Reading Time: 2 minutes and he had done it for 47 years (maybe not every year, but compound annual return), that’s pretty good. The following is quoted from Buffett 2006 shareholder letter, you can get the full letter at Berkshire web site: …… Let me end this section by telling you about one of the good guys of Wall

Reading Time: 2 minutes My performance The Scottrade account did beat the S&P 500 and Nasdaq (detail to be calculated…). This is pretty easy because the market did not go up much in the past year (3.5% for S&P and 9.8% for Nasdaq). More importantly, learned the risk, portfolio management (weighting), IRA/401K/mutual funds, all from hands on experience and

Reading Time: 2 minutes The miserable performance of CROX erased much of my 2007 gains. But thanks to the rebound of Mindray (MR), I am still be able to be above water 🙂 Some random thoughts of Q4 and year 2007 stock performance: 1) Crocs (CROX): I agree with my friend StrengthTrader, Crocs is a fashion product. It’s almost

Reading Time: < 1 minute Also, I will be visiting families and probablly not updating this blog for a week or so.

Reading Time: 2 minutes Stocks in review week of Dec 16 to Dec 22 1) I bought some MXB shares on Dec 19. After I read its prospectus more carefully, I found two things I don’t like: it will use the proceeds of the IPO ($225 m) and borrow some $425 m to pay the dividend to its parent,

Reading Time: 2 minutes For the mutual fund, besides being the leader in its category each year, one key performance measure is to beat the bench market index. For instance, if a fund is invested in emerging markets, one key bench mark is MSCI emerging market index (EFM, an ETF tracks this index). For reference, the index is up

Reading Time: 2 minutes 1) Why it quit the outsourcing biz? We know outsourcing is a typically low margin business. Interested readers can look at the VanceInfo (formerly WorkSoft), the first Chinese IT outsourcing company listed in Nasdaq. It did IPO recently. Longtop should not get into the oursourcing business to begin with. I suspect the VCs suggested the

Reading Time: < 1 minute It priced at $26, according to AP news. I did NOT bid on NetSuite IPO eventually. Two things: it raised price range from initial 13-16 to 16-19; and I noticed NetSuite is not profitable so far. On the other hand, when its bigger rival, the on-demand software provider SalesForce (CRM) did IPO in 2004, it

Reading Time: < 1 minute I bought some MSCI (company, stock:MXB) today. A month ago I heard about it from my friend StrengthTrader’s blog. But at that time I was a bit obsessed with my LFT and CROX, and did not have stomach for another IPO. In last few weeks when I was doing research for my new 401K plan

Reading Time: < 1 minute I picked the following funds (and their weight) for my Vanguard IRA yesterday. Vanguard International Value 50% (developed market large cap value) Vanguard Winsor II 25% (US large cap value) Vanguard Selected Value 25% (US mid cap value) The first two funds are in my current 401k plan, I found the Vanguard Selected Value through