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Saint Louis

Cardinals opening day

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Let’s take a break from the bad economy and stock market news, from China to US. Today is MLB opening day, St. Louis Cardinals will face Colorado Rockies at Busch Stadium.

After living in St. Louis for more than 7 years (and in the show me state for more than 10), I started to appreciate the joy, the saddness,…Cardinals brings to the town. I believe St. Louis would not be as good without Cardinals: talking about the sports and the spirit of a city.

Cardinals St. Louis

Go Cards, Pujos, Carpenter, Wainwright and La Russa…and best wishes to Edmonds, Rolen and Eckstein in the new home!

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Saint Louis

Random thoughts

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Stars on Ice
We saw Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo yesterday, very nice. Both the show and the couple. By the way, a little advertisement, my wife had a nice write up for the event.

Stars on Ice pic

Like and don’t like about snow/ice storm
Don’t like
1) Clean up my car (I don’t have garage);
2) The normal 15 min commute takes one hour;
3) Almost fall while walking, have to take baby steps sometime;

Categories
Saint Louis Stocks

Sillicon valley stocks and St. Louis stocks

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Tech for Silicon valley and agriculture for St. Louis.

Silicon Valley Stocks
We went to Sillicon valley for the holidays and obviously, stock is one common topic in family reunion and friends gathering. Note stock options makes up a significant portion of employee’s compensations for some of the technology companies there.

I happened to read the San Jose Mercury News Jan 1, in which it has a nice summary of how Silicon valley stocks did in last year. In summary, the big tech (GOOG, AAPL) and IPOs (VMW, NetSuite) lead the Silicon valley stocks to a fairly good performance. Here are two articles I read: tech titan’s year; Valley’s big year for Wall St. debuts.

St. Louis stocks
I tried to look up St. Louis stocks 2007 performance at stltoday, the web site of St. Louis Post Dispatch, but could not find any. So I just list St. Louis companies I know.

I believe Monsanto (MON), one of the largest agriculture company in the world, is the No. 1 performer last year. MON is enjoying the global farm booming, and in a way the oil boom too. By the way, I live right across the street from the company. ADM and Bunge, another two agri play, also did well.

St. Charles based solar play MEMS (WFR) also faired well very amid the all the solar boom. Note WFR is a leader in this area.

Categories
Saint Louis Stocks

Heelys is NOT going away

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Just went back from Chesterfield Mall, saw Heelys at predominant locations at “Finish Line” (the discount sporting shoes store), and TradeHome, a boutique shoes store which also sells Crocs, Keen, Merrel and Teva. The Journeys also kept the Heelys, also I saw they cut the price on one model.

Yes, Heelys (HLYS) is a broken story in terms of stock, because its lower than expected estimated growth and its mis-steps in its secondary offering. Its management expects the growth to be 20% (vs. past year’s couple hundreds). But, it’s not a broken company at least in the near term. I saw kids skating on Heelys from time to time.

Separately, I saw Dillard’s has some Cayman (Beach, the original) Crocs on sales, note the size is not complete. I bought a pair for $13.99.

Categories
Fun Saint Louis

It’s MUNY time again

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Last summer I wrote about this. This year’s show starts tonight, June 18 at Forest Park. Hope I can catch more shows this year.

MUNY forest park st. louis

Nice things about the MUNY:

Categories
Saint Louis

St. Louis Jazz Festival 2007

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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.

IMG_5049 

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Saint Louis Stocks

AG Edwards Acquired by Wachovia

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People often asked me where in the world is St. Louis, I told them the Missisipi River, Budweiser beer, the McDonald Douglas (no longer a standalone company), etc.

I think A G Edwards could be counted as a St. Louis icon too. But I did not realized it’s more than 100 years old until today it’s being acquired by Wachovia. The rationale for the buy is Wachovia is looking for opportunities in the baby boomers’ wealth management. After this acquisition the combined company, Wachovia Securities, will manage $1.15 trillion, operate 3,350 offices and employ 31,000 people. It will be the No. 2 US retail broker firm. Merril Lynch is still the No. 1.

Categories
Saint Louis

Home Inns Mindray New Oriental

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These days you need some faith to hold those relatively new Chinese IPOs. I only have Mindray (MR) at this time, but I have traded HMIN and EDU before. All three stocks dropped a lot from it highs in a week. I just want to summerize my observation after spending 2 days in Shanghai, this is in no ways a comprehensive study.

Home Inns: it faces more competition. I went to Jinjiang Inn on Sunday with a friend, we need to book a room for another friend. It’s fairly easy. Maybe this is not a busy season. But I remember one or two years ago it’s not easy to book a room one day in advance. Also Marriot (the American hotel giant) bought a Chinese economy hotel chain “Xingyu Star” and renamed it as “Wan Jia Wan Hao”. It plans to open 300 hotels in a few years.

Categories
Fun Saint Louis

Asics Running Shoes Sales at Sports Authority

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It’s not on the web. But I found some deals at the local stores (Brentwood). Obviously it’s not just the online stores such as Zappos (or Amazon Endless) gives discount for shoes. 

For instance this one ASICS GEL Kayano® XII Stability Running Shoe is $89.99 at SA. Amazon asks for $99.99 and  Zappos asks for $138.95.  

Categories
Saint Louis

Investing together?

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Revisions
(July 9, 2008) Buy and hold will not work in this market. What I found interesting lately, is buy a fundmentally good (valuation attractive) stock at low (when the market hold a selloff, when everyone is panic), and then sell some when the market recovers and everyone is excited again. This way we will have a truely low cost of our holdings, and we can hold for longer term. I did this for RIM and WDC. I should have sold the BRK.B when it was up. Well, in stock market, there is no “should have”, “would have”. We anticipate instead.

(April 1, 2008) In VALUE we trust. Don’t fall into growth trap (growth companies mean profit growth as well as revenue growth).

(Feb 2008) Invest in business, not just the stock.

(Jan 31, 2008) All year 2007 gain is gone in this month. Lesson learned.

(June 2007) I will provide performance report of my own portfolio upon request.

(Jan. 2007) I am looking to form an investment partnership, very much like the early days of the Berkshire Hathway (a.k.a, Buffett Partnership). The investors need to meet the following criteria:

1) Free to put up minimum $5,000 without worrying about “withdrawl in a year” for house payment, nice car etc. We are looking for “baggers” (i.e. the stock will go up twice or more) in a few years, thus we could hold a stock for a long time; we will not sell a stock just because it ran up 10% in a day. We will only buy fundamentally good stocks (so that we can sleep well at night). We ONLY sell the stock when we believe its fundamental is shifted.

2) People are passionate and patient about long term investing; have some background in business, finance, technology, consumer proucts (fashion) or other industries, hands on exprience is perferred; knowledge about emerging markets (BRICs, Brazil, Russia, India, China; ROW, rest of the world) is welcomed;

3) People I feel comfortable to social or interfact with (I am an easy going and open minded guy).

Organization, Distribution of profit etc: the profit will be divided according to the money each investor put in. Investment ideas will be discussed between partners. However, the managing partner makes the final decision regarding investing matters.

I will be the managing partner (pending the approval of majority of the partners).

Name in my mind (ends with equity, Capital, Partnership, or Securities):

(June 19, 2008) Cougar capital, abaqus capital; I felt capital is better than equity(ies), investments, securities etc.

(April 21, 2008) 3D Investments, because investing should be multi-dimensional, e.g., Buffett’s investing in Amazon Euro Bond in 2000/1, he was looking for both the upside of Amazon and Euro the currency. An opposite example, Crocs has been fashionable and its stock did well in 2007 (until Oct. 31), when fashion dies, so does the stock. Avoid one dimensional stock.

Agile (min rui), Heartland, Olive, Vaux (Xuva), LTV (long term view), MX

(June 26 2006) I found out MR, Olive capital domain names are taken 🙂

Email me if you are interested.

Sincerely,

Major Xu

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The following is a bit old. I am still interested in blogging and web 2.0 stuff, but not as passionate as investing nowadays.

(Jan 3, 2006 Initial) Besides comments, I welcome anyone who is interested in writing articles related to (but not limited to) the following topics:

  • Software development
  • China
  • Business
  • Living or working overseas
  • I also have a few interesting project ideas, but “idea is nothing unless gets implemented”. I am looking for people who are good at web development (PHP, Perl, JavaScript, CSS, XML and MySQL) to join me on those efforts.

    Please note at this time I don’t have any revenue and can not offer 6 figure salary or $30/hour for your work. However, we may work together and find a good business model in the future.

    Today I saw a bulletin board ad by AT&T (previous SBC), it says “blogging”. During lunch I heard people talking about “blog”, “My Space”. I don’t know if this is “bubble building” or “real big thing”. But I think we are living in interesting times.

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  • My Portfolio (updated 6-10-2009)