No Random Walking!

With the help of this site(link), I was finally able to input Chinese in vi editor under the putty telnet client.

• Configure the putty settings:
  • Select a Chinese font such as ??? with a font size of 14;
  • Set the charactor translation to UTF-8;
• Configure the vi program: In ~/.vimrc, add the following lines:
  set fileencoding=utf8
  set fileencodings=ucs-bom,utf8,prc
  if has("gui_running")
  set guifont=NSimSun:h12:cGB2312
  endif
• Set the locale in ~/.bashrc, but I am not sure this is required.

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

PS: For unknown reason the settings above don't work! Now I use the following - somewhat simplier - settings:

• Font: It's okay to use western font, such as New Courier-12;
• Translation set to UTF-8;
• Set shell variable LANG to en_US.UTF-8, i.e., same as above;

No other changes are needed.

One more note: The above only works in regular shell. I still don't know how to edit Chinese characters within the the 'screen' program. 'screen' is one of my favorite programs and provides a text-based multi-window system on Unix..

The on-going crisis affects almost every company and is believed to last for a while, that's why the market has been down sharply across the board.

I've suffered big loss as well, but I believe this is the best time to own companies that (1) are clearly growing - yes there are such companies! (2) has shown strong technical strength; (3) has a compelling growth story going forward; and (4) has good balance sheet. These companies are not impacted by the crisis at all. The best time to buy is when there is blood on the street - there will be many such opportunities in months to come!

Another class of companies that are attractive are those with values - so many companies are being traded just above the cash value, with positive cash flow, no debt and a single-digit P/E ratio. Their business has slowed, in some cases to a halt. The downside is small, but the recovery could be a long way.

Among the two groups mentioned above, I prefer the first group for the following reasons: (1) It fits my time-tested strategy;  (2) Value is often a trap and price can go substantially lower than the perceived 'value'; and (3) Except for buy-and-hold, I am not aware of any other workable trading strategy for those value plays. 

I've noticed for weeks now that some stocks, including some I currently own, are being sold below net cash. To understand the extent of the market sentiment, I scaned over 4000 stocks in my database today and I was really surprised with some of the findings.

Among the 4000+ stocks, 185 of them are being sold below net cash value. This number itself is not surprisingly high. However I was indeed surprised by the severity that some of these companies are being undersold. In cases such as M.F. Global (MF) and Morgan Stanley (MS), the selling price is over 98% below the cash value!

An Obvious Lesson here: do not buy just because it is below cash! It can become substantially below cash!

Granted, there are probably valid reasons that these companies are being sold dirt cheap, in addition to the terrible market sentiment. Many of these companies are probably burning cash faster than they can generate incomes; or they may have huge amount of loan or other obligations that are due pretty soon. In a tight credit market, it is very difficult to borrow money that is needed to operate a company.

Still some other companies, 43 of them in total, may be worth investigating and some of them are listed below. What separate them from others is that, according to data at Yahoo Finance, they have actually being cash flow positive during the last 12 months.

Data are in million dollars unless specified. EV: Enterprise Value.

The site converts any English text or web site to audio. The result is surprisingly good, which actually sounds like a real person - a lady -  talking.

Convert your favorite Websites and Blogs to speech with iSpeech - Text to speech podcast with your iPod

I am in the process of moving have moved my web sites, this blog included, to another hopefully better hosting company. I expect big improvement in speed and reliability for these sites.

This change will take effect in a couple of days if everything goes smoothly. Users of the sites do not need to do anything on their part. All users have been moved over, so have password and personal stock lists. Pls let me know if there is any problem.