Chuck Kasparov

Shorting Las Vegas

Boris, wow, thanks! Great info.

Perfect World Announces Share Repurchase Program

nah, they are too expensive right now. all the chinese game companies were buying their own stock after the big fall happened, and after they finished buying their stocks fell another 25% or so.

I think GA is a much better value right now if you check out their balance sheet. They still have $600 million or so in cash (after their $150 million buyback. Their earnings are around $200 million a year. And their market cap is around $1.5B.

I'm very nervous about their next earnings report however. So I will wait until their next earnings report before I commit.

Taking a Risk - With 20% Yields

Hi Tim, I'm with you on the dry bulk shippers - the whole industry is a bargain now.

But I would stay away from AWP. If you listened to the last conference call for their fund group (including AOD) management say that they have massive dividends and are not returning capital, but if you dig in a little bit, you'll find that when the underlying companies issue the dividends, their NAVs go way down, it comes out of AWP/AOD's NAVs. , and they never recover. If you want to make the dividend real estate plays here, I would look at the underlying stocks, and not trust the Alpine management on this.

Coke's Purchase of Huiyuan Juice Makes Sense, but Will China's Regulators Allow It?

Why such a huge valuation? Couldn't they just bid twice the value and save $600M? Does it seem like Coke is throwing away money here or are they just trying desperately to buy over regulators unlikely to approve?

High Prices Cut Demand for Metals

Mike, thanks for the interview. Usually one would expect an industry insider to have a bullish bias on precious metal prices. So if he's expecting them to go down short term - that's a very strong signal. Also, very enlightening comments on what really affects the prices and supply/demand issues. Thanks again!

My Shanghai Surprise

What is your buying strategy? If you put in 20% of your total $ every month or so for 5 months, then you should average out the relative timing. If you're trying to time the exact bottom, then shame on you for saying the first week means nothing.

Why Activision Must Renew The9's World of Warcraft Contract

Joker, thanks for your comments. That's a really good and key point I hadn't considered. I looked up Blizzard's TOS for China (see https://blizzard.com/account/c... under the china link).

Under Ownership it has the following:
All title, ownership rights and intellectual property rights in and to the Service, including without limitation the Blizzard Account that you register to use the Service ... are owned by Blizzard and/or its licensors.

So it's not yet clear to me in The9's case if Blizzard owns the accounts or the licensors own the accounts. Where did you find the Blizzard China EULA?

Thanks!

Rampant Inflation Paints Fed Into a Corner

thanks for the analysis, that makes a lot of sense.

The Highest Yielding Cash Products

E-Trade is also pretty nice. Their savings account is 3.30%. What I like is that I can swiftly move everything to my eTrade brokerage account and then use the cash to instantly trade. When waiting on the sidelines I can then move everything instantly back to my savings account.

Disclosure: I have an eTrade account.

Now's the Time to Buy Something

The other flaw in your argument is that the company had a good quarter. Adding $500 million to their cash position from "financing activities" doesn't make a good quarter. They lost money ($3 million).

If they did that every quarter - they would continue to add to their $5.3 Billion in debt, and their $356 million in interest payments per year.