stlplace

I heard about it from web these days, and found NY Daily news has pictures of this iPhone girl. She is a factory worker for Foxconn, the contract manufacturer for Apple iPod and iPhone. I remember a few years ago there were reports on bad working conditions for workers assembling iPod. Hope this time she won’t get fired for this honest and minor mistake. Note she was smiling at the camera, as I understand her month salary is about the retailing price of an iPod. Sometimes happiness is not directly related to how much money we make.

(Picture source: NY daily news, more pictures here)

BTW, it appear the GFW of China is back, as I could not find it using Baidu. So much for the change Olympics brings…

Yesterday I rided the DC-9 (Northwest Air) from MSP to STL. My seat is near the wing, and it was very noisy. So I did some search, and here is the wiki entry of DC-9. As I guessed, DC-9 is an old aircraft (30+ years old). Quote Wiki:

“The McDonnell Douglas DC-9 (initially known as the Douglas DC-9) is a twin-engine, single-aisle jet airliner. It was first manufactured in 1965 with its first flight later that year. The DC-9 was designed for frequent, short flights. The final DC-9 was delivered in October 1982.
……
Northwest Airlines operates a fleet of DC-9 aircraft, most of which are over 30 years old. With severe increases in fuel prices in the summer of 2008, Northwest Airlines finally began retiring its DC-9s, switching to Airbus A319s that are 27% more fuel efficient…”

The flight from Minneapolis/St. Paul to St. Louis was only half full. I guess NWA could use a smaller plane to save some fuel, and noise.

When the Master speaks, we all listen. Here is what he said on CNBC “squawk on the street” Aug 22. Note I don’t pay attention to CNBC and “Squawk on the Street”, unless it’s someone like Buffett or Gross (Pimco) speaking. Here are the transcripts at CNBC. I read it from trader1688 first. Some interesting quotes:

What Chinese company got Buffett interested?
6:22 AM: Buffett reveals that Berkshire made a half-billion dollar bid on a Chinese stock that wasn’t accepted. He wouldn’t say what stock or what industry. He did say that under the right circumstances he could have a lot of money in China, but noted that there are government restrictions on foreign ownership that must be overcome.

Buffett left some money on the table
7:05 AM: Buffett confirms that he sold 60 percent of his Anheuser-Busch [BUD 67.79 0.03 (+0.04%) ] shares at prices around $61-$62 before the company agreed to a friendly merger with InBev at a sweetened price of $70. Buffett says at the time he wasn’t sure the deal would go through given Anheuser’s strong resistance to InBev’s original bid. “In retrospect, I was wrong,” but he says that often happens.

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Boy, he makes the 100 meters, 200 meters so easy.

(Bolt hold Jamaica flag after winning 100m; Source: China.org.cn)

What else can I say? I wish I could be talented in stocks as he does in running

Also maybe we should visit the beautiful caribbean country of Jamaica, and we may get some inspiration there.

Original link here. Some discussions at trader1688. I don’t know even if Warren can come back from this one. Just like in soccer, when you are 0:10 and have 10 minutes left, basically even Maradona (wiki: Diego Maradona) can not help. That’s why we don’t want to “all in” (in this case, use margin) when we speculate. As Buffett and Munger did in the past, always keep some cash at hand.

发信人: failed (Failed), 信区: Stock
标 题: 紧急求救：FNM损失已经12万了，我该怎么办？谢谢您了！！！！！
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Tue Aug 19 12:35:30 2008), 转信

I understand investment is a personal choice and I deserve whatever I have.

However, during this critical moment,
your any comments are sincerely appreciated.

Thank you so much!!!

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Obviously when Chinese track star Liu Xiang quit the race due to heel injury, we are all disappointed. Not only the fact he could not get a “face saving” gold medal, and he is China’s only hope on track and field (at least from men side); but also the fact we did not know how serious his injury was. At the same thing, I can fully appreciate the pressure on him, imagine 1.3 billion put hope on me. I would not think about that probability. My wife has a lot sympathy for Liu Xiang, but I rebutted “at least he is far richer than most of Chinese”

Stock market
China TechFaith also disappoints:
From Reuters, UPDATE 2-China TechFaith gives weak Q3 outlook; to cut jobs. So CNTF is following Spreadtrum SPRD’s step. Don’t try to bottom fish on them yet! I expect the handset business in China continues to be challenging, for the near future.

The broader market:
The US market goes sideways as financials and consumer spending continue the downward pressure. In China, the mood is much pessimistic, as the Shanghai composite drop around 2300, the lowest since early 2006. So are we heading to a real estate crash in China? Let’s me borrow one word from Mr. Greenspan, it’s possible, but unlikely.

(Spreadtrum A/R and inventory from 4Q 06 to 2Q 08, click to enlarge)

As shown in the picture above, their A/R (account receivable) jumped from $1.4 m on Mar 31 to 17.4 m June 30; inventory did not reduced much. This is also evident from its reduced cash postion. Read more details from its earning release if you are interested.

Source: my google spreadsheet, data from SPRD investor relation and SEC filings.

For US audience of Beijing Olympics, NBC (including CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Telemundo and Oxygen) is the only place for extensive coverage, because the exclusive broadcast deal between NBC and IOC. While NBC did unprecedent largely positive coverage of this event, Beijing and China, I can still felt the “colored glass” of some of the comments from the anchors from time to time.

The good: the scale
NBC nearly sent all the best crews to Beijing, it is doing live broadcasting for more than 2,000 hours, covering topic from sports to the Chinese traditional snack food in Beijing. And it is airing the regular programs such as “Today” (Matt and Meredith), 5:30 PM evening news (Brian), Meet the Press (Tom) from Beijing, in addition to extensive Olympics coverage. So in other words, NBC News Operation division is essentially moved from New York to Beijing these days.

Because NBC has experience in technology, their camera crews did the opening ceremony better than CCTV (the delayed video playback was a business decision). It also has so many channels so popular sports such as gymnastics, swimming, women volleyball etc are well covered.

The bad

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I felt lucky I did sell some Spreadtrum (Nasdaq:SPRD) shares a short while ago when it exceeded $6 (a quick pop). But I don’t know why I bought some back couple days ago at $4.48. I did not bet on earning these days, but this one had dropped quite a bit from the pop, and the expectation is low. So I thought I am relatively safe. Remember margin of safety.

Well, it turns out semi-conductor stock has no MoF. Remember a while ago the star player nVidia (NVDA) fall out from the graphics chip quality problem? My small speculation player SPRD also fell off cliff. Here is the results.

To be honest, I think 2Q results was OK, but the 3Q forecast is disaster. Quote press release: Spreadtrum currently expects revenue in the third quarter to be approximately US$20 million, which represents a sequential decrease of approximately 50% from the US$40.2 million in the second quarter of 2008.

I am not going to do any fundamental or valuation analysis. It seems to me the management (that means Dr. Wu Ping and his associates) blew up badly on this one. The business itself probablly still has some value, but I lost a lot (blind) trust on management team. So I am going to sell all my shares tomorrow morning. Take a loss

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Players: foreign investment bankers, Chinese goverment

The motivation of Foreign investment bankers: pump and dump, make money from the warrants (options) in Hongkong market.

Chinese goverment
Goverment usually does not know economy or business, just look at Bush admin you will know. In China goverment plays two roles in telecom revamp: as regulator and as majority owner. This makes the matter more complicated, and it seems to me goverment revamp effort is half-baked, also widely expected. It did not give big surprise to the market and the consumers.

Effectiveness of Chinese goverment policy in the past: telecom revamp in the past; regulatory effort on real estate (so far so failed). Of course we can not read the history book and do the investing. Otherwise all the greater investors will be history major.

Note: I wrote the above a while ago right after China offically started telecom re-org (May 23). I did write about the telecom re-org shortly after May 23, here are some.

New developments

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