hillfronter83

I think fantasy football is like porker. A lot of luck (injury, opponents...), but skill definitely matters. From what I saw from my league, people routinely over value super star players. I play in a standard league and most of the "draft guide" suggested RB over QB in the first round, which makes no sense to me. I'm 3-3 and hopefully will be 4-3 tonight. But I got the highest score in the league and a guy had the second lowest score is 6-1 :(

Exciting, Congrats!

For those of working in financial industry, does any of you get charged for the professional market data fee from your personal brokerage account? I just been told that I need to pay 150/month for market data since I work for an insurance company.

Certainly there are risks involving such companies. Here is a blog that might be interesting: http://www.chinalawblog.com/2011/07/thinking_clearly_about_chinese_companies_listed_on_us_stock_exchanges.html Well I learned the hard way that China really doesn't work the way I think it works. Apparently you can run away with a real business and all of the cash (!). I forgot to mention that many stocks that are listed on both PRC and non-PRC exchanges have price disparities. The shares listed in China get a premium valuation. So you have to wonder why Chinese founders would want to list their company outside of China. Chinese stocks (especially reverse mergers) are the one area of the stock market where fraud is extremely high and the shenanigans committed are rather egregious (e.g. running off with everything). Because there are close to zero consequences for committing fraud and because Chinese authorities are kind of on the fraudsters' side, you have to deal with an extreme level of adverse selection. And then when you think you understand Chinese fraud... maybe you find out the hard way that you don't understand it. For example, it's extremely unintuitive that Chinese firms were able to easily fake their cash balances to big four auditors. Cash is one of the easiest things to audit, yet local branches of banks were corrupted into providing fake bank confirmations. There are things about China that are unintuitive. I'm not sure if honest Chinese business owners would want to list their company on foreign exchanges for legitimate reasons. Not to argue the fact that there were a lot fraud in these reverse mergers. But you have to remember that most of these companies are microcap and riskier than a normal company. Here is an interesting research regarding these CRM: I can think of a few reasons why a legit Chinese company wants to list oversea: 1. The premium on Chinese exchange didn't exist until the bull run in 2007-2008. Before that, Chinese companies' share traded at a discount on Shanghai exchange compare to Hong Kong exchange. 2. There were regulation restrictions that kept many of the companies we talked about here from listing in China. One of them was showing positive profit for 3 consecutive years, which most of the internet companies were not able to in their early years. 3. Many of such companies were backed by venture investors here in US, who would probably prefer US listing. SINA was backed by Dell and SOHU was backed by Intel. Many legit companies were taken private by majority owners after muddy water short wave that drove their stock prices down. For example, SNDA was taken private at 20% premium by its founder in 2011. This suggests that there are probably value to be found.

Certainly there are risks involving such companies. Here is a blog that might be interesting: http://www.chinalawblog.com/2011/07/thinking_clearly_about_chinese_companies_listed_on_us_stock_exchanges.html

Interesting idea. I imagine it shouldn't be too difficult to create some serious voting power with the purchase power of this forum, especially with those microcap or nanocap. However, how do you define a "group". Will people communicate with each other through an internet forum loosely be viewed legally as a group? Any lawyers here?

I want to buy some shares for my 401K's brokerage window since it only allows mutual funds. However, this fund is not available with T. Rowe Price. Is it something that Francis is working on? Can I contact the fund to find out? I spoke with Francis a few weeks back on this issue and he told me that it would probably take between 3-6 months. My hope is that it is closer to three!

I was doing some research about some of the mutual funds mentioned above since my 401K brokerage account only allows mutual funds. Here is the pdf I came up, for those of you might be interested. The performance data are from Morningstar as of 3/7/2014. Total assets and holdings data are from Bloomberg and might be a little older. Mutual_funds.pdf

can you give me detail in the process you look for them ? And how you value them? Hi King, I have been thinking about giving an example. Here it is. I own a company in AU called Jumbo Interactive. I bought it @ 30 cents. The annual report laid out everything very clearly. It is trading at 2.5x P/E before cash. JIN's business is to sell lotteries on the Internet, which is highly scalable. In the last five years, the business has grown just like other online businesses. In normal condition, this kind of business should garner 20x P/E. This is an outstanding business trading at ridiculous price. You see, magic formula wants good business trading at cheap prices. That is simply not enough for me. But the situation is not normal here. JIN's online business hangs on a contract with Tatts, which is expiring at the end of 2014, although the contract will be renegotiated a year earlier. Tatts is a monopoly in the lottery industry which owns the only nation-wide license given by the government. Recently, Tatts launched its own website to compete with JIN. Therefore, the probability that JIN will renew the contract seems low. I believe each of us has different opinion about risk/reward and you can make your own guess. Here is mine. Let's say JIN simply operates until the end of 2014 and then liquidate, the cash will cover more than the current market cap. This is third grade math so I would not give the details here. This is is the bottom line. I personally believe, after some thinking, that there is around 30% chance that the contract will be renewed as it is now. If it is renewed, I will hit a home run; if it is not, I would not lose much. There are also other complications, but I will keep things simple here. This is basically how I make my investment decisions. Hope this helps. Bao, great analysis! A lot of times for micro cap there are issues with corporate governance or even fraud. How do you stay away from such companies? The same way you stay away from fraud and bad corporate governance when you invest in a large cap. It isn't a micro-cap unique problem. Agree that it's not micro-cap specific problem. However, in large cap, usually there are institutional investors or activist investors that helps keeping management or controling interest honest.

can you give me detail in the process you look for them ? And how you value them? Hi King, I have been thinking about giving an example. Here it is. I own a company in AU called Jumbo Interactive. I bought it @ 30 cents. The annual report laid out everything very clearly. It is trading at 2.5x P/E before cash. JIN's business is to sell lotteries on the Internet, which is highly scalable. In the last five years, the business has grown just like other online businesses. In normal condition, this kind of business should garner 20x P/E. This is an outstanding business trading at ridiculous price. You see, magic formula wants good business trading at cheap prices. That is simply not enough for me. But the situation is not normal here. JIN's online business hangs on a contract with Tatts, which is expiring at the end of 2014, although the contract will be renegotiated a year earlier. Tatts is a monopoly in the lottery industry which owns the only nation-wide license given by the government. Recently, Tatts launched its own website to compete with JIN. Therefore, the probability that JIN will renew the contract seems low. I believe each of us has different opinion about risk/reward and you can make your own guess. Here is mine. Let's say JIN simply operates until the end of 2014 and then liquidate, the cash will cover more than the current market cap. This is third grade math so I would not give the details here. This is is the bottom line. I personally believe, after some thinking, that there is around 30% chance that the contract will be renewed as it is now. If it is renewed, I will hit a home run; if it is not, I would not lose much. There are also other complications, but I will keep things simple here. This is basically how I make my investment decisions. Hope this helps. Bao, great analysis! A lot of times for micro cap there are issues with corporate governance or even fraud. How do you stay away from such companies?