Author: stlplace

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Shanghai Composite

Current Status of Chinese Stock Market

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Normall I don’t comment on the general market trend (I took cue from the Oracle of Omaha because he does not predict this). But China domestic market is just too crazy in my mind. New record for the index everyday. New record for the new accounts being opened everyday. People talk about stocks everywhere. One day I heard a friend recommend a stock, the second day it jumped almost 10%. No, I hadn’t bought that particular stock because I felt I want to follow Buffett rule: buy the stuff I can understand.

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China Stocks

Crunching Time for Tax

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I believe the dealine is April 17 in the US. If you have not done so, this is a good time to do so. I found the Turbo Tax Online discount link still works (15% off).

On a separate note, more than 1.6 million people in China filed personal income tax for last year. Only individual has annual income over 120,000 Yuan need to report. The average income of that group was 320,000 Yuan (80% are workers, “Da Gong Zhu” in Chinese), and the average tax is about 50,000 Yuan. Wang Jianshuo has a good formula to calculate tax in his blog.

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Business China

Trains to Raise Speed

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I remember in the old days (15 years ago) it took 8 hours to travel from Shanghai to Ningbo. Now it took less than 4 hours. They are raising the speed again this year, according to the news. The D series train is expected to travel at 200 Km per hour, much faster than 40 Km per hour in my college years. This is just another sign China has been through in last 15 years, on the economy.

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China Stocks

Shanghai Composite Index

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Hit new high today, it closed above 3500 today (3531 to be exact).

I heard from the news on April 9, there were 180,000 new stock trading accounts being opened. As you may know the new accounts and trading volume of 1st quarter already exceeded last year’s No. Feel the power of Chinese stock investors (or speculators)? Someone did a simple calculation, let’s assume on average day 100,000 people opened the acct, and average account has 50,000 Yuan, that’s about  5 billion Yuan new money every day. If we assume 20 trading days for a month, that’s 100 billion Yuan a month. That’s on the demand (demand for stocks) side.

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Stocks

Interactive Broker Open IPO

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(Updated April 16) I placed my bid through WR Hambrecht today.  

I mentioned this a while ago. Today I received email from WR Hambrecht. The bid starts on April 16.

Last Nov I opened the acct at WR Hambrecht in order to get the IBKR open IPO. But I was not disiplined enough, end up picking up other IPO stocks: HLYS, XFML and GSIT. I already sold XFML before getting GSIT. Now I need to sell more to make fund available to IBKR bidding. Interactive Broker is the leading options trader and market maker in the US. The most famous company did open IPO is Google, followed by MorningStar.  

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Business China

Online Banking in China

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I started using online banking a few months ago because I want to check out the balance in my account (at the time I was in the US, there are no ATMs I can go check my balance). This is reletively simple at cmbchina, after you install an ActiveX control from the bank. Some open source guys are pretty upset about this but this is reality in China: Microsoft product is the de-facto standard.

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Fun

Things I don’t Like in Shanghai

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Enough praises for Shanghai, let’s look at the other side of the coin. 

Traffic, very few cars will stop and wait for pedestrains to pass, from time to time a bike would zip through (in front of) you;

Cigarette smoking is prevalent in restaurants, sometimes I think about smoking myself because I heard it’s safer than second hand smoke;

Wait in line at banks, I only waited at China Merchant Bank, one of the top banks in China, but still…

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China Stocks

Can’t Wait for Stock Index Futures

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These days this stock index future is a hot topic in Chinese market. You can read lots of discussion on the web. The concensus is the index will need some sort of adjustment before the debut of index futures. Because most people feel the Shanghai Composite Index is too high (almost 3400 as of today), and “drop before debut of index future” is a trend proved in Hongkong, etc. Don’t ask me what I think of all this. All I can tell you is the stock market here is crazy here: I hear people talking about stocks from parks to work places. Here is just another sign I saw: an advertisement @ the metro people square station, the Chinese words translated “welcome index futures, and invest wisely”.

IMG_4853 

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Fun

Sogou Ranking of Baidu Netease Sina Sohu

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Sogou, the new search engine from Sohu, has a ranking for every web site. I went to their web site, and checked out the following web sites:baidu (type in link:www.baidu.com in the blank and hit “search”, do similar for the other sites), netease, sina, sohu and stlplace. Here are their scores:

baidu: 90, sohu: 81, sina: 72, netease: 64, stlplace: 37.

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China

Is English First Co. a Threat to New Oriental?

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I noticed this “English First Co.”, which is 2008 Beijing Olympics language training partner, because of their ubiquious ads (outside and inside) Cloud 9 building. I understand there are at least 2 levels of Olympics partners. Lenovo, Haier and Coke Cola, etc are exclusive sponsors (in its product category). In other words, they gave more money to Olympics committe and they got more exposure in return. MengNiu (diary product), “English First” and others are product providers. As the name implies, they gave products to Beijing Olympics. But still, I was puzzled why New Oriental did not go for it? I can think of two reasons: 

IMG_4713 

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