oddballstocks

I'm not sure how you track performance mevsemt but you should be able to put the starting balance in excel with the date 1/1/11 and then the date of each contribution and amount and final balance run the IRR on it to get your performance. Here's what your spreadsheet would look like 1/1/11 10000 2/1/11 1000 3/1/11 1000 7/1/11 -14234 then just run XIRR over that set

Reading from my iPhone without any problems. Safari scales the text automatically making it much easier to read. Since Android is open source couldn't someone just go in and change the code to fix whatever the readability issue is?

I'm reading the book "Hidden Champions of the 21st Century" referenced above and the whole book basically answers the question you're asking. I would highly recommend it, very easy read as well. As a total aside one thing that I think makes the book great is the author's aim has nothing to do with investors it's about business and good business practices. I've found some of the best "investment" books to have nothing to do with investment at all but are more how to run a good business. An excellent book in that regard is "Billion Dollar Lessons", it identifies patterns that precede business failure. Just something good to keep in the back of the mind when examining a company.

That article doesn't really do much to convince me. They go after the messenger instead of the message and they use the SAIC claims by Benjamin Wey to support their claim. As posted either in this thread or the other one Benjamin Wey has a bunch of baggage as well that kills his message in a similar manner. I don't know who's right or who's wrong in this one, I do know there's a lot of crappy companies in China with dubious financial statements which means my radar is up. One thing that doesn't make sense to me is why would MW target this company if there are a lot of companies with lower quality. If the point is just to make a buck it seems better to short more obvious frauds more often instead of investing in the big fish variety. Just thinking aloud, if I was going to engineer some sort of short attack I think I'd go straight to crappy companies to start with and plunge the dagger in a bit further instead of taking on something where there could be doubts about my allegations.

The post of the thread... Why not forget about MW and just discuss the numbers, from what oec2000 has here this company is blowing it out of the water. Similar thing happened with CCME, looking at their statements one could conclude they had the worlds most profitable business model, but in fact it turned out to be a fake. The question I keep asking is if all of those RTO Chinese companies are as amazing as their statements make them out to be why are they trying to raise capital? Cash rich companies with high growth rates, high cash returns out looking for equity? Why not bank financing, much cheaper, instead they go for the highest cost option, just seems fishy to me.

Safety? Are they worried about a mad horde of investor storming the office in khakis and oxfords and beating them with their financial calculators?

This thread is interesting, I followed the CCME and RINO disasters along with a few others and they all fit the same sort of pattern. It's kinda like the really pretty girl who never has a guy, something just doesn't seem right about it. It seems great except for that one nagging thing that can't be explained... Stock manipulation seems to be a red herring when things go bad. I know there is an emotional aspect of disbelief that the accusations are possible but I would think stock manipulation would be the least likely explanation. I have to agree with given2invest, anyone long who is able to rationally examine the situation and is convinced the allegations are wrong should be buying hand over fist. If we believe the market is a weighing machine it should only be a matter of time before the truth comes out good or bad. I have no position but I am extremely cautious of Chinese companies listed in North America. There have been some articles out recently about how auditors have been duped, apparently many of the local banks work with the companies to falsify records. Apparently a few times the auditor has gone to the main bank branch instead of the local branch and that's where things start to fall apart.

I didn't realize it would be such a problem, I removed that line from my post all that remains are links to free posts. I enjoy this forum and would rather not be banned. So what is the rule, if I didn't create the work but it has a price attached am I allowed to post about it? Am I allowed to post a link to my blog if the post is free? I'd actually like to steer this thread back to the main topic finding Japanese net-net investments. I'm interested in it as evidenced by some of the work I've done. This is a very cheap area of the world market but it seems that value investors are just staying away. My sense is that Japanese net-nets are a bit of a novelty, it's cool to see a writeup but not many people are actually investing over there. I ended up going to Japan because of the lack of good dirt cheap stocks in the US, I started looking worldwide and ended up in Japan. There aren't many places you can buy profitable companies for cash or less. Japan seems similar to the US in the 1930s, everyone has given up on the market and believes it will never recover. My money isn't beholden to any clients so I've moved a portion of my portfolio over there and will sit on it for a few years. Even if this is dead money and the stocks go no where I'm getting between a 2 and 3% dividend which beats the rate on idle cash in the states.

Twacowfca, Why not? I have given away a lot of information, the companies in the report I actually listed earlier on this thread on the link of net-nets so there is nothing secret in there. I did a lot of work researching the companies picking out the best and putting together a lot of information that could be useful to an investor. I'm not sure what the problem charging for that is if the report is valuable and saves an investor time. If someone wants to save the money they're welcome to research Japanese net-net's on their own. What I found when I started was that no one else was really doing this and I wish something like this had been available.

Not sure if anyone is still interested in this but I wanted to follow up, this thread seems to be the appropriate place to post some of this stuff. I've continued to post writeups on my blog about some good Japanese net-net stocks: http://oddballstocks.blogspot.com/2011/05/international-net-net-8-ryoden-trading.html http://oddballstocks.blogspot.com/2011/05/evaluating-margin-of-safety-on-dainichi.html http://oddballstocks.blogspot.com/2011/05/another-profitable-japanese-net-net.html http://oddballstocks.blogspot.com/2011/05/buying-company-for-less-than-net-cash.html http://oddballstocks.blogspot.com/2011/05/dainichi-redux.html I have purchased three in my personal account so far. If anyone is out there researching or buying some of these companies I'd love to hear from you.

Interesting perspective, but I wonder if this is true why would any investor invest in FAIRX instead of just investing in JOE? If JOE is where the action is pay a commission once and ride on Bruce's decision making instead of paying 1% for a very similar result?

Check out this thread, a number of people crunched the numbers on the macro picture there: http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23036

Made a killing on Telmex, absolute killing on America Movil, did so so on Telmex Internacional. That said Telmex is the Mexican phones plus internet, land lines etc. America Movil is a Latin America wireless company, they're in pretty much every country down there including Brazil, they operate in the US under the Tracfone brand. Telmex Internacional was the international landlines and internet business. Last year America Movil merged all three back together again, they were all Telmex but regulators forced spinoffs in 2001 and 2008. I'm not sure if AMX is a buy or not, I'm holding mine, but my position is outsized so I'm not buying anymore, actually dumped a bit to raise some cash recently. Let me know if you want more info, I knew all sorts of stats for them back in 2005-06, it's down to maintenance knowledge now.

I signed up for a trial of RobotDough, some sort of screener that specialized in value...supposedly. Anyways the site is junk, probably 90% of the stocks on the value screens are China RTOs, so for your purposes it would work well, for someone looking for value ideas not so much.

I own Mastercard, looked at Visa but passed when during the IPO they broke off Visa Europe. Most of Mastercard's growth is coming from Europe, Asia, and South America, Europe is a big volume driver, I wanted a piece of that. MA is the ultimate money machine, it's part of a duopoly (sure AMEX and Discover exist, but puny marketshare), they have no credit risk they simply process payments. The company is very asset light, some computers are required to expand their network, that's about it, so huge operating leverage. As for current cheapness, ShaKherzi is probably right, V is a bit cheaper now. I ended up getting MA at a few bucks over the IPO price and have held on for the wild ride, I've looked at V from time to time, but regulation in the US and the lack of Europe has held me back. I might take a look again.

I just wanted to say that you can trade all Japanese exchanges (Osaka, Jasdaq, Tokyo) through Fidelity online for 3000yen per trade. So the price has dropped considerably, the order size is limited to the block size the exchange sets, but otherwise it isn't a problem. I have a few companies I've been looking at, I'll probably ease into a few as a basket approach. I'm fascinated by all the doom sayers on Japan. I know it's a terrible situation there economically, but it seems if everyone has written it off maybe we're nearing a bottom? Are all these fund managers giving up there the "Death of Equities" type of signal? I keep thinking how low can it go, you have a slew of companies selling for less than cash that are profitable and growing and throwing off dividends. At worst the stocks are completely dead money and don't go anywhere for a few years, I get 4-5% in dividends. That's essentially the same or greater than a bond fund, except I'd argue lower risk because the companies are operating, profitable, and selling way below liquidation value giving me a big margin of safety. Thoughts?

dual_bid - Do you have a link, I did some googling and couldn't find many notes from the recent VIC, especially about 6357 I finally watched the Pabrai video, and he suggests just finding a basket of statistically cheap Japanese stocks and buying the whole lot and sitting tight. I know the performance of this was profiled by SocGen a few years back, and they showed that even Japanese net-nets as a basket turned out well for an investor. The best performance was profitable stocks for less than cash, I'm finding 21 of those right now. I've really been mulling this over as a portion of my portfolio, just buying a nice chunk. I've also noticed for most of these stocks, even the smallest ones Fidelity has a foreign ordinary available, so purchase is possible in retirement accounts. For some I plan on purchasing directly on the exchange, but purchasing the foreign ordinary can get you around the block size requirements the TSE requires. So I have the choice of paying $60 to buy the foreign ordinary, or $30 directly on the exchange, except I'm locking into a minimum order size, it's a pick your poison. Has anyone been buying any Japanese net-nets? Anyone purchase that book? I looked at the sample page they provided and I can get the same and better data on FT.com it seems. I don't know if it's worth buying that book, thoughts?

Mastercard

I did a post about Ryoden Trading which is a profitable Japanese net-net on the spreadsheet I posted a few days ago. Let me know if it's useful: http://oddballstocks.blogspot.com/2011/05/international-net-net-8-ryoden-trading.html

stahleyp, I've seen the report, and if you're planning on investing money in Japan I'd say it's worth it.

I uploaded my spreadsheet to googledocs, I have the link below. I screened for stocks selling below NCAV with no debt, I believe all of the ones in the list are on the Tokyo exchange as well, I'm pretty sure that was a criteria, but I'm not positive. If anyone digs into some of these please post what you find, I haven't had a chance to trawl yet. Also if any of these issue english reports can you post the name and a link in this thread? Most of what I've seen is all in Japanese, and I've used Google Translate to dig through, but this is cumbersome, english would be much nicer! https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AvGl-iAW49IldHBwaVJVNjk5a1BqZ3U0dnJ3ejlDekE&hl=en

FT.com global equity screener is key, along with screener.co. The problem is there aren't that many amazing net-nets out there, on FT.com there are 10 Japanese companies selling for below cash that are profitable, the problem is most have market caps of $5m or so, very tiny companies. Screener.co turns up a few more, maybe 30 or so. I do a lot of writing about international net-net's on my blog, and the reality is there are not many out there, especially companies that have a fighting chance of survival or a market cap above $10m. I've profiled 7 net-net's so far, and I plan on diving into Japan next, I write at http://oddballstocks.blogspot.com. I found a few decent beat-down companies in Portugal, I just went through the exchange (Lisbon Euronext) site, and looked into each listing one by one. I know it's tedious and manual, but sometimes that's the best you can do.