The peculiar state of Chinese economy Spent a week in China. Spoke to many friends who work in different parts of the Chinese economy: some executives in private companies who are listed in “OTC market” (新三板)、some investment professionals in wealth management companies、some medical staff, some manager of a movie theater chain and various everyday folks… Read More »
Fake news and real facts The past week we may have witnessed a major inflection point in financial markets. However, predict future is a darn hard task and we never imagined we have the high quality crystal ball to do that, so we won’t predict the future. We can examine some facts and some “fake… Read More »
Recently I read about an interesting experiment from the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. It is about the way our brain works and how to utilize more of your System 2 and constantly checking against the usual intuitions and stereotypes created by System 1. (System 1 is the part of the brain that is giving… Read More »
In the past, BRK has a rule that whenever price of BRK falls below 1.2 times book value, Mr. Warren Buffett can use company’s cash to buy back BRK shares. Recently, this rule was removed. The share was traded around 1.4 times book value then. Immediate reaction from the market was very positive, the share… Read More »
The past week has been nothing short of major news, and yet S&P 500 ended the week effectively flat. First was the spat at G7: I guess Justin should have given Don a heads-up: ” by the way Don, I have to act tough in the press conference so I may use some words that… Read More »
We live in a very “noisy” world. The news media used to be on a weekly or daily publication cycle and now it is up to the minute thanks to widespread of social media channels. The actions to buy or sell securities used to be difficult and expensive, and required a telephone call to a… Read More »
In our previous blog posts (here and here), we argued that there is only upside for US to bring up the Trade imbalance issues with China and forced China to the negotiation table. Despite the wide spread fear of a “Trade War” in financial markets, we maintained the position that there will be no “Trade… Read More »
This shouldn’t come as a surprise – Warren and Charlie don’t recognize Bitcoin as an investment medium. This is the modified version of how Charlie phrased at the meeting. The direct quote from Charlie was “trading Bitcoin is like trading turds”. Indeed, the “value” of Bitcoin is solely depending on how much the next buyer… Read More »
Not necessarily. A headline news flash will almost always associate with rising interest rate with tailwind to bank stocks. But what is often missed is that banks’ profitability is associated with net interest margin: the yield they make lending long term subtract the short-term interest they are paying to their lenders (Fed or deposits etc.).… Read More »
Executive’s compensation. When I prepare this draft, I was thinking using “One of the most outrageous things”. However, after another round of reading, I decided to drop the structure and stick to “The most outrageous thing” in the subject. Frankly speaking, nothing else comes close to this. This time of the year is the usual… Read More »