donzelion

Vietnam: Asia's Sleeping Tiger?

Re Tata Steel's proposed investment: " bureaucratic holdups and intense competition for land rights have seen the project's first phase being pushed back to 2011."

If a company is putting $5 billion into your country, and you block their progress with red tape and land rights claims, then there's something seriously wrong. Either Tata Steel was inept (do NOT believe that), or you have symptoms that all is not as it seems.

Show me the top 10 companies in Vietnam that are not either government owned or ethnically Chinese-owned, and I'll find some basis for confidence in an investment there. Sometimes though, it's best to just let a sleeping tiger lie.

While Financials Drag Markets Down, Five Ways to Stay in Play

Constructe is on to something: why shouldn't the US vote as the 80% shareholder to "release the files"? They're our bloody files! (Lawyer in me says, "No, no! What about the non-disclosure agreements? Other lawyer in me says, "Who cares? Let all those other managers who played silly games stop hiding behind secrecy and face the rap).

Conspiracy probably plays a very small role in today's crises. Rather, there's a structural flaw for shareholders, who most often own shares through institutions (mutual funds, ETFs, pension funds, etc.). As a result, they let management get away with bloody murder - and management converts company accounts into their own piggy banks (so long as the managers concoct "earnings" - which, it turns out, with the right leverage process isn't too hard to do).

Navigating the ETF Marketplace in 2009

Unsustainable, "fluff" ETFs will continue being brought to the market - particularly as ETFs kill off old-style actively traded mutual funds and CEFs.

Some of these products seem like email spam - you can still turn a profit on spam even though 99.9999% of the recipients have too much common sense to ever buy the product.

The spammers and scammers out there haven't killed Google, Amazon, and eBay, and these dumb ETF products won't kill off the valuable core, but they will produce too much white noise for my taste.