abyli

I bet it is something starts with letter B

Company based in Canada?

Even you are going to China to see their operations, even you can talk to their management team, stay far, far away from these. :-)

This is ridiculous. I shorted 100 shares of VXX last week. Scottrade called me to cover before Monday 8/15/2011;otherwise, they might buy the shares for me. VXX is one of the most liquid ETFs in the market, scottrade can not even borrow 100 shares from somewhere? How can anyone short with the risk that your broker might force you to buy back any time?

Run, run away fast. There is no way you guys can figure it out whether TRE is a fraud or not! (Most likely it is fraud!) Chinese growth story is amazing, but trying to find a real small-cap company is mission impossible. To give you guys an idea how difficult it is. I have a friend who is doing APO business for those small-cap chinese companies. One company he has being doing business since 2005 was CMFO. He talks to CEO, CFO regularly, he met management team many, many times, he was there in the factory many many times. But now, he is not sure if the company is fraud or not. Think about that. How can we figure it out thousands of miles away? Another example. A few months ago, a company from my hometown selling wine was scheduled to be listed on Shanghai A shares board. The city spent lots of ads promoting the company on TV, big outside board, everywhere you can find. Just a week before the listing, the listing was stopped. SEC in China find that the company is a fraud! Think about that. The city is helping the company to manipulate numbers to just get listed. In chinese mind, stock market is a casino. If you lose money, it is your own fault, move on. I was attracted to the low valuations of those chinese small-cap stocks last year. I tried to uncover one real company and failed. Yes, so far, I have not found one small-cap chinese company listed in US that is real. None! If you still want to try, then look at Alibaba Group. Yahoo owns 40% of Alibaba Group, but Ma Yun just sold Alipay for pennies to himself!

In battery, byd is the king with 1000 engineers research on battery alone. 2nd place is Sanyo with about 300 engineers. Other companies just cannot afford so many engineers. Of course labor cost is rising very fast in china too! About technology, Cisco used to complain that Huawei copied them. Nowadays Cisco is using US government to block Huawei from entering US market because they know, Huawei technology is at least one generation ahead of them today! Tell me, which technology company does not copy or steal ideas from others? Microsoft? Apple? Please! When Japanese or Koreans moved up from the food chain, didnot they copy or steal, then beat US car companies in quality?

$8.7Billion.

I think this company is a fraud: (1) If the company can generate so much cash as a cash cow, why it need to go public? Why did it sell shares to Starr so cheap? Remember, chinese CEOs are not stupid, they are most shrewd in the world! If you can not figure out, most likely you are cheated. (2) In its presentation, it says the bus riders are mid-to-high income group. Any one live in China know this is NOT true. China has one of the best public transportation system in the world. You can take flights, trains, taxi, buses, metros to any corner of China. For long distance, mid-high income will take flight; for shorter distance, take trains or taxi; or you can drive yourself. If you are mid-to-high income group, you should already own a car today! (3) I asked two friends in FuZhou (where CCME is located). They have NEVER heard of this company. How many chinese have not heard of FenZhong Shanghai? (4) I think 80% frauds are underestimates. Other than those famous names like Sina, Baidu, Sohu, Alibaba, Tecent, Shengda, FMCN, etc., I have not found one company that is valid. Just last year, how many fraud stocks? Fuqi, Oriental Paper, CEU, RINO, Lihua, Bwow, TSTC, DYP, UTA, CHBT, CVVT, CMFO. I found one company that is valid: TXIC.PK. You know what, the CEO China bought a subsidiary from a relative previous year and he did not think he need get board votes! Yes, his company is public but he runs as a private company. So they could not file 10K for 2009 and CEO and CFO in US got fired! (5) I have a friend who is doing APO for those small-cap companies. One company he worked with for 5 years was CMFO, so he must have known the CEO and company very well. When CMFO's high-power acquistion was questioned by some analysts last year, even he was not sure whether CMFO is fraud or not. Think about that, how could we figure it out 10 thousand miles away? (6) I only have conclustion: stay away from chinese small-cap stocks.

I have the stock too. It is weird that everyone focus on macro today and forget about individual stocks. From my reading, CCME is a valid company, but I am not sure about the numbers. Their business model is great. Someone on TXIC board of VIC raised question about CCME. One question was: why CCME issued dividend $100M to the founder before public? Honestly, even though I am Chinese, I do not understand the behaviors of management teams in lots of those companies. In China, there is no culture of treating shareholders as partners. People think stock markets as casinos. The managers will put money into their own pockets whenever they can. It happens that CEO blocks the largest shareholder from attending annual meeting! In public TV shows, CEOs are boasting how hard they did the roadshows in USA and how much capital they received from wall street. Now they need to figure out ways to spend those money as fast as they can. I guess in their mind, those investors are idiots. They do not have the sense that they gave away part of the company for the money. I guess part of the reason is people do not feel secure in China. Today you might be the richest man in China, tomorrow you could be in prison for no reason. So people will grab money as long as they can and run away as fast as they can.

I own some CCME. I also own some shares and warrants of CCLWF and CHOP. There are lots of problems with those small cap chinese stocks, either loose internal control, accounting problem, cheating, etc. Someone guestimated that 1/3 of those small cap chinese stocks are fraud, I think it might be higher than that. ONP's story can not be true, must be faked numbers. CMFO's acquisition smells problem too. FUQI had some accounting problem, can not release 2009 earnings yet. TXIC missed the deadline to file 20-F. The extreme case I find so far was SBAY. They own 2/3 of the subaye.com. To get 100% of the website, somehow the original 1/3 owner of subaye.com in the end now owns 60% of SBAY and the management claims this is good deal! Yeah, this might be good deal for them, definitely not for shareholders. There is no concept of shareholder oriented culture in China today. People think stock market as casino. In a sense, the A Shares listed in Shanghai and ShenZhen are real casinos. The cost for management to fake numbers is very low and the gain for them could be very high. In public TV, they boasted how they worked hard to get IPOed in wall street and received $$$ from wall street. Then they will spend those money fast, some into their own pocket.

In China, ebay does not have a chance to win. Taobao.com is dominant in China and with Alipay in China, I do not see paypal has a chance to win either. Both Taobao.com and Alipay are owned by Alibaba Group. eBay retreated from China market a few years ago. Yahoo made a smart move, Yahoo gave Yahoo China to Alibaba Group + $1Billion, in return Yahoo now owns 40% of Alibaba Group. Baron do you think the Amazon creep into EBay's market thesis is overblown? Well, when I first started thinking about eBay I did thing they had a very solid moat for the web. But the more I tough about it and the more it seemed like eBay has diverged from a pure auctioneer to an online merchants host. The lines are getting blurry now, I took some time to look at their new Ebay IPhone apps and it looked like the focus was taken off their auction and more toward the selling part of the business. Not a smart move in my opinion, they are getting toward the broad market instead of staying in their very lucrative niche. There is a real danger that they will lose focus and open door for competition. I don't see Amazon going into the auction business but they don't need to, eBay is diluting it's own moat by itself. On the Paypal side, the business seems nice. Especially with EBay as a showroom. China/India to more likely to use EBay before Amazon, those are cultures that are more used to person to person trading then institutionalized trading like Amazon. So if China start using eBay first, then Paypal gets visibility and defacto becomes a leader. the question is... is eBay going to penetrate the chinese market? Payments is a business where the leader gets more business because he is the leader. On the capital allocation side I was not impressed take a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_eBay . The fact that they paid 1.2B for BillMeLater, 2.6B for Skype and god knows for that RedLaser app. Come on a bar-code reader that will tell you the price of the item as well as all the other prices in your area... there is such a easy workaround for the merchant, they will get their own SKUs instead of using the generic ones. To resume my thesis, I love the eBay/Paypal combination they are complementary and should be making a lot of money. I hate what they did with their money and their lack on focus on their core strengths. Hopefully the new CEO will, but so far it left me no clue to believe so. Still, I'd rather own eBay then Visa, you get Paypal for free and you have a descent valuation. BeerBaron

APPLE?

How do we know that RMB is 40% undervalued?

I do not understand your point. If you compare China and US economically, China is more pure capitalism and US is socialism. And in this world, there is only one country who has the power to manipulate currency and does it all the time: US. It is US who wants to have a economy war, not China! US is moving in the wrong direction. Serious, I do not see any hope here in US. "America’s power to shut down the Chinese economy by closing its ports to Chinese imports is far greater." who is arrogant here?

2008 +36% 2009 YTD +42% Thank Fairfax team with their fantastic performance. This board is the best investing board.

I sold some FFH and put the proceeds into ORH. I still own the same company with a little higher percentage.