stlplaceI’m not picking on the China Construction Bank, this is a problem existing in all the banks. I can think of two reasons:
1) People are “managing their money” nowadays, e.g., people are withdrawing money from bank and put into the stock market; people are doing the certificate of deposit…
Occasionally I received spam text messages from unknown people. People want to sell cars, apartments, etc. But yesterday I got a message from Home Inns (Rujia), it promotes the post “Golden week”(May 1 to 7) sales: it will give one night free during May 6 to 10 if I stay in their hotels for 3 nights. I can not stop laughing.
Separately, Home Inns is selling more shares (stocks), it will get $30 m from the proceeds to build more hotels. The competition among economy hotels in China are heating up.
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.
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.
(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.
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”.
Fuwei Film (FFHL) stock got a 22% jump today after it announced a very good earning report. Interestingly, I was thinking about this little known company lately. Why? Because I noticed a few days ago it got upgrade from Maxim analyst. The stock went up about 10% and dropped back to 10 in a few days. More importantly, I liked its products: plastic films used both in cosumer products packaging, and industrial packaging. Here is a link of their products (with pictures). Notice anything familar? From juice and milk bottles, to cigratte, liquor (alcohol), to laundary powder,…things we consume (eat, drink, use) daily.
The first quarter is behind us. Just like a public company reporting quarterly results and holding conference call, I am going to do a quick review of my little portfolio. This quarter is a quite rollercoaster for me, as it did for many investors. The Jan and Feb started fairly strong and at one time I had more than 10% gain (I used google finance to track my investments). This is until Feb 27. In one day I lost all my 10% gain because of the loss of my Chinese ADRs (HMIN and MR each lost more than 10%).
ICBC (601398.SS, 1398.HK), Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, announced its 2006 result today, you can read the summary here (Chinese, English). Here is an offical PDF report (in traditional Chinese).
Private Equity plays a bigger role in Chinese stock market these days. In the US private equity deals more with M&A, merge and acqusitions. In China, because the stock market did so well in last year, a lot private money has been poured into private equity (私募基金). You can feel the temporature of the market by reading this “raising minimum limit” notice. Besides money, many mutual fund managers have jumped the ship for private equity.
Interestingly, I was seriously thinking about start a similar thing (more like Buffett’s partneship, vs. other capital management firms) for a while. I won’t have this CNY 1 m. limit, which I think is no small amount for most people here. If anyone is interested, read “investing together” at the right.