Categories
Stocks

Almost Angel

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I heard about the “angel investor” term a while ago, but I have not thought seriously about their profiles, their networth, etc. This is until recently I thought about doing this myself, I mean providing seed money for some Internet startup in China.

I think in general angel investors are rich people 🙂 As a minimum they should come up with 10,000 to 100,000 (USD? CNY?) to get a company started. My favorite “angel investor” story is when the two Google guys got started, one Sunday morning they went to the home of Sun Microsystems cofounder. The Sun guy listened to their pitch for a few minutes, liked the idea, but he needed to go to church. So he gave them a $200,000 check. We all know the rest is the history.

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Categories
China Stocks

A Stock A Day

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I was on shopping spree on stocks lately. Since I bought the Panera Bread (PNRA) last Friday, this Monday I bought some Telestone (TSTC), a Chinese wireless equipment maker; on Tuesday I bought some Ninetowns (NINE), a China based software company not new to me because I lost money on it in the past 🙁

These are two speculative plays. Telestone recently moved from Amex to Nasdaq, and it is posed to benifit from the 3G services adoption and Olympics in China. Ninetowns’ software business is stablizing after one year and half’s transition period; it also is building up B2B services through tootoo.com and globalmarkets aquisition.

I only took a small position on these two as they are a bit speculative right now. As you may see from their stock prices (about $9 for TSTC, and about $5 for NINE). I am going to hold them for longer time. I was reading Philip Fisher’s “Uncommon Profits in Common Stocks”, one thing amazed me is Phil will hold a stock as long as its fundamentals are good. I guess great investors like Buffett and Fisher all have great patience 🙂 

Categories
Technology

Apple Raising the Bar

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It’s not the first time Apple jumped into the mobile phone party, they teamed up with Motorola and came up with this RAZR. Obviously Steve Jobs is not satisfied with that, and today at MacWorld show he unveiled the iPod Phone (or iPhone as people call it, although legally Cisco owned that name). If you are really curious, here are some pictures at engadget. It will be interesting to see how this will affect the Palm and Blackberry’s sale.

iPod phone picture 

Categories
China Stocks

New Oriental EDU to Report FY 2007 Q2 Earning

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on 8 am ET Jan 16. Here is link to web conference. And the dial in instruction can be seen here.  

I don’t have any EDU shares.

Categories
Business China

New US China Direct Flight

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It’s official, the United Airlines won the battle. It will fly from Washington Dulles to Beijing, connecting two capitals. It appears to me American Airlines was the front runner but their pilot union doesn’t want to fly more than 15 hours from Dallas to Beijing, and that basically pulled AA out of race. I was thinking Continental’s New York and Shanghai route makes more economic sense because they are financial centers of the two countries. But obviously politics played a role here. With two existing routes from North America to Shanghai (San Francisco, Chicago), UA will have the biggest presence in US China routes. 

Categories
China Stocks

Finally Some Rational Comments on Chinese Stocks Markets

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That’s from Andy Xie, former chief economist for Morgan Stanley (Asia), here is the link. The article is in Chinese. Basically he is saying the high PE ratio of Chinese domestic stocks can not be justified by the growth of economy. The profitability of company and the prosperity of economy are two separate things. Among the factors pushing up the stocks prices, he mentioned the growth of mutual fund industry and the slow housing market.  

Categories
Fun Stocks

How Many Houses To See before Buying

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My roommate, an American guy in his mid 20s, has been looking for a house (condo, duplex) for a while. By “a while” I meant he probablly have done this for about 9 months. I understand he has many reasons for this long process: first he was new to St. Louis when he relocated from another state to here, i.e., he need some time to get familar with the area; then comes the stagnant real estate market, in the down market everyone is waiting, as a buyer he certainlly don’t want to see the price drop after he buy the house; and most important of all, I believe he looked too many houses. I don’t know how many places he actually saw, but when he showed me the web listings from time to time, talked about the pros and cons of this house vs. that house, I know he looked too many.

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Categories
China Stocks

LFC China Life Insurance Debut Tomorrow in Shanghai

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The party is finally here. The ticker symbol is 601628 (not available at Yahoo Finance yet), it was priced at 18.88 (lots of 8 here). And it could go to 30s (note I usually make wrong guess, so take it for what it worth…)

The ticker symbol in Hongkong is 2628.HK (from Yahoo Finance). And LFC is the ticker symbol at NYSE.

Disclosure: I don’t have any postions on this.

Follow up (08Jan07, 7:48PM Central time): it opened 37.00 Yuan, up 96% from 18.88.

china life insurance LFC

Categories
401k and Personal Finance

Growth Fund or Value Fund?

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I prefer value fund in my 401K. This is from what I read (don’t remember exactly where) and from looking at the returns of funds in my 401K. Barrons’ statistics confirmed this. The worst growth fund is large cap growth. I don’t have any of those.

Go “values” 🙂

Categories
Business Life

How Much Have I Changed in 6 Years?

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I have started working for about 6 years. Although I worked for the same employer and stayed in the same city, I can tell some of my changes in all these years.

First is hobbies. I used to be crazy about the cars. I can tell the most cars’ make and model on the street, except some classic models in 50s and 60s. I spent a lot of time on the web reading all the reviews, checking out cars in the dealers’ parking lot. And once I even bought and returned a car. We all know returning things to stores is relatively easy in the States, but returning cars is not, and I highly recommend readers not do that. This hobby faded away since I bought my condo, and I started looking more carefully about my personal finance situation. I think I still like the new car smell, but if I have to take a loan with interest to buy it, I won’t.

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