Categories
Beijing Olympics

Olympics tickets: 2nd call

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For a Chinese 中文 version of this, click on my wife’s MSN blog.

The 2nd round of ticketing booking just got started. Here is the offical web site for Beijing 2008 tickets (Chinese, English). I understand they only take Visa (official sponsor of Olympics), and fund from Bank of China 中国银行 acct. Actually they sell tickets at many BoC locations inside China.

I was not serious about attending (due to cost and afraid of crowd), until couple days ago my co-worker said to me “maybe some day you can hold the ticket stub to your grand kids and tell them you went to Beijing Olympics…”.

So I checked out the air ticket fot the STL to PVG round trip at flyChina.com, I used July 19/Sept 20 to beat the traffic. It started at 1400 USD…Now if I could find some cheap tickets for the game. This Olympics thing will not be cheap. But I go home (China) once every year, so the air ticket is also fixed cost for me.

This is not just about the (potential) bragging rights. This will be my wife and my mom’s first Beijing trip if we can all make it. So money is not the No. 1 concern here.

Beijing 2008 logo

Categories
401k and Personal Finance

Two baskets for our retirement accts

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Roll over IRA
In early Nov. I received a letter from Vanguard, it says I am eligible to transfer some of my 401k to an IRA account. I thought about it, the pros and cons, and decided to do it yesterday. Here are my rationale:

1) Ideally I like to keep all my retirement in one place, but one problem is I am not very familar with the new funds avaiable in the new 401k plan. On the other hand, I have been with Vanguard for a while and I know some of the funds are really good (good enough to make me sleep well in the night).

When I say Vanguard is good, I am not only talking about the fees, the performance, etc; but also their brand: it is one of the most respected mutual fund companies in the world. I rememeber a few years ago NY AG Spizer investigated many mutual funds, and I did not heard Vanguard name there (come back to the sleep well factor…).

2) Diversify: this will also allow me to diversify my 401k (IRA); and I can compare the performance of two baskets as time goes on.

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Categories
IPO

NetSuite Open IPO

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(Update Dec 18) The company raised its IPO price range: now it’s between $16 and $19. I am NOT bidding it.

WR Hambrecht sent me an email about Open IPO. This got me to read its prospectus. NetSuite is a new kind of software company co-founded by Larry Ellison, the founder and chairman of Oracle. By new I meant they provide “software as service”, vs. the tradtional software companies such as Microsoft, in which a consumer buys product, install it, do some customization, and (possibly) run updates, etc. Quote its prospectus:

“NetSuite is a leading vendor of on-demand, integrated business management application suites for small and medium-sized businesses. We provide a comprehensive suite of enterprise resource planning, or ERP, customer relationship management, or CRM, and e-commerce capabilities that enables customers to manage their critical back-office, front-office and web operations in a single application…We deliver our suite over the Internet as a subscription service using the software-as-a-service or on-demand model. Our revenue has grown from $17.7 million in 2004 to $67.2 million in 2006. For the nine months ended September 30, 2007, we had revenue of $76.8 million. As of September 30, 2007, we had over 5,400 active customers…”

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Categories
Stocks

Money from MasterCard

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If you used your credit card (MasterCard, Visa, Diner) overseas during 1996 to 2006, you may be eligible for a settlement refund.

1) CCF settlement: I received a form from CCF settlement, which stands for currency conversion fee anti-trust litigation. I remember I used my MasterCard in China in 2005 for my Ctrip booking. Now I am eligible for $25 refund from the settlement. Quoted from ccfsettlement.com:

“The lawsuit is about the price cardholders of Visa-, MasterCard-, or Diners Club-branded payment cards were charged to make transactions in a foreign currency, or with a foreign merchant, between February 1, 1996 and November 8, 2006. Plaintiffs challenge how the prices of credit and debit/ATM card foreign transactions were set and disclosed, including claims that Visa, MasterCard, their member banks, and Diners Club conspired to set and conceal fees, typically of 1-3% of foreign transactions, and that Visa and MasterCard inflated their base exchange rates before applying these fees.”

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Categories
Site Info

New blog theme

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The loyal visitors of my blog may notice the face lift of this blog. I am using simplicity-10-widgets theme from solosteam webstudio, courtesy of Michael D. Pollock. It is fairly easy to set up but it did take me some time to upgrade my wordpress from 2.0 to 2.2, and get side bars working. I should also thank Google for helping me locate a few old pages during the process.

I believe this should help my readers to navigate the blog. Please let me know if you have any suggestions, ideas. Yes, the free gift certificate thing is still on.

solostream wordpress blog theme pic

Categories
Business China

CompUSA, Dell, TV-Guide and NetEase

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Week in review Dec 2 to Dec 8

1) All remaining CompUSA stores to be closed (bloomberg). I think it’s understandable from business point of view, because selling computer is a tough business these days. It is a commodity business, and unlike other commodity such as gas or coffee, a customer only buy a new PC/laptop once every a few years.

Similarly, I can understand Dell computer lackluster financial performance lately, and its decision to sell PCs at BestBuy (reuter news). People used to buy Dell because it offers most bang (more disk and memory, faster CPU, etc) for the buck, but nowadays people buy computer and electronics not solely for the “bangs”, they look for the brand, design, fashion (think Apple iBook, MacBook).

2) MacroVision (MVSN), the licensing software company, announced to buy GemStar-TV Guide (San Jose Mercury News). Normally when company A buys company B, the company A stock will drop, and company B stock will rise. In this case, interestingly, both companies’ stock drop big. I, for one, can not understand why a software company will buy a traditional magazine company.

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Categories
Stocks

Compare Vanke with Toll Brothers

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Vanke is the No. 1 home builder in China. Toll Brothers is a US luxury home builder. Comparing the profitability of those two are not really comparing apple to apple. But, the buyers of Vanke homes in China are mostly middle class, or in other words, their relative affulence level in China is about same the US buyers of Toll homes. Anyway here goes the data from Reuters (via Google Finance). I can see the following from the data:

1) Vanke is more profitable then Toll, because real estate is a long term growth industry in China. This is from net profit margine and operating margin.

2) Margin for both companies are declining, more so for TOL than Vanke. It’s understandable for TOL because of the weak US housing market. For Vanke it could be two things: increasing competition; sacrefying profitability for growth.

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Categories
Stocks

I do NOT hate Jim Cramer

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But it appears he hates Chinese. Here is something this popular TV host said on CNBC Mad Money (Dec. 5):

Tiring of “the idea that money is any different depending on where it came from,” Cramer acknowledged, “I hate the Chinese … [but] if they buy a stake in our company, what’re you going to do?” That’s the way capitalism works, he said.

Here is the link to the Street.com.

I am not a fan of Jim Cramer; I watch his show mostly for entertainment. Also, couple days ago I found this Wikipedia entry for Cramer to be good.

Seriously, I think CNBC and Cramer owe the Chinese people an apology on this one.

Categories
Life

HUST, my alma mater

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Read this post from WesternFord, and found those beautiful pictures taken in Wuhan Univ. and Huangzhou Univ of Science and Technology. It reminded me the college days at HUST. Hope to visit it again in the near future, last time I visited was year 2002.

While Huazhong is mostly an engineering school, it also has a decent business (management) school and econ department. One of the rising star in Chinese goverment (fiscal policy advisor) is Ba Shu Song 巴曙松 (blog), he recently gave a Finance lecture to the leaders of CPC political bureau. I vaguely remember him while in college, when he was the head of (students) radio station.

HUST pic

Categories
China Stocks

CICC 2007 investing strategies

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(Update Dec08) They released 2008 forecast, here is excerpt.

中金2008年股票策略报告认为，中国A股市场高估值状况将在2008年持续，大盘蓝筹股明年上升空间为30％－40％，并看好金融、地产、零售、钢铁和电力等五大板块的投资机会。

(Original) We are at the end of 2007, and it’s interesting to reflect how the market did, how our portfolio did, and how the analysts did (to forecast the market).

In the begining of this year, I have the oppertunity to read this CICC 2007 investing strategy report (PDF file here). CICC, China International Capital Corp, 中国国际金融有限公司, is striving to be China’s own Morgan Stanley. The reason I posted it here is not to evaluate how the CICC analysts did in terms of forecasting, but rather to help our own self-reflection: what went right, what went wrong? Hopefully we will be better investors as we continue to learn,…

CICC_2007