half the price. No wonder people will form a long wait line at Barbela during weekends. As you may know, Pizza Hut was (and still is) a very popular place in China, it’s not the good old Pizza Hut you see in the US.
I’m sorry being a flip-flopper here, because I was bullish on its stock until last Thursday. But like many things in life, I think sometimes it’s worthwhile to have a second look, this is especially true on investment. It’s no good to hold on a stock “no matter what”, or “fall in love with a stock or a company”, because we don’t want to throw away our hard earned money. At least I don’t.
I mean, you can put in the code for Chinese stocks, such as 600000 (Pu Fa Bank), etc. One good feature is they have names for you to choose from (along with the code).
Cool stuff, huh?
I heard about this thing first from reading Home Inns’ IPO prospectus. Don’t know how big a deal it is. But it was ineresting to see Home Inns’ (Rujia) being mentioned again in this list. I did not see the Jinjiang (2006.HK) being mentioned here, a bit surprised.
Think that as a “best hotel” award, if you will. This Golden Pillow thing is a bit of Chinese English.
