stlplaceThe 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.
 (picture from Boston Globe) |
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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 🙂
(for a full size of the chart, click here)
The miracle play of Eli Manning and his teammate. ELi is the little brother of Peyton Manning. I think this play will be remembered by people (at least me) for years…
By the way, there is a super bowl indicator for the market, it says if NFC team wins the super bowl the market will be up for the year. Bulls, another reason to thank for Eli and his teammates 🙂
Obviously most of them don’t know what they are talking about, accoring to Free Money Finance.
This is actually confirmed by Karen Blumenthal, the author of Grande Expectation: a year in the life of Starbucks stock. She said (before wrote the book), she has been financial journalist for more than 20 years, but she did not know what is stock split, what is earning, what is shareholder meeting etc.
I read half of the book, and I’ve learned quite a bit from Karen’s learning experience 🙂
I wrote about the bubble of PetroChina during its Shanghai IPO last Nov. I understand lots of people in China (San Hu 散户) are under water on this one. Obviously they bought into this “the most profitable company in Asia” slogan touted by some institutions that wanted to dump their shares during IPO.
Here I list some of the A share and H share price, and their bubble factor.
PetroChina: 601857.SS: CNY 26.39; 0857.HK HKD 12.27 (still lot of bubble !)
On other hand, insurance companies and banks are more rationally valued.
US Tax Rebate
The US congress and president are on the same page for one thing: help every American buy an iPod (a.k.a. the tax rebate thing). For me while I am glad to get some of my tax dollor back (rather than been blew away in Iraq, or paying a Carribean trip for some congress members…). I think the mantra of quick fix is so prevelant in this country. Sometimes yours truely also fall into this. For instance:
*Got a headache? Take an Tylenol.
*Need some stimulus for work? Got a coffee. I did this every morning.
I started pay attention to the mobile phone and service providers lately. In fact I bought some China Mobile (CHL) shares about 2 weeks ago (bought it a bit early again 🙂
Nokia: the balance
Nokia is the No. 1 brand in China as shown in baidu Shouji (cell phone) report. One thing I noticed during my last visit to Shanghai is Nokia set up a service center near Zhongshan park. Being in Midwest USA, I have not seen things like that and was a bit surprised. Why Nokia pay the extra attention to the customer services, now that they are already No. 1? One reason, I can think of, is they want to make sure their customers can get better services from authorized places, rather than going to those blackmarket and get their phones fixed.
Ballmer has been chasing Jerry Yang for a year, and today he ran out of patience. Interestingly enough, I learned it from CNBC first time (around 5:30 AM central time). Note, last time I watched early CNBC, it was Jan 22 global crash…so the lesson for me don’t get up too early 🙂
The desperation of Microsoft
After all these efforts, MSN search, MSN live space, blog, MSFT is still playing catch up with GOOG. Since it can not afford to buy GOOG, it is determined to get the No. 2 guy in web search, by paying more than 50% premium over yesterday’s YHOO closing price.
How Yahoo got here
I am always interested in recurring revenue business, debit/credit card transaction fee is one. Yucheng Tech (YTEC), the smaller rival of Longtop (LFT), is entering POS business this year. According to my friend Nawar Alsaadi’s analysis (quoted below):
“POS Revenue projections
The company mentioned in an investor presentation in February 2007 that the average business processed on a POS machine in China is 200,000 USD…Assuming an average transaction cost of 1.5% charged by the bank, the average revenue per machine will be $3000, and if we assume that Yucheng is awarded a 3rd of the transaction cost, this would net the company $1000 in transaction revenue per year. Thus, based on the company’s expected rate of merchant sign up, the company could generate as much as $50 million dollar in recurring transaction revenue by the end of 2009 as they sign up over 50000 merchants on their network…”
of this market. First is this Amazon bouncing back thing. Then is the whole market went up big, on the last day of the month. My initial sense is another windows dressing like it did on Dec 31. Note for mutual fund, hedge fund,…they all have monthly performance to meet. So take this last opportunity to pump up the stock, and make them look good.
For me, I started a kind of new strategy, I called it “swing”. I bought back some Mindray (MR) which I sold last week, because I had a limited GTC order of $32.98 in my account. This afternoon I sold some Crocs (CROX) when I saw it tried to break $35. And I set up a limited buy order of $32.50 following the sale.
By the way, Crocs just started the SoleUnited(tm) program, which will recycle used Crocs and donate new Crocs to the needy in Africa.
My point is to lower the cost of the stocks I hold. Because I don’t know which point is too high, which point is too low, why don’t take advantage of this market and swing it? I yet to do it for China Mobile, I’m under water on that one now.
