stlplaceI saw quite a few Smart cars in St. Louis lately. Another sign the gas price is going through roof. While the car looks cute, I would not drive one personally, because it is so tiny compared to other cars on the road.
(Update Mar 05) My wife Shanzi had a nice write up (and pics) about yesterday’s snow. In Chinese.
(Original) We had a 10 inch snow (huge by St. Louis standard) today. It took me more than 1 hour to drive from my work place to home, which usually takes 15 minutes. Of course I took a different route since I don’t want to take the highway, thought that would be a huge parking lot. There are less traffic on those side roads, but I almost got stuck in snow twice when I tried to go up-hill.
After one hour struggle, I did not make it to my packing lot, because I could not drive up on my drive way, so I left my car there (see below).
Lessons learned: do not take unfamilar side roads (especially roads with slopes) in snow. My car got stuck in Schultz Rd. and couple side roads along Schultz when I tried to cut across to my home. I saw other cars on the roadside, stuck in snow on the way. I should be more patient (wait on Page).
For entertain purpose only, note I am not endorsing any one of the canidates 🙂
Super Tuesday surprise
1) Huckabee won 5 states in the south. Mitt, your “Huckabee is a spoiler” talk backfired.
2) The show me state (Missouri) voted for change; the coastal state (NY, CA) voted for more of the same. The US president has been a Yale graduate since 1988, and Bush and Clinton families have occupied White House since 1988. So much for the greatest democracy in the world 🙂
BTW, AP made wrong call for Missouri Dem primary initially and here is their explanation.
Stock analogy
The miracle play of Eli Manning and his teammate. ELi is the little brother of Peyton Manning. I think this play will be remembered by people (at least me) for years…
By the way, there is a super bowl indicator for the market, it says if NFC team wins the super bowl the market will be up for the year. Bulls, another reason to thank for Eli and his teammates 🙂
(eBay headquater, Sillicon Vally, 2008, copyright@Shanzi)
Who is Meg Whittman? She is the CEO of eBay, and has been in that position for almost ten years, and she is leaving the job on March 31. I don’t personally know her (my friend Wang Jianshuo may have seen her). But from the CNBC show “eBay effect”, I got to know how Pierre Omidyar started eBay from a weekend project to a small online aution site; and Meg and her team transfered it into a global e-commerce power house.
From YouTube, the event was hold on Tuesday (Jan 15 2008)
Shoe retailers
Here are some of the major shoes stores in the US. Snapshot from the Shoe Carnival ICR XChange 2008 conference. X axis stands for the choices of shoes; Y axis stands for income level of customers.
My own experience
In recent years I bought most of my shoes shoes from online stores such as zappos, and shoebuy . And I like their service and price. I understand Amazon’s Endless (shoes and bags) is popular too.
I joked with my wife some day we are going to open a shoe store in Shanghai or somewhere in China, something like the Journey’s.
Well, if one does not, like Under Armor who skipped ICR XChange conference this year, rumors will go out. Quote StreetInsider “Under Armour (UA) Sinks On Fears Of Back-End Weighted ’08 Earnings”
January 17, 2008 11:01 AM EST Shares of Under Armour, Inc. (NYSE: UA) are under heavy pressure this morning which is being attributed to comments from Wachovia from the ICR Xchange about the company’s 1st-half 2008 marketing spend and back-end weighted 2008 earnings growth.
The firm said, “While UA is not presenting at the conference, we have learned that the company is planning to run a 60-second Super Bowl advertisement, and believe 1H08 marketing expenses relating to the launch of the cross trainer footwear product could cause 2008 earnings growth to be significantly back-end weighted. We believe total marketing spend for 2008 will be in the 12%-13% range, but a disproportionate amount could come in 1Q08.”
I know no broker offer this as an option in IRA. But how about buying Berkshire (BRK.A, BRK.B) over mutual funds in a taxable brokerage account? Not only does Berkshire has a track record which beats almost all mutual fund (21.4% annual compound return in last 42 years) and the 10.4% annual return of S&P 500. See this Buffett’s 2006 letter for details. But also an investor get the service of the best investor with virtually no fees: Buffett is paid a salary of 100,000. So why don’t we all give the money to Buffett, rather than mess up with our own investments, which in most cases can not beat Buffett’s performance in long term.
I can think of the following reasons:
1) We think it’s harder and harder for Buffett to repeat the performance he had in last 42 years. It’s practical because as much as Buffett is getting better (he is a life long learner), his portfolio is growing so big that expecting an annual return of 20% is impossible.
I came across this list of top 25 stocks in last 25 years from AOL money and finance. The original article was appeared on USAToday Sept 15, 2007.
Note statistically, a sample of 25 is too small to draw any scientific conclusion. But I found a few things to be interesting nonetheless.
1) Two money managment firms in top 5: they are Franklin Resource (up 65 times, ticker BEN), which manages the well known Franklin Templeton funds; Eaton Vance (up 38 folds, ticker EV), which manages the less known Eaton Vance funds.
Let me quote the article “As the old saying goes, the way to make money during a gold rush is to be the one selling shovels“.
2) Hardware and software: Cisco (up33 folds), Microsoft (up 29 times), Oracle (up 28 folds), and Adobe (up 20 folds). May I add Google here? It’s up around 800% from offering price of $85 to around $700 during from Aug 2004 to Sept 2007 (roughly 3 years).
3) Which stock surprise you most?