Gold, Biotech and Energy outperformed…

… while Semiconductors (again) and Financials were relative underperformers. The Semiconductor HOLDR (SMH) was listed on June 5, 2000 — just in time to destroy everyone who invested in it.

Nowadays I always bookmark an article I like to delicious. Frequently I use the Google Toolbar “Send To” function to save the same article in my Gmail “database.” And lastly I often want to Digg the article if I think it deserves it. Shouldn’t I be able to do all three things with a single click? Why do I have to futz around doing these things separately?

Again, if I knew anything about programming, I’d write a little thing that would accomplish all three tasks with a single click.

Posco, South Korea’s largest steel maker, was among the 17 largest equity holdings in Buffett’s portfolio as of the end of 2006, alongside one other Asian stock, PetroChina, China’s largest oil company. Berkshire Hathaway paid $572 million for a 4% stake in Posco. In 2002, Berkshire paid $488 million to accumulate a 1.3% stake in PetroChina.

Related: Buy China, Hold America, Short Europe (April 30, 2003)

Just found this great Buffett quote while rummaging around in the maoxian archives… it’s astonishing how much good stuff is buried somewhere on this site. ;-)

“Markets are there to serve you, not to instruct you. You can often find a couple of companies that are out of line. Find one; get rich. Most people think that what the stock does from day to day contains information, but it doesn’t. It isn’t just something that wiggles around. The stock market is the best game in the world. You can take advantage of people who have no morals. High prices inside of a year will typically be 100% of the low price. Businesses don’t change in value that much. That is simply crazy. There are extreme degrees of fluctuation, and Mr. Market will call out the prices. Wait until he is nutty in one direction or the other.”

I think there are precious few canned screens on the Bloomberg for finding stock trading ideas. There’s one called “LVI” (Largest Volume Increase) which is just a simple screen comparing today’s or yesterday’s volume with a 1-, 5-, 20-, or 90-day average of volume, ranked by percentage change. It screens by exchange but doesn’t offer China’s, though it does have HK’s, Taiwan’s, etc.

I think the deal with the Bloomberg is that everyone builds scanners and other tools (usually in Excel?) that use the feed. I was looking at the fields available through their API: a mere 25,000 or so (including 246 real time fields). Impressive.

I should have taken the money spent on business school and leased a Bloomberg terminal and explored it for fourteen months instead. With the savings, I could have gone to night school at DeVry in New Brunswick and learned how to program instead. In other words, I could have done something useful and productive, instead of getting a stupid MBA. Live and learn. (My son will know better.)

I was just confirming my beneficiary information at Vanguard and re-wrote their “why you should confirm these details” blurb to give myself a chuckle:

It’s important that you review your beneficiaries and keep them current, particularly when you experience a major life event, such as death, that could affect your beneficiaries.

I’m not sure how many people share my sense of humor.

Weak market, bad day for all the stocks I already think are cheap. But as we know, cheap often gets cheaper. I have a limit order in to buy some of the Homebuilders SPDR (XHB). Don’t know if it will ever come to Papa, but I’m patient.

Last night I saw the low budget monster movie from Korea, The Host (92% Fresh!), with one of my girlfriends. It was in Chinese so I probably only caught 80% of the dialogue, but I still found it very funny.

J. Hoberman’s review
Stephen Hunter’s review

Afterwards at dinner my companion made a very interesting observation (not related to the movie). She said that because change has been so rapid in China these last 25 years, the generation gaps appear in about half the normal time, which she figured to be about 15 years. So young people in China who are a mere seven or so years apart can’t relate at all to one another. Darned interesting, I thought. I value brains over beauty, but like all my girfriends, she has both.

Does anyone know if you can share New Worksheet (NW) layouts from the Bloomberg? These are the default five they offer, but I’d like to see and share different people’s creations. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. ;-)

Why we read (and re-read) J.D. Salinger:

“She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing.”

From: A Perfect Day for Bananafish