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    • Fri Apr 11th 05:53 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Blogonomics: The Seeking Alpha Model
      Thanks Mick. Sharon contacted me today and I hope and expect the hits to my firm's website will go back up to pre-new website. As I just emailed David, my latest column had a Shaun Rein submits thing at the front again and the hits to my website did indeed go up. So hopefully the changes Sharon implements will drive traffic up again.

      And no, I did not receive any email from Sharon a few weeks ago.

      As for some of the critiques here, I just do not get them. I just emailed David this... but I personally will not submit a commentary to anything but a top tier publication... BusinessWeek, Forbes, level ... and SA.

      The outreach that SA gets it incredible in terms of readers is really remarkable and the SA team deserves a heckuva lot of credit for making one of the best channels in the business.

      Thanks.

      S. Rein
      View article »
    • Thu Apr 10th 17:16 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Blogonomics: The Seeking Alpha Model
      Also, David, even if you don't give us money or shares for writing the commentaries... I think that you should give contributors who have been around for a while the right to buy shares.

      S. Rein
      View article »
    • Thu Apr 10th 17:13 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Blogonomics: The Seeking Alpha Model
      Thanks David for the response. If you did make those changes, it would be hugely beneficial for everyone involved. Keep up the good work!

      S. Rein
      View article »
    • Thu Apr 10th 16:32 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Blogonomics: The Seeking Alpha Model
      I do think that SA is doing a pretty good job, so keep up the good work. I do have some concerns as I have written in private several times:

      1) I agree with Yazz. After the website revision, it does not appear anywhere on the article the name of my company. Although you have our link on the left under our picture, you should put our company name AND put it at the front of the article like it used to be.. Shaun Rein from the China Market Research Group submits.

      The fact of the matter is a lot of sites copy and paste our articles and never add the name of our companies. Therefore, while my name gets picked up, my company name does not. This is a problem. People now have to click twice before they see the name of my firm... as any good marketer knows, branding comes from active discussion with consumers (an actual slick) , and passive (a visual of the company name). This should be changed.

      2) I used to write once in a while, My firm CMR conducted this research... and provided a link to my company embedded in the article so that if people copied and pasted my piece there would be somehere in the article where I could get credit. Now, if I try doing that, my article gets revised to take the company name out. I know you do not want too many self-directed promos, but I DO this in my BusinessWeek and Forbes commentaries and they allow it. Why not SA?

      China's Rising Retail Market
      www.businessweek.com/g...

      Chinese Seek Quality from Multinationals
      www.forbes.com/opinion...

      3) Frankly, I have cut back on posting because if feel there has not been any quality control in the China section. There are people posting who clearly have no idea what is going on. I am not talking about a disagreement of opinions... I am talking about extremely low quality commentaries.

      I only will write an original commentary for certain publications -- BusinessWeek, Forbes, and SA... I do it for SA because it is clear that your deals with Yahoo and other get huge exposure. But I am also concerned about the erosion of the brand when. There does need to be QC in accepting some of the articles.

      4) I do not have a blog. Pretty much everything I post on SA is an original piece. I hate it when I spend a lot of time on a piece and have it get posted and then have 10 other posts the same day come out on top. I preferred the old site where the most recent 10 articles or whatever would get more prominence. I think you should revert to that.

      Anyway, these are just a few ideas. I think that you are doing an excellent job. I do understand the frustrations of some of the other contributors, as I have had them too. My main problem is more on teh technical aspects.

      The actual number of visitors to my firm's site has dropped since SA's new website was adopted. The new site is terrible -- bad for contributors and not good for readers to navigate as easily.

      S. Rein
      View article »
    • Sat Mar 1st 22:21 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Why All Consumer Magazines Should be Free Online
      good article
      View article »
    • Sat Mar 1st 22:15 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Book Review: Jim Rogers' "A Bull in China"
      This is another review on Rogers book by Paul Woodward

      bsgasia.blogspot.com/2...

      Thursday, February 14, 2008
      Shaun Rein 1, Jim Rogers 0
      Shaun Rein seems to me one of the soundest writers on the PRC commercial scene. I find myself agreeing with him more often than not on the development of corporate China.

      I have rarely, however, agreed with him more than I do today when I read his intelligent review of the pompous, self-important piffle masquerading as investment advice in Jim Rodgers' book A Bull in China: Investing Profitably in the World's Greatest Market. While Rein (like me) avows great optimism for China's economy and businesses, he pulls no punches when he says:


      Overall, though, it does not really sound like Rogers has any idea of what he is talking about when investing in China. He seems to be talking in broad macro themes rather than on specifics of doing business in China. He sounds very much like that professor or government official or businessman who flies into China a couple times a year and lives at the Portman Ritz Carlton and then positions himself as the China expert but does not understand the realities of business here.
      When I first travelled to China in 1985 I talked to a very sage American woman who had already been running a business there for several years. I was making my living as a writer then and her advice still sticks with me: "those who stay for a week write a book. If they stay for a month, they might try to write a magazine feature. If they stay for year, they're far too confused to write anything". And it is still so. She, by the way, is still running a China business, now publicly listed and very successful.
      View article »
    • Sat Mar 1st 22:15 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Book Review: Jim Rogers' "A Bull in China"
      This is another review on Rogers book by Paul Woodward

      bsgasia.blogspot.com/2...

      Thursday, February 14, 2008
      Shaun Rein 1, Jim Rogers 0
      Shaun Rein seems to me one of the soundest writers on the PRC commercial scene. I find myself agreeing with him more often than not on the development of corporate China.

      I have rarely, however, agreed with him more than I do today when I read his intelligent review of the pompous, self-important piffle masquerading as investment advice in Jim Rodgers' book A Bull in China: Investing Profitably in the World's Greatest Market. While Rein (like me) avows great optimism for China's economy and businesses, he pulls no punches when he says:


      Overall, though, it does not really sound like Rogers has any idea of what he is talking about when investing in China. He seems to be talking in broad macro themes rather than on specifics of doing business in China. He sounds very much like that professor or government official or businessman who flies into China a couple times a year and lives at the Portman Ritz Carlton and then positions himself as the China expert but does not understand the realities of business here.
      When I first travelled to China in 1985 I talked to a very sage American woman who had already been running a business there for several years. I was making my living as a writer then and her advice still sticks with me: "those who stay for a week write a book. If they stay for a month, they might try to write a magazine feature. If they stay for year, they're far too confused to write anything". And it is still so. She, by the way, is still running a China business, now publicly listed and very successful.
      View article »
    • Sat Mar 1st 22:12 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Book Review: Jim Rogers' "A Bull in China"
      DavidinChina wrote this earlier on another book review on Rogers:

      seekingalpha.com/artic...

      Perhaps you should also read this FT book review. Mr Rogers may not be all he seems.


      New market proves difficult to corner

      By Jamil Anderlini

      Published: January 10 2008 02:00 | Last updated: January 10 2008 02:00

      On this Chinese version of the board game Monopoly . . . it's not a roll of the dice, but a corner on the best information, that will help you pass 'Go'," celebrity investor Jim Rogers asserts in his new book about investment in China.

      Rogers is known for helping George Soros establish the Quantum Fund in the 1970s, for writing books such as Investment Biker and Hot Commodities and for predicting the bottoming-out and recovery of the Chinese stock market. Unfortunately, in this book, Rogers does not provide "a corner on the best information".

      The title - A Bull in China - is somewhat misleading to start with, since Rogers upped sticks from the US to Singapore, rather than China. When I asked him recently why, if he is so bullish on the country, he doesn't live here, he replied that his family had planned to live in Shanghai until the shocking air pollution made them decide on far-flung Singapore instead.

      The book reads like a combination of personal memoir, stock pick listings and historical explanation of the Chinese economic miracle. The style is breezy and intended to entertain but at times gets bogged down in trying to explain the complexities of the Chinese stock market.

      The most interesting parts are the author's personal recollections of his first visit to China in the mid-1980s. Rogers provides a great description of buying a single share in a bank over the counter in Shanghai in 1986 before the Chinese stock markets had even been set up. He also describes trips on his motorbike across the country when many roads turned to sand or were washed away by floods.

      Sadly, such anecdotes make up a small part of the book.

      The underlying hypothesis is indisputable - that China will continue to grow and there will be lots of good investment opportunities in a range of industries - but this revelation comes two and a half years into a bull run in the Chinese stock market that has seen the benchmark index jump six-fold.

      During a recent publicity tour Rogers made headlines by announcing that he was selling every US dollar asset he owned and buying China's renminbi assets. But when I asked what exactly he was buying he was less forthcoming. He conceded that prices in the Chinese real estate and stock markets were reaching bubble levels and no one should buy them now, but said he was not making direct investments in factories or unlisted local companies. Pressed a bit harder, he correctly pointed out that any foreigner can open a bank account in China and he was buying cash.

      The renminbi is still not a freely convertible currency and, although it used to be much easier to buy renminbi than to exchange it for foreign currencies, in early 2007 the government ordered Chinese banks to restrict individuals' annual purchases of renminbi to the equivalent of $50,000, the same amount that can be changed into foreign currencies each year.

      China has a thriving black market and extensive underground banking system but Rogers assured me he has not resorted to illegal means to buy renminbi. As a significant institutional investor, Rogers may be able to structure some sort of offshore, renminbi-based non-deliverable forward contracts with an investment bank but that is hardly an option available for individual investors wanting to get a piece of China.

      At times, this book reads like a collection of analyst research notes with each section followed by an incomplete list of Chinese companies with stock codes and a quick blurb. Quite a few of the highlighted companies are domestically listed "A-shares", which individual foreign investors are not yet allowed to buy. At other times, the book reads like a history of China's capital markets. But much of the information is out of date and in some places inaccurate or misleading.

      For instance, his explanation of the confusing Chinese stock market contains some key errors, such as an assertion that the proportion of shares in the market owned by the government dropped from 78 per cent in 2002 to less than 50 per cent by mid-2006. In fact, the state directly owned more like 50 per cent of all shares in 2002 and the proportion of state ownership in the market has risen since then following a spate of big state-owned enterprise listings.

      To his credit, Rogers clearly believes in the China story he is selling in this book. But it doesn't take a financial wizard to be positive on the country's long term prospects and with the proliferation of books on offer from other old China hands there is little need to bother with this list of stock picks.

      Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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