Category: Stocks

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Stocks

Swap some Heelys with Crocs

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Did a little adjustment on my portifolio today. Sold 30 shares of Heelys (HLYS) and bought 22 shares of Crocs (CROX). I saw the new product release from Crocs today.

“…the Off Road and All Terrain models in the spring and fall of 2007. The Off Road (MSRP: $39.99) is a rugged outdoor shoe with additional traction and is currently available in women’s sizes (6-12) and men’s sizes (4-13). The model is available in seven color combinations, including chocolate/chocolate and sienna/khaki, new to the shoe’s 2007 color palette. The All Terrain (MSRP: $59.99) is a weatherproof shoe for all-condition performance and stability. The shoe is available in women’s sizes (6-12) and men’s sizes (4-13) in five colors, including the new 2007 color combination of black/black…”

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China Stocks

Focus Media FMCN is hotter than BIDU

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It seems not very intuitive that Focus Media (FMCN), a LCD media advertising company, has done better than Baidu (BIDU), the No. 1 search engine in China. After all , putting up the LCD screen, soliciting the advertising customers, and creating those short films are not high tech as “search engine”, which involves creating a large number of clustered computer, and complicated search algorithm. But this is the reality, Focus Media (FMCN), closed above $80 today amid the new offering of $500 m, the PE (ttm) is about 76, market capital 4.4 B. Since its debut in July 2005 (at 20s), it’s up about 300%.

SH_elevator_ad

How about Baidu (BIDU), it debuted on August 2005 at about $120, and it closed at $124.50 today. Here is the chart. The PE is about 165 and market capital 4.2 B.

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Stocks

Home Inns HMIN on Seekingalpha

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I published an article about Home Inns HMIN on Seekingalpha (Yahoo Finance) today. This was loosely based on my previous post in this blog on Jan 3.

Seekingalpha is a financial (stocks in particular) blog platform, and it’s a Yahoo Finance partner.

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China Stocks

Home Inns HMIN Yahoo Message Board

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Yes. It’s up and running now. Here is the link. I don’t know exactly how new IPOs got the message board started. It usually takse many requests, and lots of patience.

Oh, don’t take the discussions (especially the price target) too seriously. Because if you believe it and trade accordingly, you may regret later. That being said, I did see some intelligent analyses on the message boards from time to time. But a lot more emotional rants too. You are warned.

No message board for New Oriental (EDU) yet. The funny thing is that Mindray (MR) board was inherited from Morgan Food (used to have ticker symbol MR), and the board works 50% of the time. No wonder Yahoo stock did not do well lately 🙂

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China Stocks

Chinese Companies’ Earning Calendar

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SNDA (Shanda): Feb 12

BIDU (Baidu): Feb 14

NCTY(the9):   Feb 14

Note Feb 18 is the Chinese New Year.

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Stocks

Buffett is in Shopping Mode

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Fruit of the Loom, a whole owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway (Buffett’s company), bought the intimate apparel business from VF corp. Here is the deal.

fruit of loom picture

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Stocks

What to Read from Insider Selling?

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(Update 12-14-2023) Came across this issue again when doing some research on the Hashicorp stock ($HCP).

CEO David McJannet

Confounder Armon Dadgar 

I assume cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto has a shell company and didn’t use his own name for the shares he traded. I didn’t dig into it: it’s not something that I feel it’s productive for me to do. A while ago though, I did think about learn the Go lang and see if I can be one of the 1st 200/300 employees at Hashicorp (thinking the stocks pre-IPO). It didn’t materialize 🙂 Btw, I just learned Mitchell is leaving Hashicorp.

Again I feel we should not worry about insiders selling stocks? In most cases we don’t need to do, as the insiders would like to to cash out for their life style or charity, note Bill Gates, if he didn’t sell, he would be a trillionaire? Just look at Steve Baller’s $MSFT stock.

(Original 2007) Not too much. From time to time, the insiders of the company, a.k.a, the founders, the senior management, or even the venture capital, decided to sell their stocks in the public market. As ordinary investors I used to be worried about those kinds of events. Until I read Peter Lynch’s book One Up On Wall Street lately. Now I think we don’t need to read too much from this. Insiders are also human beings, they may want to buy a nice house, send their kids to Harvard, etc. In other words, they need to have some cash. From investment point of view, they don’t want to have 100% of their investment in their own company’s stocks too (Buffett is an exception because he is the Guru of investing/money management).

Last Friday New Oriental revealed that its CEO Yu Minghong and another director will sell a large amount of stocks. It’s no surprise the market reacted negatively. But I am not worried. I bought some more EDU stocks instead. At 33.00 (note its fiscal 2007 first 6 months earning $0.68, and its first quarter is the strongest traditionally), I believe it’s fair priced.

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Stocks

Yahoo Finance Goes Personal

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Yahoo launched its personal finance web site. Here is the link. Yahoo Finance already has lots of information about personal finance. But this time I think they are trying to separate it out from the “investing”. I think it’s good in the sense that ordinary people really don’t want to mess with stocks, they would be happy if they can keep track of spending, real estate, tax, saving, retirement fund/401K, etc. There are already a few good personal finance web site, such as fool.com, bankrate.com, let’s see how Yahoo plays out.

yahoo personal finance picture

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China Stocks

HMIN Home Inns Update

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There are lots of praises for Home Inns (Rujia, most in Chinese). I saw this one in English. Actually from my own experience at four Home Inns in Shanghai I have both praises and complaints. So every coin has two sides.

On serious side, I noticed after Home Inns developed the new hotels in Nanjing and Qingdao this year, they are developing very fast in Xi’an and Anhui. This is all good. But I still have couple questions for them: as they add more hotels, how many are company owned (how many are franchised)? From my understanding they make a lot more money from company owned hotels. Also, how about pricing power? (do they need to discount to get people to stay?)

Note the stock hit all time high yesterday ($41.85).

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Stocks

Counting Crocs CROX

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This evening when I was in the TaekwonDo class, I counted the number of Crocs in my class. Out of 12 pairs of shoes, there are 3 pairs of Crocs. Seriously, I did a little analysis on the Crocs sales number in year 2005 and 2006. The growth is very impressive, but how long will the trend last?

                   2004         2005            2005 9m 2006 9m        9m growth
Sales $13,500,000 $108,600,000 $70,741,000 $236,162,000 234%
# of pairs 649,000      6,000,000     3,908,343     13,047,624 
$ per pair   $20.80            $18.10        $18.10            $18.10 

Note: for 2006 9m number, they did not say the actual pairs sold, I assume the same unit price as of 2005, and get the unit number by dividing sales by $ per pair.