Categories
gadgets

Blackberry down

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Yesterday one of the big news (Reuters) in the technology arena is the down of Blackberry (a.k.a., the Crackberry) email sevice in north America. This obviously has huge impact on the business and goverment users as they rely on device for email. But how could this happen? Isn’t blackberry supposed to be more reliable than the mobile phone network: one example is in 911, Dick Chenny got his Blackberry working while many cell phones users in White House and Congress stopped working.

Well, while the Blackberry is usually reliable, it is not perfect. According to the news, it appears the networking center of RIM had a glitch yesterday. As shown in the picture below, every email has to route through RIM’ networking center (or data center).

blackberry architecture pic
(source, Blackberry.com, a full size architecture picture can be seen here.)

Categories
Stocks

Tweaks for Dow Industrials

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Dow Jones Industrials Average (DJIA, Wikipedia), commonly referred as Dow Industrial Index, is widely perceived as the benchmark of the US stock market. This perception is not necessary a reflection of reality, as I said in my earlier post.

Today Dow underwent another tweak: from Feb 19 it will remove Altria (MO, today’s closing price $72.42) and Honeywell (HON, $57.64), at the same time it will add Bank of America (BAC, $42.14) and Chevron (CVX, $80.42). Since Dow is a purely price weighted, so the relative strength of Oil company as of late should help it, while the weakness of financials (BoA) will do the opposite.

Interestingly, if we add the closing price of two outgoing stocks ($120.06), vs. the new comers ($122.56), they are very close. An co-incident, or another factor considered by the creator of Dow 🙂

Categories
Master Series

Unofficial indicator of market bottom

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Peter Lynch once described our human’s psychology about stock market during different cycles, in his book One Up on Wall Street. I remember he used a party as an example, and he looked at the number of people approached him (people know he is a fund manager), and the amount of conversations about stocks, as an unofficial indicator about the market. So, for instance, in a red hot market, almost everyone came up to him and recommended his/her stock pick; while in a bear market, people will talked about “how is the weather”, and pretty much regard him as a dentist.

According to my observation, we are somewhere in between at this time. I mean, people think the stocks are risky, if not toxic 🙂

I would really be interested in learn how this plays out in the gatherings of Chinese New Year back home.

Categories
401k and Personal Finance Investing

Close AMZN puts, Portfolio update

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I closed the Amazon Feb $65 puts last Wed, when I saw the stock dropped to around $68, which is the low point the day after it released Q4 earning.

Lesson learned:
1) short/put a stock is much harder than I thought. I started this trade because I saw EDU, AAPL, and VMW all dropped big after missing earning. But I have hind-sight bias on them: things are always clearer on rear view mirror. I did not know EDU will issue a so-so guidance for this Q; I did not know iPod suddenly stopped growth, iPhone did not sell as fast as Steve wanted, and Mac computers are expensive considering consumer slow down.

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Categories
Stocks

Flip flopper

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It appears Politicians are not the only flip floppers. The reason we should not follow analyst blindly.

Citigroup Global Markets analyst Jim Suva, talked about RIMM on early Feb (source: seekingalpha):

“Overall, we believe the points brought up during today’s call are highly supportive of our bull case on RIM. Concerns regarding financial services exposure have been largely debunked, in our view, and we think investors should be encouraged by what seems to be a very low replacement rate at Citi, and financial services in general…”

Mr. Suva reiterates his “buy” rating on RIM, and maintains a $140 price target.

Today, according to Barron’s, CitiGroup analyst thinks RIMM will go down significantly. Let me quote:

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Categories
China

5 billion text message greetings in China

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According to my friend Wang Jianshuo (and he got it through CCTV), Chinese people sent 5 billion text messages (SMS) for the New Year Greeting.

Separately, I picked up more China Mobile shares (CHL) today. Average down is not the best approach, I may sell some CHL (I bought at higher cost earlier) later on, if the share price goes up.

Categories
Master Series

Lynch and Buffett talked about downturn

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In this bear market, we can watch Cramer, read WSJ, Yahoo Finance, Google Finance etc. But all this can not substituted “reading what the real masters are thinking”.

With that in mind, here is Buffett’s talk about US economy Money available, cheap, due to rate cuts, quote the article:

Buffett said that what has taken place “is a re-pricing of risk and an unavailability of what I might call ‘dumb money,’ of which there was plenty around a year ago.”

and another my favorite:

“It’s sort of a little poetic justice, in that the people that brewed this toxic Kool-Aid found themselves drinking a lot of it in the end,” he said in reference to some of the large investment banks that were involved in designing and marketing complex investments that have soured in recent months and have generated billions in losses.

Peter Lynch is the legendary fund manager of Fidelity Magellian. Here is a PodCast (MP3) of his. He talked why we should not try to time the market.

Categories
Fun

Super Tuesday etc.

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For entertain purpose only, note I am not endorsing any one of the canidates 🙂

Super Tuesday surprise
1) Huckabee won 5 states in the south. Mitt, your “Huckabee is a spoiler” talk backfired.

2) The show me state (Missouri) voted for change; the coastal state (NY, CA) voted for more of the same. The US president has been a Yale graduate since 1988, and Bush and Clinton families have occupied White House since 1988. So much for the greatest democracy in the world 🙂

BTW, AP made wrong call for Missouri Dem primary initially and here is their explanation.

Stock analogy

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Categories
China

China snow storm relief

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The unexpected snow storm hit China hard, at the worst time it could find: the Chinese New Year, when billions of people travell to their home to be with their families.

Here are some places that could use our little help.

1. China Snow Storm Disaster Relief Fund, the money will be forwarded to Red Cross China.

2. OSCCF（海外中国儿童救助基金会), note “snow storm relief“.

I will add more as I see other organizations who can help.

China snow storm pic
(picture from Boston Globe) 		google cn lunar new year 08 pic
Categories
Shanghai Composite

SSE Composite Index, Happy New Year

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Last night is the last trading day for Chinese domestic stock market, for the year of pig. According to Google Finance, the index is up 72.09% in the year of Pig. The index closed at 4,599.70, a tiny bit shy of 4,600. Shanghai composite has been up BIG two years in a row. Guess that’s the reason for people to take caution 🙂

Shanghai Composite Index Year of Pig
(for a full size of the chart, click here)

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