International Investing

Slates Daniel Gross explains this offbeat indicator:
The financial results of these testosterone-filled cow palaces reveal much about several trends affecting the U.S. economy.
…
But as the year unfolds, steak stocks become more like leading indicators. If profits are humming, M&E budgets are in rude health, and prospects look good, you’d expect businesspeople to use steakhouses for [...]

Bloomberg News recently reported an increase in Chinese interest rates from, “0.18 percentage point and its one-year deposit rate by 0.27 percentage point”
Why not the standard 25/50 basis point increases like every other central bank in the world?
The answer has to do with the Chinese calendar and superstition, as well as the ancient Asian counting [...]

From the WSJ:
Tamas Bencze got a rude surprise when he ripped open his mortgage statement last summer. In just two months, the payment on his three-bedroom home here had jumped 10%.
“My wife looked at our mortgage and asked me, ‘What’s happening?’” he says.
Mr. Bencze got burned playing a risky game: He had taken out a [...]

By exchanging his options for shares Steve Jobs cost himself over $4 billion. Yahoo has the details:
As of Friday, 5/25/07, Apple is trading for $112 per share. Therefore the value of the 10,000,000 shares assuming he still owned them all would be $1.12 billion.
However the value of the options would be far greater had he [...]

With more competition than ever, hedge funds are investing in ever more risky and exotic items.
This Dirk Pitt style find of $500 million in gold has made some hedge fund investors rich:
The once-in-a-lifetime find is reportedly valued somewhere around $500 million and is fetching some pretty hefty dividends for a lot of the hedge funds [...]

An interesting read about a market in a complete bubble frenzy:
Chinese have combined a traditional delight in word-play with their new-found passion for stocks to create a rich supply of colloquial jargon for investing that is bandied around brokerage offices.
“Ghost shares” are highly risky, but “black horses” have beaten expectations. Buying cheap to sell high [...]

Thanks to Chris Masse for the pointer. The chart is from TickerSense.

Imagine the pressure to pad when earnings are coming up short:
Australian class action law firm Slater & Gordon was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange on Monday, making it the first law firm in the world to go public. The firm’s principals and initial investors made a tidy profit in the first day of trading, [...]

From the digg spammers over at the consumerist:
Using a back-tested paper portfolio and an actual case, the authors of a study published in the Journal of Marketing found that companies at the top 20% of the the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) greatly outperformed the the stock market, generating a 40% return.
From 1996-2003, the portfolio [...]

The rule for all of these scams is this: We are never deceived, we only deceive ourselves.
Here is a Washington Post article on the top ten list which is missing a link to the real list. You can find the list here.
My favorite — and I use that word sarcastically — is the “prime bank [...]