Tuesday, 24 April 2007

growth in topline and bottom line

I checked the past performance of China infrastructure machinery holdings (3339), the stock price has surged 400% last year. The one key performance of this company is a resonable topline growth can result a significantly higher bottom increase. E.g. in 2006 the sales increase 38%, the underlying profit increaed 109%. Again it's about the fixed cost and increase of gross margin.

Fixed cost may make the company more operationaly risky but it also give investor much better result of sales increase, because it will generate a much higher profit growth.

Company with very big sales and low gross margin may be a very good investment choice. A very slighly improvement in topline will give a huge return to investors.

Checks the past performance of companies and try to look for companies' performace has such parten i.e. resonable growth in topling result a massive increase in bottom line.

Two lessons today

Lesson one, don't touch those high PE stock. Today 210 primce sucess decrease 25%, because the the annual result is only 15% growth, much below the market expectation. The PE was around 60. For a stock with high PE, there is no any safety room if the company fail to deliver. Altough the company is in a sound position the share is still very risky.

Today I also sold off a position in one stock, the stock is 10% below the pruchase price due to the new share issues. Although the compan's business looks positive, in short medium term you cannot expect the share price go up after a dillusion effect of 10%. Before make any purchase decision always check the cash position and previous capital expenditure (possibly level or working capital). If the company doesn't have enough cash they have to raise the finance one way or another, and for those company it might not be the best time to buy those shares. If really believe in their business, buy in after the share issues

Monday, 23 April 2007

bond and inflation

An artical from bloomberg

A few point want to make

1) the annualised return from a treasury bill even beats the S&P return from 1984 to 2006, it is in high 10s

2) The US government issued a treasury bill with 20% coupon rate

3) Possibly this is what going to happen again, with hyper inflation rate a high yield government bonds will be issued
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In Case You Missed It: Charts Show Bond Rally Is Over (Update1)
By Elizabeth Stanton
April 23 (Bloomberg) -- The biggest bull market in U.S. Treasury bonds is over, according to the analysts who rely on historical price patterns to make their assumptions.
The proof that it now pays to be bearish can be found in financial futures based on the government's 4 3/4 percent bond maturing in 2037, a benchmark for the 22-year, 11-month rally that began in May 1984 and ended on April 6, says John Kosar, president of Asbury Research in Lake in the Hills, Illinois. That's when the price of 30-year Treasury bonds for delivery on the Chicago Board of Trade fell below 110 20/32 and signaled a new direction for the market, he said.
The turning point was so obvious that even ``a five-year- old who has a ruler and a pencil can draw a line under the lows and make a determination'' that bond yields have bottomed and are poised to climb for many years to come.
While former traders like Kosar don't get much respect in academic circles, they insist their charts confirm what some investors already know: ``that inflation is the issue,'' he said.
The Federal Reserve's preferred measure of inflation, the price index for personal consumption expenditures excluding food and energy, has been 2 percent or higher since April 2004. In the previous eight years, it topped that level during only six months. Core inflation was as high as 4.7 percent in 1984 when 30-year bond yields rose to 13.9 percent.
Twin Deficits
``There have been only three reversals into rising rate cycles in the last 200 years; we are in the fourth,'' said Louise Yamada, the former chief technical analyst at Citigroup Inc. who now runs Louise Yamada Technical Research Advisors LLC in New York. Yamada, who started as a technical analyst at Smith Barney in 1980 and was top ranked in Institutional Investor magazine's annual survey from 2001 through 2004, says that while previous bull markets in U.S. bonds ranged from 26 to 37 years, the most recent one was the biggest.
Investors who bought Treasuries in 1981 reaped almost twice the returns as those who bet on the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.
Bill Gross, who manages the world's biggest bond fund as chief investment officer of Newport Beach, California-based Pacific Investment Management Co., says yields must rise in coming decades to attract the foreign capital needed to finance record federal budget and trade deficits.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the deficit will widen to $304 billion in fiscal 2009. The gap in goods and services traded totaled $58.4 billion in February. A 1 percentage point increase in the deficit as a share of gross domestic product, lasting for three years, adds as much as 0.5 percentage point to 10-year note yields, according to a 2005 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Volcker, Greenspan
Peter G. Peterson, the chairman of Blackstone Group LP, saw the same outcome in his 2004 book ``Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It,'' published by Picador Books (241 pages, $15.00). Peterson in 1992 co-founded the Concord Coalition, a group advocating lower budget deficits.
The rally began on Oct. 1, 1981, after Fed Chairman Paul Volcker boosted the central bank's target for overnight lending rates to a peak of 20 percent to stem inflation that was running at a 14 percent annual rate. The yield on the benchmark 30-year Treasury rose as high as 15.21 percent on Oct. 26, 1981.
Treasuries gained through the 1980s and 1990s as Volcker and his successor Alan Greenspan brought consumer price increases under control. Greenspan reduced inflation below 4 percent.
`The Competitive Market'
The 13 1/4 percent bond due in 2014 that the government sold on May 15, 1984, returned an annualized 24 percent. The S&P 500 returned 13 percent, including dividends, during the same period. Bonds gained more than shares of Motorola Inc., DuPont Co. and Duke Energy Corp.
Foreign investors and central banks also drove down U.S. yields by doubling their holdings of Treasuries to $2.1 trillion in the five years ended February, according to Treasury Department data.
``It's the triumph of the competitive market,'' said Edward Yardeni, who coined the term ``bond vigilantes'' in 1983 to describe investors who protest monetary or fiscal policies they consider inflationary by selling bonds and driving up government borrowing costs. He now heads Yardeni Research Inc. in Great Neck, New York.
`Greatest Bear Market'
Yamada in 2001 correctly predicted 10-year Treasury yields would range between 3.5 percent and 5.5 percent for several years and has been right so far this year in forecasting that gold prices would rise.
The benchmark 4 5/8 percent 10-year note was 4.66 percent as of 11:15 a.m. in London, according to New York-based bond broker Cantor Fitzgerald LP.
The three previous shifts from declining rates to rising ones in the 206-year history of U.S. yields lasted two to 14 years, Yamada said. She analyzes trends using a mixture of interest-rates on foreign loans to the republic in the late 1700s, yields on New England municipal bonds in the 19th century, and high-quality corporate and Treasury yields in the past 100 years.
The rise in bond yields from 1946 to 1981 ``was the modern world's greatest bear market in bond prices,'' said James Grant, publisher of Grant's Interest Rate Observer in New York. The decline in yields to four-decade lows in June 2003 ``began what may prove to be another long-lived march upward, and will probably carry longer and further than people can imagine.''
`Pedestal With Alchemy'
Technical analysis was used by rice farmers in 17th-century Japan to monitor and forecast crop prices. It was popularized by Charles Dow, creator of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896. Technical analysis is based on the theory that a chart of the price of any asset or index contains clues about future movements.
Burton Malkiel, a Princeton University professor, criticized chart analysis more than thirty years ago. In his 1973 best-seller, ``A Random Walk Down Wall Street,'' published by W.W. Norton & Co. (414 pages, $19.77), he wrote that ``under scientific scrutiny chart reading must share a pedestal with alchemy.'' Malkiel was traveling and didn't respond to a request to comment.
``Whether the blue line crosses the red line matters very little to us at Hoisington Management,'' said Lacy Hunt, chief economist at the Austin, Texas-based firm. Hoisington oversees almost $5 billion of Treasuries and has beaten the Lehman Brothers Aggregate Bond index by 2.5 percentage points a year on average over the past five years.
Resume Decline
Hunt says Treasury yields will resume their decline, pushing 30-year bond yields to a record low of 3.5 percent in the coming years as economic growth slows in response to the Fed's 17 interest rate increases since June 2004.
Some chart readers say the rally in Treasuries ended two years ago. A line drawn from the 10-year note's yield peak of 15.8 percent in September 1981 through the December 1999 high of about 6.9 percent was broken as the yield rose in August 2005.
``When I go out to a client I bring a long-term chart like that,'' said Walter Burke, a technical market strategist at Merrill Lynch & Co. in New York. It ``certainly indicates the trend is trying to change.''

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Sunday, 22 April 2007

more about convertable and chaoda

after I sold the shares in chaoda, the share price increased. looks like I over estimate the impact of the convertable bonds

1) excluding the loos due to fair value of convertable bonds, the underlying business in chaoda actually performed better

2)At the time I sold the shares the PE is very low at 9, even all the convertables dillusion took into account the fully dilluted PE is still 9.9 not very demanding

3)The company sold the convertables last year, the market actually have already priced in the convertable dillusion effect.

Lession: Look the underlying business of the company, financing cost usually is not as important as underlying business

Thursday, 22 March 2007

CONVERTABLE BOND和STOCK PRICE

今天看了超大国际2007 年的INTERIM REPORT决定卖出超大国际了. 超大是一家种蔬菜和批发的公司,GROSS MARGIN很高的一家公司, 因为CUT了所有的MIDDLE MAN.我买进的时候PE也很低,而且公司发展很快,租用种菜的土地在2006年比2005年增长了40%. 但是我买如的原因

1) 2006 年报显示公司的SALES增长很快,因为土地多了,种的和卖的菜也多.不过PROFIT没增加,因为FINANCE COST在2006年比2005年增加很多, 公司为了买地发了10来亿的CONVERTABLE BONDS.当时我就想FINANCE COST应该是FIXED COST,随着SALES的增长PROFT MARGIN也会更快的增长.

2)第二个原因是每亩的产量在2006年比2005年少了很多,当时我想是因为新土地太多(土地增长了40%), 第2年的时候新土地产量因为和旧土地一样,产量就会大增.而且蔬菜又不愁卖,SALES肯定大加.

看了2007年的INTERM决定卖了,理由如下

1) 因为超大容资用的CONVERTABLE BONDS,而不是一般的LOAN,所以FINANCE COST不是固定的. 2007年INTERIM的时候超大的LOSS ON FAIR VALUE OF CONVERTABLE BONDS有100M. CONVETABLE BONDS要VALUE它有2个部分一个是BOND, 另外一个部分是WARRANTS. WARRANTS的价值肯定是随着股票价值增加,所以股票价格越高,CONVERTABLE 价值越高,那末FAIR VALUE LOSS也更高. FINANCE COST是会随着股票价值增加而增加. 按照超大的发CONVERTABLE的AGREEMENT,如果所有的CONVERTABLE都转成股票了,那末OUTSTANDING SHARE会增加10%. 这个DILLUSION EFFECT也决定个股票的RISK.股票一定长到一定程度,CONVERTABLE变股票,股票价格一下就下来了.

2) 这个公司虽然GROSS MARGIN还是比较高,OPERATION MARGIN却低了很多.ADMIN EXPENSESS增加太快.公司在COST CONTROL上面问题太多.

3)每亩产量没有提高,原因为什么不知道.但是感觉公司好象也没能力提高每亩的产量.

4)最重要的一点的,感觉公司的MANAGEMENT是想把公司做大.一下发那么多CONVERTABLE圈钱买地,公司这几年一直是NEGATIVE CASH FLOW. MANAGEMENT没有FOCUS到PROFITABLITIY. 整个MANAGEMENT没有考虑到MINORITY SHAREHOLDER的INTERESTS. 发那么多CONVERTABLE就是根本上是把SHARE HOLDER的INTERESTS转移给了CONVERTABLE HOLDERS.

Wednesday, 28 February 2007

股灾的一点感想

2月27,2007。 中国股市以下跌了10%,居然全球的股市都跟着跌了。Dow 跟着跌了3%。真没想到中国的股市现在这莫有影响力了,不过我个人感觉还是股市都好了4年了,人人的神经都开始紧张了,一下有了点动静人人都开始抛了。我个人还是不大觉得这次是股灾了,2月28也就是今天上海股市又涨了3%。等这个星期过了后就知道大概的影响有多大了。

不过这也算是我的第一次小股灾了,portfolio从150跌到了142。也学到点了东西

1)以前升得猛的跌得也猛
像以前狂升的1171,2345这次也是跌得最厉害的。 以前没怎莫波动的股票这次也没受很多影响。特别是那些平时交易量就不大的股票,这次也没什莫影响。像610这种没被FUND粘手的这次都没怎莫动。 这也印证了PETER LYNCH说的还没被fund发现的好股有最好的return.

2)炒概念的股票还是不要碰了
像2345这种完全是炒asset injection的股票以后还是不碰了,说不定哪天就破

3)投资还是要看公司的FUNDEMENTAL
这次很多买的公司我其实也不紧张,像135。如果是被UNDERVALUED的公司总有一天会涨得。

4)高PE的公司还是少碰
这次210也跌了不少,公司本身其实还是满好的,不过pe也很高,人人对他的EXPECTATION也高。这种公司波动也大,以后还是要小心

通过这一次我认识到了买股票真的要买FUNDEMENTAL,而且是要被UNDERVALUED。一定要对买进的每只股票有了解,作一个真正的value investor.

以后买股票PE上了25的不买,一定要了解公司的FUNDEMENTAL,不要去炒概念,像什莫ASSET INJECTION,新的法规出台压这种。这些东西到底有多少能落到实处,又能什莫时候落到实处都是未知。

Sunday, 25 February 2007

yanzhou coal another COSCO? Ref (行业复苏)

Yanzhou coal now trading at 7.9 about a 24% return, but now UBS report give the target price of 10.4. Now is yanzhou coal another COSCO? Does history repeat so quickly now?

1) Coal price is up
It's also a sort of turnaround for the industry. And given yanzhou coal's cost is more than its peers, the increase a goal price should have a greater impact on the bottom line. E.g. two factories both produce coals, one use 80 and another use 60 to produce one unit. When price is 100, profit for two is 20 and 40 respectivly. If price increase to 120, profit for two is 40 and 60, one is an increase of 100% another is an increse of 50%. Therefore yanzhou coal should benefits more from the increase in the coal price than its peers.

2) Fundemental is not that good for yanzhou coal
Yanzhou coal has some production problems recent years, not sure if it's one off issue or not. Although UBS target price is 10.4, it also forcast an decrease in profit of 12% or so.

3)Market attention
Yanzhou coal also has the market attention as COSCO had, the price has increased 3% while market as whole was falling last friday.

Is yanzhou coal another COSCO for me? Everything is so smiliar except that the fundemental for yanzhou coal is not as good as COSCO. However given the market attention and recent performance of the stock price, I tend to believe yanzhou coal is another COSCO for me. Am I right this time? Only time will tell, let's wait for about 2 weeks to one month and see if the yanzhou coal can reach $9.5.