More Baidu

Added a little more Baidu at 427. First time I'm really watching its ticker. Amazing liquidity, volatility. 428 one minute, 426 the next. Baidu is frothy, far above its moving averages, already up more than 2% ($9) today. I'm playing this with the Alibaba.com IPO since Baidu has announced C2C auctioning recently. I'm also playing this with Google, which got upgraded to 850.

YGE is up to 36.50, which is positive. Make that 36.64. Crude is up $2 today, plus a bombing near Yemen. The oil situation was on my mind yesterday, and I wanted PTR at 222, but it was late and my broker stopped taking PTR orders (I don't know why) in the final 5 minutes. PTR was up to 228 in pre-market, but is back down to 222.

Luv Alibaba, not so much Yahoo

Alibaba, Alibaba, Alibaba. That name has tantalized and tormented me for the past several months. Great company, huge growth, superb location (China and expanding). But there's no way for the common man (me) to get in the coming IPO on the Hang Seng. So what to do?

Rick Aristotle Munarriz suggests the back door: Yahoo. Yes, Yahoo, which owns 44% of Alibaba not including the 10% slice of Alibaba's IPO.

Alibaba and the IPO Thieves

Much as I love Alibaba, I can't stand Yahoo ($28.36, down 0.03% today) and its bloated (lack of) maneuvering in the U.S. My visualization of Yahoo is Jabba the Hut. Maybe not as slimy and smelly, but really, the blobby guy needs a good 15 minutes to make a 180-degree turn.

And yet, as Munarriz writes, Yahoo has its clutches on Yahoo Japan (the clear winner there), Alibaba and even Gmarket, a Korean stock that I love (but don't own). So Yahoo, with its Softbank connections perhaps, is a champion overseas and a chump domestically. Hmmm... maybe it's worth a closer look, but I've already looked at Yahoo's numbers. Then again, those numbers don't include the huge IPO proceeds that Alibaba is about to rake in. Munarriz forecasts a possible market cap greater than Baidu's.

Maybe the ultimate move by a swift Alibaba would be to IPO in the states. Alibaba, Alibaba, Alibaba. Tempt me no more.

Google's next opponent

Google doing so well. When I was a kid, I heard about this googol, which is the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeroes.

Well, Google is a name well chosen for many reasons. But what I like today is the market's response to the Co's decision to go into the wireless advertising space. GOOG is trading up 1.2% at $509 near the close. I can't help but look at this through China-made binoculars. With China Mobile, Tencent and Alibaba dominating the space there, this move by Google is a must.

Whether GOOG penetrates the culture enough to make a dent depends on the Co's continued efforts to localize itself. Example: calling itself Guge, though there already exists a Beijing company by that name.

Ultimately, the online cellphone advertising space in China will be a war between Google and Alibaba, which goes public later this year. Alibaba is 40% owned by Yahoo. Things are beyond interesting now.

Pupule Paul has no position in Google.

China's fortune

For what it's worth, Fortune's David Kirkpatrick is the latest to echo the grand scale of China's free market revolution. As Jim Grisanzio points out, Kirkpatrick sees growth on steroids (my paraphrase) in the Middle Kingdom.

I'm already high on Baidu, Sina and Focus Media. CNOOC is possibly overbought, but has doubled since appearing on my radar months ago. China needs oil, pollution levels are out of hand. Makes me wonder what the pollution play will be in a year or two.

Jumping into China for the sake of jumping isn't wise, of course. But growth is growth is growth. And I feel equally bullish about Nintendo, which is one of only two Japanese stocks I like at all. If there are any others, I'd love to find out.

But back to China. Alibaba, 40% owned by Yahoo, goes public later this year. Already a sector leader. And what about Tencent, the dominant player in instant messaging? I'll have to do some digging, but a Tencent IPO might be, as the kiddies say, off the hook.

Disclaimer: Pupule Paul is long, just a teeny bit, in BIDU, FMCN and BIDU.