No Random Walking!

Back in Shenzhen now.

The site for booking tickets for 2008 Olympia is still down at this hour. Two thoughts:

1. The tickets to the Beijing Olympia Games will be hugely sought-after.
2. Sohu, the web site builder, should have anticipated the high volume traffic but failed the meet the demand badly. 

Speaking of Sohu, it reported earnings yesterday that passed the expectation. The stock price is close to $60 now. It's the best story that I closely followed this year (since when the price was still in the low-20s).

Correction: The company that built the ticketing system for Beijing Olympics is said to be GeHua, not Sohu as I said above.

I've observed this before, but it's showing up again: For almost all of the stocks I currently own, their share prices are higher than the analysts' median price targets as shown on Yahoo! Finance!  Yet I think they are still heading higher! Three thoughts:

1. It is possible that some price targets are intentional, i.e., manipulation;
2. If not, more than half of those analysts are proven wrong already;
3. Could be a useful screening criterion, i.e., a contrarian indicator, for bullish stocks.

Key points:

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

In other words, the Chinese government's best (and only plausible) option is to let the stock market run freely, unless something drastic is done to the currency Yuan.

Link to ???:“???????????”——??????

Two thoughts:

1. Baidu is important enough to influence the sentiment on the whole market?! Wow!
2. The market has had a very good run lately. A stress test such as this ongoing "tech slump" is actually good for the long run. 

Link to Baidu-spurred tech slump raises bubble fears: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Link to AFP: China has 106 billionaires compared with only 15 last year

Be aggressive, hungry and greedy when presented with ...

• ... an imminent opportunity (i.e., in a couple of days)
• ... ... of a super-high probability (i.e. almost a certainty)
• ... ... ... that is modeled from actual data (i.e. price, volume, etc.)
• ... ... ... ... that are consistent with the underlying story (i.e. fundamentals).

<I tried to put the long statement above as a mathematical expression, but so far remain unsatisfied. Need to refresh my skill on Bayesian statistics.>

???????"??????":

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

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

That's the title of a recent article on The Motley Fool (Link).  Interestingly the question is very similar to the one I've always been asking myself: Why am I not earning 100% annual returns? Seriously!

First of all, let's be clear that achieving 100% annual returns consistently for a small fund is doable, because many small-cap stocks do double or tripple in a year and it isn't very hard to find them if one spends enough time on it. I really believe him when Warren Buffett said that he could achieve 100% annually for small funds but now has too much money to make it possible.  So why aren't many people with less money able to do it?  [Maybe there are many people who have done it but I just don't know about them?]

... to be continued.

I am no longer following InterOil and how its Elk-2 well is coming along. For the sake of completeness, I am including a new drilling report below which sent IOC's stock crashing yesterday. I didn't try to interpret the testing results, but it must not be good even though the company described them as "encouraging":

Link to InterOil Confirms Encouraging Elk-2 Well Test Results and Sets Date for Conference Call: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

The stock had been declining graduately ever since T. Boone Pickens was reported taking a stake in the company back in August.