Reading Time: < 1 minute The apartment we rent has experienced ownership change. The current owner can not resist the offer given by new owner (more than 15,000 Yuan per sqr meter), and she sold it. The apartment is about 20 years old, and near Zhongshan park. From my observations newer apartments (5 or 6 years old) in the area

Reading Time: < 1 minute Charlie Munger is the Vice chairman of Berkshire Hathway, and chairman of West Co. Financial. He has background in law, real estate, and investing. I found his recent Q&A on the West Co. Financial’s annual stock holder meeting to be interesting. Here is the Chinese excerpt translation by Deng Hang; and here is the original

Reading Time: < 1 minute Week in review 09/09 to 09/15 1) One dollar is 7.50 Yuan. This is the rate I got from China Construction Bank ATM today, using my BoA debit card. 2) The China People’s Bank raised interest rate (by 0.27%) again in the weekend. 3) Moon cake coupon: there are many “moon cake coupon” flippers these

Reading Time: 2 minutes Chinese stocks are becoming more and more expensive. From different statistics, average PE of the market is in 40s. This is not cheap compared to around PE 18 of US S&P 500. There are many reasons for that, and I’m not jumping into it. But I want to share an interesting phenomena here: these days

Reading Time: 2 minutes I remember seeing a book written by John Bogle (the founder of Vanguard) where he suggested “individual investors should buy mutual fund not stock”. I agree with some of his arguments, such as diversification. And I believe that’s also the fact in the US: where pension fund and university endowment fund invested in stocks, mostly

Reading Time: < 1 minute I added some Chinese financial blog under “blogroll”. Two notables are Dan Bin (CEO of a private equity in Shenzhen), and Zhu Ping (Guangfa Fund manager, a graduate from Shanghai Univ. of Finance and Economics). Both are disciples of Buffett. Dan Bin bought a share of Berkshire so that he could attend the Berkshire annual

Reading Time: 2 minutes Looking for a cheap but clean (decent) place stay in Shanghai? I revisited this issue and have the following observations. 1) Home Inns, Jinjiang Inn, Motel 168 and Hanting Hotels are not the cheapest. But they offer the best value in terms of location (near metro station or major business center). I have stayed in

Reading Time: 2 minutes The saga of applying the US visa. Warning: for entertainment purpose only. I am not providing any advice for visa application. Last Friday I went to the US consulate Shanghai for the worker visa, with my wife applying H-4. Ten years have passed since I first applied the student visa. A lot things have changed:

Reading Time: 2 minutes Last week one of the biggest news in consumer electronics arena is Apple decided to cut the iPhone price. Consider Apple just started shipping iPhone in late June, this move is a blow to its most loyal customers (early adopters). Apple quickly responded to the angry customers by offering $100 credit (source: Apple.com). From my

Reading Time: < 1 minute Here are the results from Yahoo Finance, some highlights: Second Quarter 2007 Highlights: — Total net revenues increased 99.3% over the second quarter of 2006 to US$30.2 million. (1H revenue $64 m, slight decline over Q1 2007?) — Net income increased 482.1% over the second quarter of 2006 to US$7.1 million. — Diluted earnings per