Like New Oriental, I think of Ctrip (CTRP) as a no-brainer investment. It’s a play on private consumption and the emerging middle class in China. Annualized returns of over 50% since issue, and I think it has a lot of room to grow.

(All my old posts on Ctrip are stuck in blog purgatory but I hope to get them out later this week once I find someone who can help.)

I noticed that New Oriental (EDU) is within striking distance of its all-time high. All my old posts on EDU are trapped in blog purgatory, but I think long-time readers will remember my praising this stock as a no-brainer for years now (similar to Ctrip (CTRP)).

Chinese people value education and are all racing to get ahead / get rich quick. Generally very frugal, the Chinese will spend huge money on education. There aren’t many ways to play this, but EDU is one of them.

I bought this stock when it came public and haven’t sold a share.

It’s been awhile since I made an unsolicited product placement post, but baby T (who is now five) and I are huge fans of Schleich animal figurines. He has a bunch that surround the edge of the tub to play with at bath time. The detail and quality of craftsmanship are first-rate, as you’d expect from the Germans. If you have small children, I recommend starting a little Schleich zoo for them.

Here’s his white tiger:

For a long time I bragged that my system sold Natural Gas (UNG) at the end of July 2008 when it was 43.09. Then at the end of December 2009, nearly a year and a half later, it said go long, so subscribers and I promptly bought at 10.50. Then at the end of January 2010 it said oops, get out, so we sold at 9.68. Didn’t brag about that smooth move.

I was stupid to get in when I did but I was smart to cut my losses since UNG last traded at 8.06. As David Ricardo (died 1823) was fond of saying, you have to let your profits run on and cut short your losses.

One of my better moves of late was getting long the regional banks (KRE) at the end of last year. Subscribers and I are still up in the genius zone on this position (we have 23 open longs currently, including oil and gold, with 21 in the genius zone).

I doubt there are many trend-following systems that noted a change of trend in KRE last December, but mine did.

Folks have been asking me for my thoughts on crude oil. I follow USO for my newsletter and subscribers and I have been long it since last October. You can see that our entry was just about as bad they come. The difference between me and other gurus is that I’m honest and tend to highlight my mistakes. This also explains why I don’t have thousands of subscribers.

Anyway, the good news is the system is saying sit tight and the losses aren’t awful (yet). After reading this post, if you’d inexplicably still like to subscribe to my weekly newsletter, just drop me a line for details.

It’s hard to be bearish on Chinese real estate when I look at the stock chart of a developer like Winsan. This company is not covered by any Western investment research firm as far as I can tell, just like hundreds and hundreds of other listed companies here in China.

I have the Beijing Edition of Monopoly. Their choices for what local properties to use to populate the board interest me. For Boardwalk they use the Central Business District (CBD). Park Place is Chaoyang Park. Using Monopoly logic, both areas should hold up well in a bust, right?

I was reminded this week to take a look at the performance of my trend-following system for gold (GLD), and the answer is: it stinks. It’s true that it caught chunks of the big swing in late 2007 into mid 2008, but besides that it has just chopped around. I bet this is the case for everyone who has tried to trade gold off the weekly charts.

I’d wager $20 that no one can show me an audited trading record for any system that has traded GLD since its inception that has beaten simply buying and holding GLD since then.

UPDATE: GLD is up around 150% over the last five years, which is just over 20% annualized.

Here’s a chart showing our current GLD entry. Remember that I put my own money behind every idea in my newsletter and I too bought gold back in early November 2009. If you’d like to become a subscriber, just drop me a line for details.

I’m looking to buy shares of Chinese commercial farmers, but haven’t had the time to do proper research and find them. I looked through the “farming & fishing” subsector stocks that are held by MOO (an ETF I follow in my newsletter, which we have been long since December 2008).

It’s interesting to me that only two of the baker’s dozen stocks listed here are incorporated in the United States (Monsanto and The Andersons).

UPDATE: I got a chance to screen for Farming & Fishing sector stocks in China and came up with this list (click screenshot to enlarge it). I’m not going to think too hard about it and will stick around US$25,000 across these ~40 names next week.