stlplaceI 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.
There are lots of talk about the Starbucks store in Forbidden City in Beijing these days. It started in Chinese demestic media, and now it speads all over the world (tonight I saw it on BBC). I happened to take a picture of that Starbucks store during my 2005 visit to Beijing. Personally I also felt it’s in appropriate to have a Starbucks inside the forbidden city. I think they can move the store outside.
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 🙂
Wang Jianshuo, the famous (yet low profile) blogger in Shanghai, wrote an excellent series about living cost in Shanghai.
SNDA (Shanda): Feb 12
BIDU (Baidu): Feb 14
NCTY(the9): Feb 14
Note Feb 18 is the Chinese New Year.
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.
(Update 12-14-2023) Came across this issue again when doing some research on the Hashicorp stock ($HCP).
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.
Happy Microsoft $MSFT Dividend Day to all who celebrate
Shareholders received a quarterly dividend of $0.75 for each share that they own
Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft received a dividend check for $249,939,742.50
He's on track to make $1 Billon in annual dividends pic.twitter.com/eJ3P6oskjS
— Dividend Growth Investor (@DividendGrowth) December 14, 2023
(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
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.
I got lots of spams (spamming comments) lately. Thus I decided to use the special anti-spam program for now. If you feel your comments have been mistakenly treated as “spam”, shoot me an email and I will manually revert it.
I will also check it regularly to make sure legimate comments don’t get treated as spams.
Today I went to Post Office to mail something. I noticed there are lots of people, which is not unusual, because people want to get things done in the weekend. What surprised me a bit is there are many people applying for the Passports. This also makes sense to me because recently the goverment issues new rules that require US citizens carrying passports if they travel between Canada, Mexico, Carribean Islands and the States (they don’t have to show passports in the past).
But I think there is another reason. Did you notice the gas price dropped significantly lately? Today I saw unleaded gas as low as $1.87 per gallon. I don’t remember when I saw gas below $2 last time. Anyway I am not complaining here, nor do I try to predict how oil price will go next. I believe the lowering oil price means two things: more discretionary spending for consumers; (poentially) lower prices for airfare and cruise vacations. I think people are getting passport and vacation booked in advance to take advantage of this trend.
Revisions
(July 9, 2008) Buy and hold will not work in this market. What I found interesting lately, is buy a fundmentally good (valuation attractive) stock at low (when the market hold a selloff, when everyone is panic), and then sell some when the market recovers and everyone is excited again. This way we will have a truely low cost of our holdings, and we can hold for longer term. I did this for RIM and WDC. I should have sold the BRK.B when it was up. Well, in stock market, there is no “should have”, “would have”. We anticipate instead.
(April 1, 2008) In VALUE we trust. Don’t fall into growth trap (growth companies mean profit growth as well as revenue growth).
(Feb 2008) Invest in business, not just the stock.
(Jan 31, 2008) All year 2007 gain is gone in this month. Lesson learned.
(June 2007) I will provide performance report of my own portfolio upon request.
(Jan. 2007) I am looking to form an investment partnership, very much like the early days of the Berkshire Hathway (a.k.a, Buffett Partnership). The investors need to meet the following criteria:
1) Free to put up minimum $5,000 without worrying about “withdrawl in a year” for house payment, nice car etc. We are looking for “baggers” (i.e. the stock will go up twice or more) in a few years, thus we could hold a stock for a long time; we will not sell a stock just because it ran up 10% in a day. We will only buy fundamentally good stocks (so that we can sleep well at night). We ONLY sell the stock when we believe its fundamental is shifted.
2) People are passionate and patient about long term investing; have some background in business, finance, technology, consumer proucts (fashion) or other industries, hands on exprience is perferred; knowledge about emerging markets (BRICs, Brazil, Russia, India, China; ROW, rest of the world) is welcomed;
3) People I feel comfortable to social or interfact with (I am an easy going and open minded guy).
Organization, Distribution of profit etc: the profit will be divided according to the money each investor put in. Investment ideas will be discussed between partners. However, the managing partner makes the final decision regarding investing matters.
I will be the managing partner (pending the approval of majority of the partners).
Name in my mind (ends with equity, Capital, Partnership, or Securities):
(June 19, 2008) Cougar capital, abaqus capital; I felt capital is better than equity(ies), investments, securities etc.
(April 21, 2008) 3D Investments, because investing should be multi-dimensional, e.g., Buffett’s investing in Amazon Euro Bond in 2000/1, he was looking for both the upside of Amazon and Euro the currency. An opposite example, Crocs has been fashionable and its stock did well in 2007 (until Oct. 31), when fashion dies, so does the stock. Avoid one dimensional stock.
Agile (min rui), Heartland, Olive, Vaux (Xuva), LTV (long term view), MX
(June 26 2006) I found out MR, Olive capital domain names are taken 🙂
Email me if you are interested.
Sincerely,
Major Xu
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The following is a bit old. I am still interested in blogging and web 2.0 stuff, but not as passionate as investing nowadays.
(Jan 3, 2006 Initial) Besides comments, I welcome anyone who is interested in writing articles related to (but not limited to) the following topics:
I also have a few interesting project ideas, but “idea is nothing unless gets implemented”. I am looking for people who are good at web development (PHP, Perl, JavaScript, CSS, XML and MySQL) to join me on those efforts.
Please note at this time I don’t have any revenue and can not offer 6 figure salary or $30/hour for your work. However, we may work together and find a good business model in the future.
Today I saw a bulletin board ad by AT&T (previous SBC), it says “blogging”. During lunch I heard people talking about “blog”, “My Space”. I don’t know if this is “bubble building” or “real big thing”. But I think we are living in interesting times.
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