No Random Walking!

Very puzzling story: Merrill Lynch Commodities, Pacific LNG and InterOil Sign Shareholder Agreement for LNG Project. They seem to be planning to build the infrastructure for an LNG terminal before the gas is confirmed! The price for IOC shot up $4 in after-hour trading.

In retrospect, there were signs that the news was coming. I spot the discrepancy between IOC's price and its RSAP line a couple of days ago (see the lower right-hand corner on the chart below) but didn't act on it (I thought it was just bouncing off the recent low which acted as a support).

Action? Avoid the stock for now because the story is puzzling.

It's not as glamarous as you may think. --- Pros and cons of working at home:  Link to Should You Start Your Own Work at Home Business?

On the same site is an article on How to Be a Great Salesperson, which I sure will never learn to be one.

The best selling happens when you are trying to meet someone’s needs. This is when you will be most successful.

Sales is a numbers game: SW³ = “Some Will. Some Won’t. So What!” You won’t win them all, and that’s ok. We all know the baseball analogy of how even the best batters miss the ball about 70% of the time. So don’t sweat the individual sales loss. Just move on to the next. With that said you do want to analyze your result patterns over time and adjust your strategy when you want different results. The idea here is to stay disciplined especially on bad days, stay focused on meeting needs, and keep evolving your strategy, tactics and skills. Slow and steady wins the race.

Isn't that also true for investing?

Much hyped Sohu 3.0 has been officially released. Well, it is indeed more a hype than anything that will get me excited.

The main features of Sohu 3.0 are video broadcasting/blogging and instant messaging (???), in addition to the integration of multiple sites Sohu has acquired over the years. My experience so far:

• Who really cares video blogging anyway?
• The instant messaging function is slow. No way it's going to compete with Tencent's QQ.  
• I don't see any integration. Too many sites, user ids, etc...

On the other hand, I still think that Sohu has the best technical teams, i.e.,software engineers, among the major Chinese internet companies. Sohu's Chinese Input Method (????????and search engine (??) are still among the best in the industry. 

[Traffic Watch]

Sohu has seen its daily traffic rank and page views trending up lately. If the trend continues, it will catch Sina, which has been slipping lately, this year in terms of daily traffic. [NOTE: we should always take it with a grain of salt when interpreting this kind of "data". The lines are for baidu.com, qq.com, sina.com.cn, and sohu.com in decending order].

[Ad Revenue] 

Based on an IBD article, Sohu is #4 in search engine market and #3 in online ad revenue. [NOTE: obviously IBD didn't care about Tencent since it's not listed in US, even though it probably ranks #1 or #2 in online ad revenue!]. Sina's market cap is twice of Sohu's. Sohu lacks the name recognition that other companies enjoy.  

The article (Link to Gold ETF Impact) explains how the gold ETFs such  as GLD is priced and how it is related to, or sometimes decoupled with, the underlying physical gold price. 

Other kind of gold ETFs seem to track the stocks of gold-related companies instead of the price of gold. One such ETF is GDX. During the bull market in the recent years, these ETFS have outperformed GLD by a wide margin.

??????????????????Bain Capital) ?????????

Link to ??????????????_???_????_???

I don't know whether or not the statements below are true, but it's nevertheless interesting to read. The author is a professor in China Science & Technology University.

???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????(? QFII)??????????????????????????700?????????????????????????????????????????????????????2005????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????2003?? 4000????????????12000????

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? 1?8?????????2003????????????????????64000??????3-5??????????????????????????19.2??-32???????????2006???20.9????GDP????????????????????GDP?????????2006????????????(M2)??????34.6??????????????55%-92%????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Link to ?????????????????_????_???

????????“??”????????????????????????????????????????????????????

The site with the highest (global) rank is baidu.com which has been ranked the 7th for a long time. It is followed by Tencent's qq.com.

The most improved? sohu.com. My guess is that Sohu is getting more popular due to its successful launch of its online game 'TianLongBaBu', its popular Chinese input method and its blog site which lately is stealing bloggers from Sina. Sohu is also in charge of building the offical sites for the 2008 Beijing Olympia. The savy investors anticipated these changes and bid its share price up over 50% during the past 3 months!

and many other forms, such as this 2D version that can encode 2000 ASCII characters:

Link to Scott Blake - Bar Code Art

Unit: US$/gallon

Link to Gasoline Prices Around The World