Category: Stocks

Categories
Stocks Technology

Hard disk pioneers won nobel

Reading Time: < 1 minute

From Reuters, Hard disk pioneers won Physics nobel: France’s Albert Fert and Germany’s Peter Gruenberg won the 2007 Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for a breakthrough in nanotechnology that lets huge amounts of data be squeezed into ever-smaller spaces.

My take: Hard disk has changed the way we live and work, as we can find it in MP3 players or computers. But hard disk makers are not good investments in general. One can look at Seagate (STX), Western Digital (WDC) long term chart (5, 10 years) to see its so so performance. I think this industry is just too competititive and chronic price cuts makes the profit too thin.

Good technology does not necessarily translate into (very) profitable business. I think Google is a rare specie in the tech arena, with its unique business model and almost monopoly postion in the market, and the ever lower cost of hard drives to store its data 🙂

hard disk pic

Categories
Stocks

Ping An and China Life bid shares from each other

Reading Time: < 1 minute

PingAn insurance logo

This is what I heard from a guest at “Market today” (China-CBN). Here is how it works: China Ping’an insurance (601318, 2318.HK) and China Life insurance (601628, 2628.HK, LFC) holds significant shares (more than 3%) from each other. Now they are buying shares from each other in the market, which will drive their stock prices higher. This in turn, will bring more profit (unrealized investment gains) to each company, according to the new accounting rules being effective this year in China. As a side note, investment gains exceeded many public companies’ original (main) business profit this year. For instance, Youngor (600177), the famous apparel maker, makes more money from the investment in Citic Securities (600030) than from shirts/jackets.

I’m not accounting expert, nor have I researched how similar things are counted in US GAAP. But my gut feeling tells me China new accounting rule is one reason for the China bubble right now. Because at the end of the day, those paper profit will be gone as fast as they come.

BTW, I’m just curious, when China Life (LFC) reports to SEC, what kind of accounting do they use?

Categories
Stocks

Another typhoon

Reading Time: < 1 minute

This one is for real. Here in Shanghai it started to rain yesterday afternoon; today the heavy wind sometimes make it impossible to walk. I saw numerous people flipped their umbrella. Just as I was thinking I’m lucky, my umbrella did the same thing.

Zhongshan park (Kaixuan Rd.)
IMG_5487

Zhunyi Rd. & Changning Rd.
IMG_5486

Categories
China Stocks

Buying house in Shanghai Series: II

Reading Time: 2 minutes

First a little background. Like the Chinese stock market, the Chinese real estate market has a brief history and I talked it a bit in my previous E-House post. Also, China is a big country and the real estate market varies by region, for instance, the Shenzhen market is cooling down lately while Shanghai market is becoming hot. Very much like in the US we could see Dallas and Seattle are still doing ok, while California, Las Vegas etc. are cooling down now.

Vanke_BaiMa_1

The picture above is taked from Vanke White Horse Garden in Shanghai (courstey of soufun.com, for more pics click here).

With that in mind, I am talking about my understanding the Shanghai housing market, in Q&A style.

1) Why the price went up so much lately?
It’s mostly supply and demand. The new supply is very limited in 2005 and 2006 because: the prevailing prices did not spur interest from developers to build new homes; the new supply of land is very limited.

Continue reading “Buying house in Shanghai Series: II”
Categories
Stocks

Holiday reading etc.

Reading Time: < 1 minute

The Chinese market closed for a week during this national holiday. The HK and US market is still open. There are lots of actions of Chinese stocks in those markets. From the blue (red) chips (such as LFC), to more speculative ones (such as EFUT). It appears to me the valuation of FXI, LFC etc are no longer attractive anymore. But at the same time we can not ignore that the new money is continuing pour into those hot stocks.

My job is not to predict the market, nor am I an expert on FXI and LFC (although I did talk about those two a while ago). I picked up Philip Fisher “common stocks and uncommon profits” instead*. Phil wrote the book more than 50 years ago, but the 15 points to find the great stock still holds: product service, R&D, profit margin, sales, management,…

Continue reading “Holiday reading etc.”
Categories
China Stocks

National day holiday

Reading Time: < 1 minute

National Day (the birth date of PRC) Oct 1 is coming. I saw lots of flags on the street. Pretty neat, huh?

IMG_5426

Seriously, this is a good time for the travel industry to cash in. Because people will have a week off. Many people are doing some tour: from Sanya, Li Jiang to Bali or Bangkok…This is also a big test for the airline and railway system, because they need to move millions of people: some go on tour; some visit family. We will be the latter group.

Continue reading “National day holiday”
Categories
Stocks

Buying house in Shanghai Series: I

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have thinking about this for a while. But I was not convinced to buy, until this week our new landlord wanted us to move out sooner than we would like to. Here comes the inconevience of renting. Another reason (make me consider buying) is the rapid rise of home prices lately. You know we all like to buy stuff when it goes up, not when it goes down 🙂

I did a little homework: mostly pay attention to the listings outside broker’s office; talking to brokers or developer sales people. Now I have an idea about the apartments around Zhongshan park. Those are two apartment complex in the walking distance (2 or 3 mins) of Zhongshan park metro station. Not surprisingly the ave. price is more than 20,000 Yuan per square meter. There are not many small units (I mean one bedroom apartment) in those two. A two bedroom apartment usually takes 100 sqr meters, or more than 2 m Yuan. It’s no small amount considering annual salary of 120 k (or 10 k per month) is considered high for white collars here.

Zhongshan Apartment

IMG_5391

Continue reading “Buying house in Shanghai Series: I”
Categories
China Stocks

Recent Chinese IPOs in NYSE and Nasdaq

Reading Time: 2 minutes

From the bbs at world famous mit. Thanks to Author: capcase (gotmail). I’m putting my comments at the end.

Here is the original article in Chinese, the original title is “china IPO stocks”. For English, cnanalyst.com has a nice table which tracks Chinese ADRs YTD performance. So check out from there.

下面是一个简单的表格，列出了2006年12月20日至今在美国上市的中国企业的名单和大致情况。更详细的情况无法在这里列出，有兴趣的读者可以查询Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance和China Analyst,即可得到比较详细的英文资料。

橡果国际(ATV), NYSE上市，融资1.19亿美元，IPO总回报9.5%，主承销商为美林、德意志银行；

Continue reading “Recent Chinese IPOs in NYSE and Nasdaq”
Categories
China Stocks

Crocs, Mindray and QDII

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Crocs (CROX) stock is on a roll lately, as it’s closing 3rd quarter and holding two investor conference (link to webcast) in NYC and London. I added some more CROX last week when the escalator accidents is on the news. Another reason is I sold WX. I think both CROX and WX are good long term but I want to bet on “more sure” things.

Mindray (MR) has also done well lately. Incidently it’s also holding a conference in the US. At this time the fastest growth will from the US market. Chinese domestic market will also have some growth but the goverment still yet to roll out reforms in the health care (hospital) industry. Notheless I think (for the good or bad) Chinese patients still got to see doctors, so I’m not worried about MR’s prospect in China.

Continue reading “Crocs, Mindray and QDII”
Categories
Stocks

Goldman Sachs failed Chinese test

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Week in review 09/16 to 09/22

0) Sept 22 is “no car day” in many Chinese cities. Individual car owners are encouraged to take public transportation. I saw some volunteers on Zhongshan park metro station.

1) According to China Capital week, 中文难倒高盛, Goldman Sachs senior executive, Malysian Chinese Richard Ong, failed the Chinese test administrated by CSRC. Because of that Mr. Ong can not take the top postion of Goldman China.

2) US federal reserve hikes interest rate by 50 points. Higher than many people expected. The more important question investor should ask: is Mr. Bernanke trying to rescue the market, or the economy?

3) You got the RMB, we got the IPOs. To contain the excessive liquidity in China, the CSRC recently approved the Haigui IPO of 3 big state owned companies: China construction bank, Sheng Hua Coal, and Petro China.

The reason people called it Haigui is, those stocks have been listed in Hongkong Stock Exchange for a while. Now they are returning to the Shanghai A share market, at a much higher price compared to the price listed in HK a few years ago.