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Monthly Archives: July 2009

Cninsure: Insurance That Pays Off

July 31, 2009
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Cninsure: Insurance That Pays Off

My stock idea for today has a great-looking chart, good earnings growth and a fine story.  Which means there must be a “Yes, but …” attached.  True. The company is Cninsure (CISG), a fast-growing China-based insurance broker that offers property, casualty and life insurance in 21 Chinese provinces.  The company was founded in 1998, just as the Chinese private sector was really powering up.  Before the switch to capitalism, the Chinese state didn’t have any use for insurance; everything belonged to the state and the state was committed to taking care of people from cradle to grave. But people...

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India IDs Its Citizens

July 30, 2009
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India IDs Its Citizens

Statistics will tell you strange tales, but I ran across one recently that pretty much dropped my jaw.  It was in a story about India’s recent declaration that it’s going to create secure, biometric identity cards (complete with a computer chip containing fingerprints, iris scans, criminal records and credit histories) for every single one of its 1.2 billion citizens.  The intention is for each Indian citizen to have a unique number and for all of this information to be linked in government computers, forming one of the largest databases ever created. The goal is to begin issuing the new...

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Bill Gates, Richard Feynman and Tuva

July 30, 2009
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Bill Gates, Richard Feynman and Tuva

Two weeks ago I saw a little news item:  Bill Gates had succeeded in acquiring the rights to the films of some classic lectures on physics by Richard Feynman and was making them available free, for all the world to see. Who was Richard Feynman? As a child, not so impressive–he didn’t speak a word until he was three.  But he mastered differential calculus when he was 15, earned a bachelor’s degree from MIT and then a doctorate from Princeton. He was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project, but the bulk of his career was spent in academia,...

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Duoyuan Global Water: A High-Potential “Liquid” Stock

July 29, 2009
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Duoyuan Global Water: A High-Potential “Liquid” Stock

My stock idea today takes its cue from water. Good old H2O. Water is a daily requirement of all living things, and the earth has a limited supply. So as the world’s population increases, proper management of water resources becomes increasingly critical. And where are both the population and the use of water increasing especially fast? China. So my idea today is a very young stock, which came public on June 24 and just earned a spot in Cabot Top Ten Report. It’s Duoyuan Global Water (DGW), and here’s what editor Michael Cintolo wrote: “Duoyuan Water is a leading...

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ResMed: Not Your Ordinary Health Care Company

July 28, 2009
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ResMed: Not Your Ordinary Health Care Company

My featured stock today is a health care company that has created its own unique niche. I have studied the company’s sales and earnings trends. I have read about management’s strategies, goals, and plans for the future. I am confident that I could put all my money into this stock, because the outcome is obvious: the stock will be a winner! In fact, I like it so much that it was featured in the May edition of Cabot Benjamin Graham Value Letter, of which I am the editor. ResMed (RMD) designs, manufactures and distributes medical equipment and supplies to...

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