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Article about Arsène Wenger from Arsenal. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d363b054-6548-11e2-8b03-00144feab49a.html

My 2 cent. Malaysia AirAsia is around the 52-week low. Because its dominant in Malaysia's market threaten by coming new Low Cost Airlines . But the valuation now is even lower than its Thailand affiliates (AAV:TB) . So I guess at this price ,it is somehow attractive. Thailand Coincidentally,I just discuss Indorama Venture(IVL:TB) last night. It is run by Thai-Indian family and number 1 producer of PET and run a largest Polyester plant. IVL has footprint in Asia, North America & Europe. The margin compression this year is due to Asia sector but NA & EU still doing good. The company has informative IR section and webcast here http://ivl.listedcompany.com/webcast.html

Some private investors prefer to do an all-in for the past several years in AAPL http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/12/06/apple-stock-investing/ The story would be a lot different if they put it in Enron, Worldcom or Chinese-scam companies

Cv Starr was duped into CCME a couple of years ago http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-21/greenberg-s-starr-sues-china-mediaexpress-alleging-fraud.html Sorry ,wrong link at first

Thailand's market is very expensive now. Companies in retail sector are trading 30-40x PER. And hospital chain are about 30-40x PER also. Even property develoers (cyclical) are trading at 15-20 x PER. Way too expensive ,IMHO.

Quest Management, Inc. -> Thai Focused Equity Fund http://www.questthai.com/ Also some good video interview with Doug Barnett http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=HOnjRPI8zkw&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DHOnjRPI8zkw Brkmystery ,thanks for the link. Actually, I used to visit his website a few year ago. He used to invest in some companies that I interested in. Do you have a link to the old thread on MSN board about Doug Barnett ?

From Agora Vancouver 2012 Conference .

Frank, thanks for great insight. Most of analysts using EV and VONB as a valuation method for lifeco .That's why I am curious because this methodology involve largely to company's guidance. So it can be misleading easily by lifeco itself or optimistic assumption. ubuy2worn, it seems to me that lifeco is a superior investment than p&c insurance. But this is too obvious. Generally , in emerging market lifeco has higher valuation (PE,PB) than p&c insurance co. AIA Group looks very solid . (DB research here - https://ger.db.com/csa/pubdoc/9sed1ztz00wf5s7 ) . But Bruce Berkowitz has sold all of AIA to support the outflow cash.

I have been trying to rationalize investment in Life Insurance Company. This is good paper for embedded value(ev) valuation and also value of new business (VONB) . http://www.mediafire.com/view/?n4qkoy4dkyvxjyn So value of any life insurance companies is Appraisal Value (AV) = Embedded Value (EV) + [VONB x Capital Factor] But my concern of using this valuation method is it seems too obvious because most of life insurance provides their own EV and VONB For example , AIA http://investors.aia.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=238804&p=irol-presentations The valuation swing from the capital factor. In case of AIA, current market capt is about $47 billion . $47 B = $29 B + [ $1B x CF ] ( EV & VONB taken from latest AIA interim presentation ) CF = 18x . And my friend told me that for AIA using 15-18x CF is reasonable. AIA just bought ING Malaysia for 17x Capital Factor .So current market valuation of AIA is fairly priced. What could go wrong with this valuation method ? Is it good enough to replace PE ,PB matrix when comes to life insurance company?

I was thinking the same think last month when I bought my mom new eyeglasses with progressive lens.It was expensive and what I bought is just a low-end lens. The high-end lens costs 10x more. Essilor and Hoya are a dominate brand in my country for an optical lens. Essilor also has a larger market capitalization than LUX .

I believe it is a lot better to copy investment ideas on message board than from other sources. It can be here or someplace else(some posters in iHub are very good also) . If we can find next rock-star stock picker on webboard/blog first (ie,Michael Burry on Silicon Investor Board), it is easier to make profit by following these people than just follow well-known gurus via public data.

http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/business/s/1584087_manchester-united-to-accelerate-plans-to-float-on-new-york-stock-exchange Man Utd will float in NYSE soon

Thanks. I had only ever read Marks and seen photos of him. In the flesh he actually looks much younger than I expected. Anyone knows how old he is? I saw 66 somewhere, but I'm not sure it's a good source. http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/officerProfile?symbol=OAK&officerId=1620874 The Most Important Things is a very good read . It might be repetitive from his newsletters but it doesn't mean the content is not good. My key takeaway from the book is that you do not need to time the market when using Value Investing Framework because the valuation itself will keep you out of the market when the price is too high and make you come back when the price is too low. And that might make you underperform the market in the short-term(few years) but in the long-run you should do better.

I remember watching Nathan's Hotdog eating 10 years ago in cable channel(rerun) . There were 3 Japanese contenders and 3 of them beaten ex-Champion handily .The 3rd place was a Japanese middle age woman. I though it was crazy that Japanese champion can eat 24-25 hotdogs that time. But later year when Kobayashi came to Nathan's contest. He broke all previous record by double .He ate 50+ hotdogs. It was truly amazing. Kobayashi set new standard for competitive eating. He beaten every competitive eater in Japan that time by very wide margin. Chestnut came later but his record is so great also. Kobayashi in 2001 TV show ( Akasaka finished 3rd place in Nathan's before the year that Kobayashi won the title) http://www.metatube.com/en/videos/4237/Food-Battle-Club-Kobayashi-vs-Akasaka/

Anyone consider NFLX a buy at this price ? Analyst at Oppenheimer said it is still a buy. He said "if you takes out international's losses , NFLX is trading at 11-12x earning" http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000094903&play=1 The short interest is still high on NFLX .The same % as when it was almost $300 last year http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/nflx/short-interest A lot of articles on SA bashing the company.But most them are repetitive. Only few positive articles on Netflix on SA but most of the comments were filled with haters. http://seekingalpha.com/symbol/nflx/in-focus The contribution margin% of the Q1 of streaming business was actually improved from Q4 last year (13% vs. 10%). http://ir.netflix.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=NFLX&fileid=562052&filekey=df0733e0-5de0-4bef-8c1f-87580229e303&filename=Q1_12_Financials_Statements.xls It is amazed that Netflix becomes one of most hated stock in SA and Yahoo MB. There is a website created solely to attack Nflx and Reed Hastings. The company is the same company back in 1 year ago but the sentiment is changed dramatically. Reed made a couple of bad decision last year and now some calls him and inexperienced CEO.

Vitaliy Katsenelson said this since 2010 or longer http://contrarianedge.com/2010/07/30/japan-land-of-the-rising-debt/ The strong Yen hurts exporting if this is reverse it might be better for export. Most of Sovereign debt of Japan owned by Japanese.Only 5% held by foreign. I am not sure how this will end. 25% of Japanese are over 65 year old. But Japanese Corporations has a very conservative balance sheet.They are good at doing business and they have footprints almost everywhere in Asia and the world. Japaneses are very good on what they do. They are hard-working,smart and creative. My most usage iPhone's app today is "Line" which is from Japanese Company.It becomes very popular in the recent months. It should be bought out at higher price than Instagram.

This Japanese speculator has done quite well. Turning 1.6 Million Yen to 18 Billion Yen within 8 years http://caps.fool.com/blogs/check-out-this-japanese/129372 Not sure how he is doing after 2008. But the wealth created is by far less than managing OPM or start a very successful business.

When I was visiting Shanghai, I hardly saw anyone wearing suit or a casual shirt. Everyone wear a t-shirt or a polo shirt with jean to work.

Another investor I would like to mention is Nivate Hemwachirawarakorn . He is unknown outside Thailand. But domestically ,he is very well-known individual investor. He wrote an investment column regularly in the newspaper and also share his investment view on television and free seminar. It was him who introduced value investment concept to Thailand as well. His resource is abundant in Thai but none in English. When I first started investing almost ten years ago , it was his book that inspired me on value investment concept as well. He is an individual investor so his track record is unaudited. But he shared his performance on his books which is publish annually. It is a compilation of his investment columns on newspaper for each year. Here is this track record from the last 15 years. He started earlier than that but he said he applied value investment framework since then. He is 58 years old now. http://i50.tinypic.com/34owx2v.jpg I think his track record is reliable because his positions is visible to public when he acquires more than 0.5% of total share outstanding in public companies. From his book, he started with 10 million baht ($300,000) which is 100% of his net worth that time. 15 years ago. And he grew it to about 1,500 million baht ($50 million). He uses zero leverage and just doing a simple buy&hold strategy. He owns 6-7 stocks as a core investment. He said he doesn't use conventional valuation matrix such as PE, PB or DCF. He looks for the high quality companies that can grow strongly within the next 5-10 years. His investments are mostly in retail sector. He just said last month that his investment success is largely due to very low valuation of Thai Stock Market when he started .And he does not think it is repeatable if he starts today .

Richard Chandler I found his information on another thread on this board. He and his brother have turned a family fortune from $10 Million to $5 Billion within 20 years of investing globally without outside money and almost zero leverage . Interview with II before he and his brother split the fund and went solo. http://www.iinews.com/site/pdfs/IIMagazine_March_2006_Secrets_of_Sovereign.pdf

There are Market Misconduct Tribunal and SFC for Hong Kong Stock Exchange but I don't kmow abot China Mainland version. The level of fraud is high not only in US-listed Chinese companies but also in Hong Kong Exchange as well. This website that provide a insight on fraud at HKEX http://webb-site.com/ From my experience, the fraud in HKEX is likely to associate with penny stocks and the stock that has done too many capital raise or has a poor disclosure in annual report. I think it is detectable if you have done some homework. Having big-4 auditor is not fraud-proof when we are talking about US-listed chinese companies. But I think the easiest way to detect the fruad is if the margin and cash flow are too good to be true,it is likely to be a fraud. I did buy into two US-listed Chinese companies last year ,I sold one and still holding on another ones. I was lucky to exit first position with moderate gain.If I still hold it until today, I would be on substaintial capital loss. But I still believe it is not an outright fruad. It is a car-dealerships in Beijing that went on IPO in December 2010. The reason that it did IPO in US market was becuase the coming new car quota regulation in Beijing. If it did an offering in HK or Shanghai ,no one would buy the shares. So it went on US-listing route where investors were less informed. The car quota was annonced 3 weeks after IPO's date if I remember correctly. My point is this space requires a lot of due-diligence.It might not worth your time. Do not buy base on financial statement only. For another company that I still have a position, I am on 50% gain but not sure if it is worth my time or not. I went to visit its AGM in Shanghai becuase share price was on a crash last year so I need to make sure that at least the company exists and they were conducting real AGM.This company had management installed from American biggest shareholder after the accounting was cooked by previous Chinese executives.So I have a reason to believe that it is not an outright fruad. But there is nothing 100% sure.

The problem is because they took a kickback to promote stocks without declaring it to subscribers ,isn't ? Using fake robot can't be a problem, I mean they can use a simple rule robot to identify the trade. ie; moving arevage crossover and thr likes. I have seen plenty of overclaimed newsletters or moneymaking ebooks since my first day on internet. These kind of products that are selling base on greed can exist for such a long time. To be honest, I bought a $400 money-making ebook that turned out to be almost useless. It is easiest to make money from people who want to make money.

I am with you on this one. The symmetry of Facebook make the censorship very difficult. When some of my friend click "like" or "comment" on hate-speech or hate-photo. It appears in my feed until I click to unsubscribe it. I have to do the unsubscribe things repeatedly on the same friend. I don't know why it is still appear in my newsfeed. And you know some hate-photo is the real nightmare when you see it. I still have it on my mind and wish that I didn't see it at first place.

For those who might interest to invest in this region. It does not have much detail but also good for starter. http://www.bcg.com/documents/file100219.pdf

I second that .You should travel ariund when you are still young and healthy.you might find a nice country to settle/study also. Last week, I met a 24-year old Danish man who sold his Facebook service tool for multi million$ and then moved to live in my city. He is starting a new venture from here becuase he likes to live here after travalling around Asia.