Category: Stocks

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IPO Stocks

Year end investments summary

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My performance
The Scottrade account did beat the S&P 500 and Nasdaq (detail to be calculated…). This is pretty easy because the market did not go up much in the past year (3.5% for S&P and 9.8% for Nasdaq).

More importantly, learned the risk, portfolio management (weighting), IRA/401K/mutual funds, all from hands on experience and can not be measured by the numbers.

What went right
1) Sell the losers: XFML, SBUX
2) Ring the register on winners: HMIN
3) More focus, 3 or 4 stocks maximum in the portfolio; work on same stocks (MR) if it’s working
4) Basic research: reading F1/S1 prospectus, 10K, 10Q; using google spread sheet
5) Read the five stocks/investing books (listed in my aStore), learned a lot from the masters. I still need to complete Buffett’s book (a little harder) and Ken Fisher’s book (a little long).

What went wrong/lesson learned
1) Did not sell CROX before Oct 31 ER: if a stock went up a lot and its weight on overall portfolio increased dramatically, make sure ka ching some…
2) Speculate on small companies (GSIT) without much research

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Stocks

Fourth quarter 2007 update

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The miserable performance of CROX erased much of my 2007 gains. But thanks to the rebound of Mindray (MR), I am still be able to be above water 🙂

Some random thoughts of Q4 and year 2007 stock performance:

1) Crocs (CROX): I agree with my friend StrengthTrader, Crocs is a fashion product. It’s almost unbelievable for Crocs to become popular in much of the world in such a short time. At least it grew much faster than Nike did 20 years ago. But will Crocs be as big as Nike some day? I don’t know. The market thinks it will NOT (traded at PE of about 20, the company projected 35 to 40% revenue growth in 2008).

2) Mindray (MR): benifit from the global spending of healthcare. Although the US market did not turn out to be as successful as we like, other interntional markets especially South America made up the slack.

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IPO Stocks

I sold MXB six hours too early

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Stocks in review week of Dec 16 to Dec 22

1) I bought some MXB shares on Dec 19. After I read its prospectus more carefully, I found two things I don’t like: it will use the proceeds of the IPO ($225 m) and borrow some $425 m to pay the dividend to its parent, Morgan Stanley; Morgan Stanley still controls more than 90% of its share. So I put up a limited sell order at 29.30 for Dec 21.

On Dec 21 the stock opened at $29.50 and had a huge run from 3:00 PM EST till close. It closed at $33.72. This reminded me 3 years ago I sold my 51job (JOBS) two days too early.

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Fun Stocks

Mission impossible: beat the index

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For the mutual fund, besides being the leader in its category each year, one key performance measure is to beat the bench market index. For instance, if a fund is invested in emerging markets, one key bench mark is MSCI emerging market index (EFM, an ETF tracks this index). For reference, the index is up 33.44% from Dec 21 2006 to Dec 20 2007.

But, beating the index is very hard. Consider Bill Miller, the legendary fund manager of Legg Mason Value Trust, and he is going to underperform the market second year in a row after beating S&P continously for 15 years. Here is a link to the fund details. From the portfolio, Bill hit a home run with Amazon, but he also had dogs like Sprint, Yahoo and to a lesser extent, eBay. The following is Performance of Monthly and Average Annual Total Returns (as of 11/30/07, source: Legg Mason site).

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China Stocks

Random thoughts about China housing bubble

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All right, now the Chinese regulatory (People’s Bank, China banking regulatory commision, China Securities Regulatory Commission,…) got what they wished for this Christmas: after the cool down of the doemstic stock market, now housing market started take a turn (according to many experts including Vanke CEO Wang Shi). This is reflected in the sharp declining of home builder stocks in China (think Vanke 000002). And in the US, two China real estate ADRs, EJ and XIN, both lost more than 10% today.

I think most people will agree the existence of bubbles in China stock market and housing market. But many of us disagree how big it is; is it causing problem for the real economy (overheating), and introduce unecessary risks? I am not economist and do not pretend to be one. The interesting thing for me, is that the Chinese regulatory took the notes from the melt down of US sub-prime loans, and tried to be one step (or maybe many steps) ahead of the curve. (Below, E-House/EJ office on Changning Rd, Shanghai)

E_House_CN

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China Stocks

Vanke: good stock at bubble price?

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Stock Price
Shares of Vanke (sina, Google Finance) has gained more than 200% YTD, but it is taking a hit lately. A while ago I read these two interesting articles (21cbh, sina) about the valuation of Vanke share. The key question is whether it is over priced, considering its growth potential. Of course no one can predict the growth. At the beginning of 2007, has anyone predicted the housing price in Shanghai would go up 30% to 50% this year? I know I did not…

Housing Price
Vanke chairman Wang Shi said the Chinese housing market is at its turning point now. I don’t know whether the Chinese housing market is peaking out or not. In the following I used its monthly sales data and tried to calculate the average price in last 7 months. The ave price went from 7,634 Yuan per sqm in May to 10,393 Yuan per sqm, a 36% gain. From May 31 to Nov 30 its stock went from 19.41 Yuan to 31.55 Yuan, a 63% gain.

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Stocks

Money from MasterCard

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If you used your credit card (MasterCard, Visa, Diner) overseas during 1996 to 2006, you may be eligible for a settlement refund.

1) CCF settlement: I received a form from CCF settlement, which stands for currency conversion fee anti-trust litigation. I remember I used my MasterCard in China in 2005 for my Ctrip booking. Now I am eligible for $25 refund from the settlement. Quoted from ccfsettlement.com:

“The lawsuit is about the price cardholders of Visa-, MasterCard-, or Diners Club-branded payment cards were charged to make transactions in a foreign currency, or with a foreign merchant, between February 1, 1996 and November 8, 2006. Plaintiffs challenge how the prices of credit and debit/ATM card foreign transactions were set and disclosed, including claims that Visa, MasterCard, their member banks, and Diners Club conspired to set and conceal fees, typically of 1-3% of foreign transactions, and that Visa and MasterCard inflated their base exchange rates before applying these fees.”

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Stocks

Compare Vanke with Toll Brothers

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Vanke is the No. 1 home builder in China. Toll Brothers is a US luxury home builder. Comparing the profitability of those two are not really comparing apple to apple. But, the buyers of Vanke homes in China are mostly middle class, or in other words, their relative affulence level in China is about same the US buyers of Toll homes. Anyway here goes the data from Reuters (via Google Finance). I can see the following from the data:

1) Vanke is more profitable then Toll, because real estate is a long term growth industry in China. This is from net profit margine and operating margin.

2) Margin for both companies are declining, more so for TOL than Vanke. It’s understandable for TOL because of the weak US housing market. For Vanke it could be two things: increasing competition; sacrefying profitability for growth.

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Stocks

I do NOT hate Jim Cramer

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But it appears he hates Chinese. Here is something this popular TV host said on CNBC Mad Money (Dec. 5):

Tiring of “the idea that money is any different depending on where it came from,” Cramer acknowledged, “I hate the Chinese … [but] if they buy a stake in our company, what’re you going to do?” That’s the way capitalism works, he said.

Here is the link to the Street.com.

I am not a fan of Jim Cramer; I watch his show mostly for entertainment. Also, couple days ago I found this Wikipedia entry for Cramer to be good.

Seriously, I think CNBC and Cramer owe the Chinese people an apology on this one.

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China Stocks

CICC 2007 investing strategies

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(Update Dec08) They released 2008 forecast, here is excerpt.

中金2008年股票策略报告认为，中国A股市场高估值状况将在2008年持续，大盘蓝筹股明年上升空间为30％－40％，并看好金融、地产、零售、钢铁和电力等五大板块的投资机会。

(Original) We are at the end of 2007, and it’s interesting to reflect how the market did, how our portfolio did, and how the analysts did (to forecast the market).

In the begining of this year, I have the oppertunity to read this CICC 2007 investing strategy report (PDF file here). CICC, China International Capital Corp, 中国国际金融有限公司, is striving to be China’s own Morgan Stanley. The reason I posted it here is not to evaluate how the CICC analysts did in terms of forecasting, but rather to help our own self-reflection: what went right, what went wrong? Hopefully we will be better investors as we continue to learn,…

CICC_2007