Kathy Yakal wrote up footnoted.org in the Electronic Investor column this week. Michelle’s excellent blog has long been on my A-list.

Here are the bits I found interesting in this week’s issue of Barron’s:

“Monsanto’s flagship product, Roundup, is the No. 1 herbicide. The company estimates that over 70% of the world’s insect-resistant and herbicide-resistant crops bear its stamp.” — Shirley Lazo

“New demand for commercial aircraft is coming mainly from Asia, particularly from India and China, where airline deregulation is spurring a big travel boom. Asia as a whole is expected to remain strong, with China’s air traffic forecast to grow at 8.5% a year over the next 20 years, nearly double the average world rate.” — Jay Palmer

“Venezuela is America’s second-largest foreign supplier of refined petroleum products …. The United States of America is the world’s largest energy producer, consumer and net importer. Yet, it ranks 11th worldwide in reserves of oil and sixth in natural gas. The U.S. ranks first only in coal reserves.” — John Licata

“The Palestinian Stock Exchange… happens to sport the best returns in the region — a whopping 310% year-to-date gain. What would likely surprise American investors even more is that the PSE, which now has a market capitalization of around $5 billion, is as big or bigger than stock markets in seven of the 10 new European Union members, including Slovakia and Lithuania…. the PSE’s Website is www.p-s-e.com.”
– Vito Racanelli

“Today, just 40% of visitors stay one night in a hotel in Macau — so few that, tellingly, Wynn and MGM are building hotels with just 600 rooms each. Were every visitor to spend the night, the city would need 20,000 additional hotel rooms, up from 9,000 now, reckons CLSA Asia Pacific Markets, a research firm. Two nights: 50,000 more. …. CLSA Asia Pacific Markets expects visitor arrivals, which totaled 16.7 million last year, to surge to 35.2 million in 2010. A key: 100 million people live within a three-hour drive, and some are swiftly getting richer.” — Leslie Norton

“Irving Kahn will be 100 this Monday …. He’s in the office every business day, reading scientific periodicals, annual reports and newspapers in search of undervalued stocks …. In warm weather, he walks the mile from his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to the firm’s offices on Madison Avenue and 55th Street. On a cold recent afternoon, this reporter rode on a city bus with Kahn from his office to his home. Although his firm would gladly pick up the tab for a car service, Kahn finds the $25 cost ‘obscene,’ relative to the senior-citizen bus fare of $1 …. ‘Irving is a voracious reader. He reads several newspapers a day, plus numerous scientific journals’ …. ‘The thing that makes our style different from the typical firm is that we read much more broadly outside Wall Street on subjects like science and technology to locate trends that are not obvious,’ Irving says. ‘One reason that it’s hard for many people to manage money is that they’re influenced by what other people do. Buffett’s not like that’ …. ‘My dad says he doesn’t have time to read fiction,’ Tom Kahn says. ‘I remember as a kid he would come home with a briefcase full of annual reports. His business is his hobby. He doesn’t play golf or bridge, and he gave up tennis a while ago.’” — Andrew Bary

“The economy in this country appears to be slowing. But that doesn’t mean it is slowing every place in the world and the big shift in our view is to think about the United States as being a part of the world economy …. As the world matures, the first thing developing countries need is raw materials. The next thing they need is some form of infrastructure technology …. Much of what state capitalism is paying for is real basic: clean water, electricity and roads. And a lot of the participants are U.S. capital goods or cyclical companies …. [explaining ‘intermodal integration’]: if you go to Target and buy something, Target sends the dollars back to China and China sends the dollars back to the Treasury and the merchandise is put together in China, the container comes across the Pacific and is offloaded on the West Coast, picked up in its container by the railroad. The railroad takes it to a distribution area where it is sorted out and truckers pick it up and take it to the various Target or Wal-Mart centers or whatever. At that point, the merchandise is broken up further and sent to whatever store needs certain items, say, for Christmas …. You have to think of this increasing worldwide trade as a super logistics play.” — Interview with Susan Byrne by Sandra Ward [I love the line: ‘Target sends the dollars back to China and China sends the dollars back to the Treasury.’
Susan Byrne is sharp and clearly “gets it.”]

Copyright © 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.