Categories
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

Categories
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).

Categories
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.

Categories
Stocks

Wall Street Rates Heelys HLYS

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To summerize,

17-Jan-07 CIBC Wrld Mkts Initiated   Sector Perform
17-Jan-07 JP Morgan Initiated   Overweight
17-Jan-07 Bear Stearns Initiated   Outperform
17-Jan-07 Wachovia Initiated   Mkt Perform

The full story is here. I would not take their ratings too seriously (I would like to read their analysis instead). The 60% sales increase in California (No. 6 economy in the world if considered as a country) in 2006 is a good sign. Is California a mature market as the analyst suggested? I don’t know.

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Categories
China Stocks

Mindray MR Pre-announce Fiscal 2006

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I summerized its year 2005 and 2006 (low end) number here. I noted that the revenue year over year growth slowed a bit (consider first 9 months growth about 41%). This can be attribute to the continuing “anti-corruption” campaign in China hospitals.

                  2005               2006              YoY

Rev (CNY)  1,078,573,000 1,470,000,000 36.29%
    
Income         205,089,000    360,000,000 75.53%
    
Earning (CNY)           2.40                3.73 55.42%

You can read the news here.

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Categories
China Stocks

Bought Some EDU New Oriental

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I don’t know why the stock went down this morning after a good earning report. Anyway guessing stock price’s daily fluctuation is not my job. I did listen to the conference call (script by seekingalpha) and it seems to me Michael and Louis did well, although Michael’s English is not perfect. Some of the growth driver:

1) Elite English, I believe this is more like “business English”, I know in Shanghai there are “WallStreet English”, “Webber English”, etc. Don’t know how New Oriental will do in this new space. But profit margin in this area is better because those customers are not price sensitive.

2) Oversea English Test preparation: I believe things have not slow down because nowadays more and more Chinese high school graduates go overseas for undergraduate education.

They also talked a bit on goverment regulation on “private education sector” and coming lock up expired period.

Categories
Saint Louis

Patience More Patience

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This is what I got from Ameren UE web site. Note the number 1299 only reflects the outage of my neighborhood. From what I heard from radio Ameren tries to restore majority of customers by this evening.  

Current Outage
Outage start date/time:        Saturday Jan 13, 2007 7:01 AM
Outage status:                    Order assigned to servicemen or crew
Cause of outage:                 Tree contact
Estimated restoration time:   Tuesday Jan 16, 2007 3:15 PM
Number of customers out:    1299

Categories
China Stocks

Michael Yu Minghong’s New Report Card

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All right, New Oriental announced the fiscal 2007 Q2 report today. Here is the report. It seems they are doing well. Some highlights include 33% YoY reveneue growth (beat est. 20%). “The growth was mainly driven by the increase in the number of student enrollments in language training and test preparation courses.” 

I imagine people just can not get enough English classes (spoken English, business English, kids English), and all kind of testings (IT, law, graduate school admission, in addition to traditional TOEFL/GRE/ACT/SAT).   

Categories
Technology

Phishing Mail from Paypal

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I got this one from Paypal, it’s faked but it looks very much like real. I mean the words (as you can see below), graphics and return address etc. Obviously the phishers are gettting smarter. So we need to get smarter too. I would not click on a link in an email unless I know it’s safe. I will open a new window and type the web address myself.

==========================

Your account has been flagged!
PayPal Security Measures.

Dear PayPal Member,

Your account has been randomly flagged in our system as a part of our routine security measures. This is a must to ensure that only you have access and use of your Paypal account and to ensure a safe PayPal experience. We require all flagged accounts to verify their information on file with us. To verify your information at this time, please visit our secure server webform by clicking the hyperlink below:

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Categories
Saint Louis

Can Not Get Enough Crocs

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It seems like it. I noticed the Crocs Kiosk (pavilion) in the malls before Xmas. Now it looks they are going to open stores. The following is what I saw from Chesterfield Mall today.

crocs_kiosk crocs_store

Update (19Jan07) I went to the mall again tonight, and found out they changed the display of the “store”. Obviously they are not going to open a Crocs store. This is just a place for display. Sorry for “pull the trigger too early”.