Reading Time: < 1 minute You Tube video: John Templeton interviewed at Wall Street Week at PBS. He was talking about the market in 1989: Germany; Japan stock market hit the top and started going down; Hongkong; US, etc. John passed away today, at age of 95.

Reading Time: < 1 minute This Friday will be another big day for the Apple fans, the 3G iPhone will be unveiled globally. The past weekend I stopped by the local Apple store, I have not been to there for 6 months so my impression maybe more genuine. Besides the iPod touch (iPhone was absent), I found some of the

Reading Time: < 1 minute GRE analogy problem China GDP number: politicians vs. Corporate earning: executives stock options Hint: the local officials pump up the GDP numbers so that they can get promoted; the corporate CEO/CFO pump up the earning number so that their stock options will be more valuable. Of course in an ideal world, when the law is

Reading Time: 2 minutes NBC will pay $3.5 billion for weather channel, weather.com and its related properties. News here. Hm, I think besides the travellers, people interested in the weather include commodity traders. The commodities range from crude oil, natural gas, heating oil, to crops. The reason goes like this, if natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina happens, it will

Reading Time: 2 minutes Amid the terrible market and paper loss in my brokerage account, I was doing some soul search: general market condition aside, what went wrong in my investments; new ideas? I came across this Cal-Maine foods from the latest Barrons, Egg Fight: The Yolk’s on the Shorts. We all know the egg price went up quite

Reading Time: 3 minutes (Update July 8) More about the value of SPRD. Last month Datang sold its 32.1% stake in TD chip maker T3G, for 122 m CNY. This values T3G at (122m) / 32.1% = 380 m CNY. That’s $54.3 m (assume $1 = 7 CNY), and I will use that number for the TD business of

Reading Time: < 1 minute Obviously I pulled trigger too earlier on this one, SpreadTrum Communications (Nasdaq: SPRD). Here is a Speadsheet which has the revenue numbers for recent quarters. I think one reason for the continued pressure is the slow cell phone market, as indicated by the shipments slowdown of MediaTek, a bigger rival of Spread. My current plan:

Reading Time: < 1 minute (Update July 7) Microsoft and Carl Icahn appeared to team up and will try to ouster the current board, esp. CEO Jerry Yang. I don’t think the current board and management is toasted because: 1) Two co-founders Jerry Yang, David Falio, along with their friends Softbank, Alibaba have more shares than Carl Icahn and his

Reading Time: < 1 minute Recent market turmoil reminds me 6 years ago: Enron, WorldCom and Tyco scandals are all in the news. Even blue chip names like GE and Xerox have some corporate governance problems. GE gave excessive benifits to retired chairman Jack Welch, the benifits including Manhantan condo, free corporate jets, season tickets to Yankee baseball games etc.

Reading Time: < 1 minute This is probablly the most expensive lunch: Chinese fund manager Zhao Dan Yang won the Buffett lunch bid for $2.1 million (International Herald Tribune). The proceeds benifit Glide foundation, a San Francisco based charity formerly supported by Warren Buffett former wife Susan Buffett (Susan passed away in 2005?). My 2 cents I was surprised by