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Monthly Archives: March 2011

Sentiment Analysis: The Third Leg of the Table

March 30, 2011
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Sentiment Analysis: The Third Leg of the Table

Over the last few months, my monthly contributions to Cabot Wealth Advisory have focused on ways to use options and ways to lower risk. One of the simplest ways to use options is to buy a call option on a stock that you think is going to go higher or to buy a put option on a stock that you think is going to go lower. But how do you determine which stocks to buy calls and puts on? Most people use either fundamental analysis or technical analysis. Fundamental analysis includes things like price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios, return-on-equity (ROE) and...

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Revolutionizing Restaurant Reservations

March 29, 2011
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Today I want to discuss a company in a seemingly mundane industry, restaurant reservations, with a revolutionary business model. The company is OpenTable (OPEN) and it’s made waves with its online tool that allows diners to reserve a table at a restaurant without having to pick up the phone. The company, which has been around since 1998, currently has 20,000 restaurant customers in the U.S. and collects a $1 fee from diners seated from its website and 25 cents if the reservation comes through the restaurant’s website. The company also gets about 10% of reservations from mobile devices. (I’ve...

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Get a Job, Chinese Edition

March 28, 2011
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Supply and demand is very much what 51job (JOBS), the Chinese employment and human resources services company is all about. When 51job was founded in the 1990s, finding a job (or an employee, for that matter) meant checking the listings in a weekly employment newspaper. The company excelled at getting employment news out and still publishes millions of paper copies of its recruitment newsletter every week in the 16 Chinese cities it covers. But the real action now is at 51job.com, the company’s website. The site has over 45 million registered members and a database of 36 million résumés....

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All the News That’s Fit to Purchase

March 27, 2011
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For years, traditional print media outlets have tried to figure out a way to make money online. As they’ve watched their print ad sales plummet and been unable to recoup those losses in Web ad sales, some have turned to digital subscriptions. The New York Times has announced that it will begin instituting a paywall for heavy online users starting on Monday. The first 20 articles you read a month on its website will be free, but if you want more, you’ll have to pay extra. Home delivery subscribers will have full, free access to everything the Times offers...

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Rare and Expensive

March 26, 2011
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Rare and Expensive

As the editor of Cabot China & Emerging Markets Report, I keep a very close eye on what’s happening in the Middle Kingdom. So I can follow the Chinese government’s attempts to guide their economic and social juggernaut toward prosperity while maintaining stability and protecting both the environment and their own jobs. Inflation has been the big story for the past couple of weeks, as China’s February Producer Price Index (PPI) rose 7.2%, which was the biggest jump since October 2008. I’ve written before about the delicate balancing act of keeping the growth of China in the sweet spot,...

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