Wow. No posts here for three days. Maybe I have a life after all. Some passing thoughts on a supposedly down day.
• Georges Yared is right. Again. Just a few days ago, he wrote that AAPL's life below $150 per share was coming to an end soon. The stock has run from the 130s to today's high of 150.22 in a short time. Yared has been a persistent bull when it comes to certain growth stocks. He's been right. Bull's eye right, and that's why I continue to absorb his writing.
• BIDU continues to fluctuate today. With the NAS flitting below and above neutral in this first hour, BIDU dropped to 295 before rallying back to 300. An insane run for a stock that hit a subprime-sludge low of 161 on August 16. I can't help but think that a lot of money has gone to BIDU stock because a) it's in China, and b) it's a search engine. And that's it. Profits are nothing special. All Baidu really has is huge growth margins in a country of 1.3 billion people, most of whom still don't have computers. That's where cellphone web access comes into play, and that's why I wonder why BIDU is taking so long to anchor itself in that realm. Chinese access the web more by cellphone than computer. It's not even close. I just wonder if Alibaba, a major IM company that's 40% owned by Yahoo, will ever open an ADR in the states.
• CROX is running up again. A lot of bulls are expecting the Co to share robust mid-Q3 numbers during a presentation this morning. The stock broke through the 60 barrier on Monday with major volume.
• Among the small group of stocks on the plus side early in the day was GRMN, which hit an all-time high of 120. Stock pulled back and is now at 117.58. The stock has doubled since late May, and I wonder if a split is imminent. I'm not a big fan of splits, but I don't avoid them, either.
• LULU has been sitting for much of the morning at 39. When Cramer pumped the stock last week with a long segment, LULU made a couple of runs to the 41-plus range. I think LULU sits in this range until earnings, but you never know...
• MCD is consolidating after last week's magical run off the announcement of a 50% increase in the dividend. I got a few shares, mainly for my nephew (he loves the chicken snack wrap and has loved McDonald's all his life), but I don't see another run in the shares until earnings. Maybe the Co can make a deal with Apple and give away iTune songs in the McCafe and at the drive-thru. So wacky that it could happen.
• NILE had a couple of runs to 105-106 recently, but pulled back to 99-100 both times. Today, the stock is locked mostly in a 98-100 range, taking a breather since its run from 80 during the past two weeks. No complaints here. I'm just glad I got a little piece at 80. Sure, I wish I'd gotten more at 80 (or even 75), but this was pre-Fed rate meeting, so what I did (by my standards) was spooky. The older I get, the more adverse I am to risk. It's the dang truth and I can't deny it.
• RIMM broke into positive territory before much of the market and has kept its gains. I wonder how sales are going in China.
• Another favorite of my nephew's, Under Armor, hasn't been much in this rally. UA is down 1.2% to 63.92. I just think the forward P/E (47) is still a bear argument that a lot of bulls have bought. I can't argue against it when CROX is trading at a forward P/E of 23.
• Nintendo is forming a base here above 60, much to the relief of longs like me who had foolishly bought more shares at these levels. Though I won't be buying any stock at these lofty prices, it's reassuring to know that my A and A- stock picks have great reasons that more than justify their valuations. The Wii is still a killer app, as is the DS, and that won't change going into Christmas season.
I love you, I hate you: Well, well. Focus Media has finally cleared up its Q2 filing mess and the stock is up 15.4% so far. I would be angry about this, as a former FMCN long, but I'm past that. At some point, this is still going to be a piece of Chinese advertising that I want, but I need a bargain price first.
And speaking of China, Yingli Green Energy is up 3.7% to 25.64. The whole oil patch craziness is intriguing. Oil prices go up, CNOOC Ltd., PetroChina and Exxon go up, and so do the solar/clean energy stocks. I'm just surprised, with the U.S. economy slowing, that I haven't kept my toes in China's waters.
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http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=8b5833a1-b270-42d7-b059-35a5ae1bb362
BlackBerrys slow to crack lucrative Chinese market
Aileen McCabe, CanWest Asia correspondent
CanWest News Service
Sunday, September 23, 2007
SHANGHAI -- Given half a chance, the BlackBerry could have become the "crackberry" here, virtually overnight. But, after more than seven years of negotiations leading to a long-awaited "launch in China," there is still no sign it will happen any time soon.
Indeed, despite word this spring that the BlackBerry 8700g would be available for sale in China for $700 at the end of August, it still isn't.
A call to China Mobile, which is Waterloo, Ont.,-based Research in Motion's partner for its addictive e-mail device-cum-phone, puts paid to that idea. The customer-hotline receptionist delivers the bad news: "We are not selling BlackBerry cellphones."
To buy one, she says, you have to go "to Hong Kong or some foreign countries."
She explains that if you B.Y.O.-Berry, China Mobile will provide service for it. "However, you cannot apply as an individual," she cautions. "You must be a group client."
In any case, the prices China Mobile is charging ensure Berrys are out of reach of most ordinary Chinese. China Mobile offers packages at $57 or $85 a month. For the average city dweller who brings home less than $350 a month, both options are impossibly expensive. By comparison, you can text to your heart's content on a mobile phone and talk a reasonable amount of time, too, all for about $15 to $20 a month.
The crazy thing is that while RIM might not be selling BlackBerrys in China yet, they are slowly catching on anyway.
Taobao, the Chinese-language equivalent of EBay, has literally hundreds of them for sale online, from the latest 8300 Curve with Simplified Chinese, loaded for $800, to the basic 7730 for $75.
No one is exactly sure where they are all coming from, but there is a suspicion that a lot are returns from North American and European buyers that are somehow getting recycled into the Chinese market by dubious entrepreneurs. And, this being China, some are almost certainly unabashed knock-offs that look exactly like the real thing, but often don't operate like it in a pinch.
Without a China Mobile contract, none of these Berrys will send or receive e-mail. They work as a very cool mobile phone, though, and can usually access the Internet.
The big screen and full keyboard should be real attractions, given how mad the Chinese are for texting. Still, there's one huge drawback: Unless the Berry is specially loaded, it can't send messages in Chinese script.
And even when it has the necessary program, it's not easy to operate using just two thumbs.
That's one of the reasons even the RedBerry, a Chinese-made BlackBerry copycat that only costs pennies per month to use, hasn't gained much traction here.
On blogs where the technically savvy debate such things, there is a lively interest in whether RIM will develop some kind of "smart-fill" capacity to simplify e-mailing and messaging in Chinese. But, so far, there is no sign of it and, despite repeated attempts, no one from RIM would comment for this story.
But while BlackBerry seems to be getting off to a slow start in China, it has by no means missed the boat.
In Guangzhou last weekend, a government official told business leaders that there are now 600 million mobile phone users in China -- one in five of all the world's users -- and that the number is growing by an average of 6.76 million a month.
There is no question that mobile usage is penetrating ever deeper into China's vast rural heartland, but, according to the China Daily, the businessmen were told "city dwellers' appetite for more fashionable, media-rich and web-accessible handsets continues to boom."
Nice find, cramer_krook. Next step is for me to find some stats/metics on BlackBerry sales on Taobao. China is koo-koo for cellphones ... I think the CrackBerry will eventually find a price range and sell like crazy.
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