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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (45832)	2/8/2004 4:54:12 AM
From: Seeker of Truth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Hello Jay, thanks for your fascinating epistle. Though you speak of real estate as "not too exciting" and "not thrilling" it seems to me that your ventures in that direction are eminently successful. Sometimes you have described yourself as "terrified" and maybe that's the greatest fun for you, jumping out of the way of disaster and incidentally collecting some profit as you leap. Real estate is neither sold nor bought instantly as stocks are. About stocks, the tax regime in Hong Kong fashions or allows your frequent portfolio shifts. If you were penalized with a capital gains tax of 26% each time you jumped out of stock A into stock B, you wouldn't be so mobile. Your response to crisis wouldn't be with all your resources, because so much of them would be locked in by the prospect of delaying payment to the government since if you don't sell you don't get taxed. There is a moral thread; you speak of "undeserved" gains. We are raised to work hard and to know that only as a result of great effort does anything good result. But it seems that profits to be had are way in excess of the effort involved, not a result of hard work but of isolating yourself from the main stream, "lonely path the right way". So the conscience reminds one that this was not achieved in a "deserving" manner. Booms arise when something important suddenly becomes quite cheaper than before. CISCO made communications drastically cheaper, enter the communications boom of the 90's. What's suddenly cheaper now? Hardworking, disciplined labour, i.e. Chinese or Indian(English speaking Indians). Cheap communications made communication back and forth to India a lot more feasible so the English speaking desk labour of India suddenly became available in all its low price. China's government changed its hostile attitude to capitalism so all of a sudden really hard working Chinese factory labour appeared as a result of this policy change. We have even reached the opening stage of outsourcing R & D to China. Aside from buying Chinese shares there must be many smart smallish out of China companies which are joining their special know how with Chinese labour. It's a task to find them.