Cell phones and wireless value-added services (VAS) have taken China by storm, leaving wire line telephone service in the dust. China’s major wireless companies are healthy and growing. We have great affection for China Mobile (CHL), which was a huge winner for the Cabot China & Emerging Markets Report back in 2007.

But the big telecoms are old news now, and a better place to look for growth is in AsiaInfo Holdings (ASIA), a Chinese company that offers software solutions and software protection for the big phone companies.

My investment idea today is a Mexican telecom company that’s turning into a regionally dominant provider of voice and data network services. Founded in 2000, American Movil (AMX) provides both wireless and fixed-line communications, but it’s clearly the buildout of the wireless network that’s stirring things up.

The company offers the whole spectrum of cellular services, such as short messaging, content downloading, video streaming, GPS and Internet access in addition to standard fixed-line services like Internet, cable TV and data transmission.

As an emerging markets specialist, I usually recommend a stock from outside U.S. borders. But I also watch the wider market, and for this issue I’ve picked a U.S. stock with an intriguing story and an earnings-powered gap up under its belt. It’s a specialty retail company that’s had some good earnings news and has another good reason for attracting attention.

Williams-Sonoma (WSM) is a San Francisco-based retailer that operates more than 600 stores including 264 Williams-Sonoma high-end kitchen stores, more than 200 Pottery Barns and nearly 100 Pottery Barn Kids stores along with a few dozen outlets and other brands.

My stock suggestion today is in the spirit of adventure. It’s a medical technology company that doesn’t really have revenues, much less earnings, and it doesn’t have a product approved for sale. What it has is a great idea for a hand-held device that will enable dermatologists to scan skin lesions to determine whether they are melanomas.

The company is Electro-Optical Sciences (MELA), and the device-called the MelaFind-uses light at various wave-lengths to scan the suspicious lesion. It then uses its database of melanoma images to calculate a diagnosis.

My stock recommendation today is American Dairy (ADY), a Chinese producer of milk powder, soybean milk powder, walnut products and other dairy stuff.

China isn’t known as a big consumer of dairy goods. Many Chinese find cheese distasteful and just don’t enjoy yogurt, buttermilk and the rest of the milk-based foods that delight Westerners. But that’s changing … a little.

Back in February 21, 2008, I wrote about an interesting stock for Cabot Wealth Advisory. The company was China Digital TV (STV), a maker of hardware and software that control access to digital content on Chinese televisions.

Here’s what I wrote at that time. You can read the whole write-up here.

My investing idea today is a jewelry company, which isn’t the sector that usually springs to mind when growth investing is mentioned. But Fuqi International (FUQI) (pronounced Foo-chee) is a Chinese jewelry manufacturer that’s catering to an enormous appetite for gold among China’s increasingly affluent people.

In many countries, China and India among them, gold jewelry isn’t just an adornment, it’s a way to accumulate wealth and pass it along to future generations. Long experience has taught many people that necklaces around your neck and bracelets on your wrists are more portable and more reliable than volatile currencies and fragile banks. So, as personal income rises, so does the amount of money heading into gold jewelry.

I once bought Apple (AAPL) on a pullback just before it reported earnings. It was a stupid move, but it paid off because nobody had anticipated just how many iPods Apple was selling.

One of our rules for evaluating growth stocks is that the leaders of a previous bull market are seldom the leaders of the next one. In fact, the odds are about four-to-one against it.

The stock market occasionally takes on a kind of soap opera tone, with emotions running high and complicated romantic tangles proliferating.

There’s a kind of acquisition competition affecting three fertilizer companies, right now that has a little of the “He loves her, but she loves someone else” flavor.

Back when mastodons still walked the earth, cell phones made phone calls, period. So cavemen could call home to say the hunt had been successful, but certainly couldn't send a picture to illustrate their prowess.

Now, of course, cell phones are high-powered multimedia packages that can access the whole world and everybody in it, posting tweets to Twitter, passing thoughts to Facebook friends and sending text messages to everyone. The Internet, photos, games, GPS, email, TV and videos are all flowing into these handheld powerhouses.

Does anybody else besides me remember the people who were fearlessly predicting that oil would be topping $200 a barrel soon?  If so, congratulations!  You've just learned a valuable lesson about the utter futility of predicting the future.

Predictions about the price of crude were a particularly short-sighted version of the prognosticating fallacy called "If This Goes On."  The If This Goes On fallacy goes wrong by just extending the present trend into the future without taking any moderating influences or complex variables into account.