Barry wrote a post about the Top Twenty Finance Blogs according to something called “Valuewiki.” I thought it would be useful to adjust that list based on the age of the blog (authors, please correct me if I got a date wrong):

1. Maoxian | First Post: September 23, 2001
2. The Big Picture (Barry Ritholtz) | First Post: September 18, 2002
3. Trader Mike | First Post: April 2nd, 2003
4. Footnoted | First Post: August 18, 2003
5. The Kirk Report | First Post: September 3, 2003
6. Fat Pitch Financials | First Post: August 12th, 2004
7. Random Roger’s Big Picture | First Post: September 29, 2004
8. Bill Cara | First Post: December 22, 2004
9. Jeff Matthews | First Post: January 11, 2005
10. Crossing Wall Street | First Post: July 11, 2005
11. InvestorGeeks | First Post: October 30, 2005
12. Ticker Sense | First Post: November 9, 2005
13. Gannon On Investing | First Post: December 24, 2005
14. Howard Lindzon | First Post: December 29th, 2005
15. 24/7 Wall St. | First Post: March 7, 2006
16. Stock Market Beat | First Post: March 8, 2006
17. Herb Greenberg’s Market Blog | First Post: June 18, 2006

I threw out Seeking Alpha (David Jackson’s serf-driven content aggregator), Blogging Stocks (a Calcanis Corporation “blog” ?), and Ant & Sons (copy and paste ?) — none of which are blogs as I define them.

I’ve lined up the price of the Shanghai Composite to correspond with the peak of the Internet bubble (as represented by the IIX). When bubbles burst it ain’t pretty, and people who are paying the wrong price for Chinese stocks are going to learn an expensive lesson.

Best bit from an A1 article in today’s WSJ: Stock Frenzy In China Stokes Official Concern:

Regulators say they are increasingly seeing signs that investors… are teaming up with merchants to, in effect, borrow from their credit cards, presumably hoping that stocks will rise enough before the bill comes due to pay off the debt.

The credit-card maneuver typically involves a merchant who agrees — in return for a commission — to process a transaction that allows the cardholder to get cash at a lower cost than a conventional cash advance.

(China still doesn’t permit brokers to offer margin trading, or investing with borrowed funds, to individuals.)

I haven’t heard of this but then again I haven’t been asking around. All the classic signs of a bubble are in place — manicurists giving stock tips, folks borrowing against credit cards to go long, day trading grannies, parabolic price moves, etc. It should get ugly but it’s impossible to short stocks (卖空) here so there’s no easy way for me to cash in on the coming crunch.

Related: How Do You Say Textbook Fibonacci Retracement in Chinese?

For some reason I couldn’t get to wsj.com since the beginning of the year, but today I got through and plowed through three weeks of headlines. I found about three stories that I was interested in reading closely. (I sorely regret re-subscribing to the WSJ for another year.) Here are the key bits from one of them:

“UBS Securities is ready to start business as China’s first full-service brokerage house run by a foreign firm. Their new Chinese venture is armed with a full set of licenses to trade, underwrite securities, manage assets and publish research, among other things. UBS won government approval to set up a securities firm in September 2005, just as China’s securities regulator was closing the door on new foreign ventures. UBS agreed to pay $210 million for a 20% stake in a new brokerage house formed out of the former Beijing Securities, a troubled broker owned by the Beijing municipal government. UBS will have control of the company’s 11-member board of directors without owning the largest slice of stock. UBS is one of six in the buying consortium. The Beijing government is the largest shareholder with 33%, three Chinese state companies each have stakes of 14% and International Finance Corp., the investment arm of the World Bank, has a 4.99% stake. UBS Securities doesn’t have an opening date, and the equity hasn’t yet changed hands. UBS expects it to happen in the first quarter.”

Amusing bit (in bold) from UBS:

“By September 2005, a strategic cooperation agreement had been signed with the Bank of China and Beijing SASAC (State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission), and UBS and The International Finance Corporation (IFC) had received State Council Approval of their plans to restructure Beijing Securities. What at first glance appears an unusually quick implementation of a high-level strategic decision is, in fact, the result of patient investment and a long-term approach.”

“Unusually quick implementation” — this phrase doesn’t even exist in Chinese. ;-)

Article from June 21, 2006: Ahead of rivals, UBS clears step to starting China brokerage

Gleaned from a recent Wall Street Journal article, supplemented with information found here:

• AirAsia | Hub: Kuala Lumpur
• Jetstar Airways | Hub: Singapore
• Oasis Hong Kong Airlines | Hub: Hong Kong
• Orient Thai Airlines | Hub: Bangkok
• Tiger Airways | Hub: Singapore
• Valueair | Hub: Singapore

Best bit from Part III of Barron’s 2007 Roundtable:

Meryl Witmer: For ‘07, Navistar say they will be operating-cash-flow positive. They might have break-even results or worse. The analogy I use in this case is, say, some woman is looking to marry a guy and he just got laid off from his job. Should she assume his earnings power over time is nothing? Or should she assume he will probably get a job in six months or a year?

Art Samberg: Has he started drinking yet?

Meryl Witmer: My point is, one year does not make the company. A company is worth the net present value of its future cash flows. So even if a year is zero, that doesn’t make it worth zero.

I’ve been making Witmer’s argument to my wife for many years now. ;-)

1. Creative Solution to a Problem in Elementary Physics Class (image)

I’d give the student partial credit… and you’d never see this kind of answer in a Chinese school.

2. Engine Failure on Takeoff, Boeing 777 (Photo)

Great shot.

3. Chinese Aircraft Maintenance

There’s some controversy about these pictures, but anyone who lives here would never question their veracity.

4. Weight Watchers Patent

p = c k 1 + f k 2 - r k 3.

5. When driving in China, first know where to spit

Drivers should:

A. Deliberately underestimate each other.

B. Compete for road supremacy.

C. Learn and help each other, adopt one’s strong point while overcoming one’s weak point and keep safely driving.

I don’t drive here and I resent the fact that bikes have utterly lost the battle for road supremacy.

6. David Seah’s Printable CEO™ Series

I’m fascinated by these GTD (Getting Things Done) nutters. They must spend 90% of their time planning and recording the things they do leaving about 10% of the time for actually doing things.

7. Web 2.0 Company Name Generator

“Bubbletag,” I love it. A 2.0 version of Dack’s great web economy bullshit generator.

8. Another Neat Find on Google Maps

Is this just an illusion or was she constructed with a little help?

9. Famous People: Childhood Photos

Proof that Angelina Jolie’s lips are real.

10. Norah Jones, Now in Her Own Words

“If people enjoy the music, great. And if they don’t like it, and they think it’s boring, fine. They don’t get it. But it doesn’t matter anymore if I’m completely understood. Because you’re not going to be. And you’re never going to please everybody, so you shouldn’t try.”

My wife does find Norah Jones’ music incredibly boring, but both baby and I have enjoyed watching her Live in New Orleans DVD about a hundred times.

Quite a few people emailed to thank me for posting Selected Excerpts from The Deep Blue Good-By — there are a lot of Travis McGee fans out there, I guess. Here’s the first part of my selected excerpts from The Quick Red Fox (1964):

“I wondered how many secret, solitary orgasms had been engineered with her in mind.”

“Before you bet, you count what’s in the pot.”

“[She looked] like a fifty-peso floozy in a back-room circus in Juarez.”

“A man likes the illusion of exclusive option, even on the most temporary basis.”

“Bed is the simplest thing two people can do. If it goes with a lot of other things, it can be important, and if it goes with nothing else, it isn’t worth the time it takes.”

“Sexually disturbed people try to be the sword of the Lord, going around slaying the sinful.”

“Holding something alive, warm, sleeping is like handling fresh moist soil under the sun’s heat. Restorative.”

“I felt like a jackass adolescent who’d tried to tell a dirty joke in front of real people.”

“Self-evaluation… is the skin rash of the emotionally insecure.”

“Venus de Milo would have looked like hell in stretch pants.”

“A person can not endure inexplicable worthlessness. So they establish the pattern of proving themselves worthless.”

“I hum sad songs all day without making a single sound.”

“We can defend ourselves from our enemies, and even from our friends, but never from our family.”

“For the soul to be offended it must first exist.”

“He… had the animal’s awareness of something not quite right.”

“[We] sat like dulled passengers in a heavy train sidetracked at the end of noplace.”

“A man like that can’t believe anything that doesn’t sound crooked.”

“[He] looked at me with the concealed anguish of a toothless crocodile inspecting a fat brown dog on the river bank.”

“Ever since the popularization of the Freud-Fraud, we are all addicted to fingering ourselves to see where it hurts, Mommy. With no one to kiss and make well.”

“… it looked as if [his] nose had been hit at least once from every possible direction.”

“All the old pilgrims [to Las Vegas] wore the memory of pain, and were impatient to get to that certain table at that certain place, in time for crucifixion.”

“…[as] dangerous as a prat fall on a bunny slope.”

“Somebody, Hemingway maybe, had a definition of a moral act. It’s something you feel good after.”

“Violence is the stepchild of desperation.”

REITs, Metals, and Materials all had a good week…

… while Biotech got wrecked and Consumer Discretionary and Retail both took it on the chin (shortly after I wrote this, unfortunately).