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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Seeker of Truth who wrote (35822)	6/16/2008 1:34:45 PM
From: RJA_	Respond to of 217487

>> 20 years from now, the energy crisis will be over and Elmatador, Tobago Jack, Energy Play will be chatting about real estate and gold. Perhaps we will have a world currency system linked to gold, and it will be taken for granted, like the air we breathe, or the water fish swim in... and there will be no need to chat about it, either. If we can get over this, and the populations problem, could be a very pleasant aquarian age. Best wishes for the future!

To: Seeker of Truth who wrote (35822)	6/16/2008 1:48:09 PM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 217487

20 years from no BRIC's economies will be 1/2 the G6 overtaking them by late 2030's. It will be a brave new world. Before that we will build a new economic world order.

To: Seeker of Truth who wrote (35822)	6/16/2008 5:13:11 PM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217487

hello seeker, <<Oil, coal, natural gas>> a friend just amazon-ed me a book about the end of oil. even though i had figured carbon will get truly tight, i had never considered the facts in any organized fashion. a passing glance at the news headlines does not qualify as a serious review of the matter. i thank the friend. <<real estate>> interesting happening in this arena where i have chosen to build a way to invest spare cash as well as a possible business. what seems to work, so far, focusing on (following constitutes a draft of an eventual update following completion of renovations and commencement of leasing acts) (i) renovate small old building in mature urban center heavy traffic location - rent may be 2.4x-ed to 3x-ed depending on existing lease contract age of the tenants thrown on to the street - gold citadel club is doing so on a building purchase april 2007, and if the building is located just so on a block, strategically blocking others from redevelopment, all the better 7.7% net yield on total cost may soon be, but alas, a bummer, mark to market capital value went up by 80%, so yield on mark-to-market can only be 4.47%. renovation should complete in another 50 days so leasing effort can commence. in an environment where income tax is low at 15.5% and cap gain tax is 0.0%, not bad, almost a no-brainer, and sure beats bank deposit at 0.01% annulized daily call rate and at 0.7% annulaized 2-years fixed deposit :0) besides, the stuff is liquid enough to be considered near-cash. when and if the stuff goes illiquid, a suggestion to myself, buy more. (ii) renovate or just own small ocean-view apartments in gentrified neighborhood with own community of upscale restaurants, bars, and mass touristy nick knack shops, of good addresses, but neither of prime of the low density lower upper low density housing nearby nor of the upper lower proletariat high density hovels also nearby, priced to extract the reasonable sum from – say for example, a “director - origination controller - pacific rim” of a regional office of a global i-bank around 35 years old and trying to save some money, and, say the sort of 40 year olds who are just starting an independent money management career after having worked for years within large firms. while these folks maybe married and have kids, the spouse and kids do not live with them for any number of good and bad reasons. the rental yields range between 4.7 to 6.1% depending on state of original purchase (stuff requiring renovation yields more). two recent such purchases of the club just resulted the first to be rented out starting july 1st at 4.7% yield to a director – origination controller – pacific rim, whatever that job is, and the second unit to (80% probability) be rented to a new hedge fund manager after completion of renovation on sept 1st. an interesting happening, on the first unit, the original vendor wishes to buy back the property at 5.56% premium to her original selling price, with 5% accounting for the cost of all-inclusive closing and stamp duty and such, and 0.56% for the trouble of having owned the unit for a full month. seller’s regret :0) another interesting happening, a expat father living upstairs from the first unit wishes to buy the unit at 11.11% premium for use by his returning daughter, lamenting that he never even knew the unit was on the market before gold citadel snapped it up all cash. neighbor’s regret :0) (iii) buy and hold industrial buildings at cost in transforming neighborhoods where folks and government are spending serious money to implement change-of-use. gold citadel had bought a rather large plate in wang chuk hang of hkg and will in a few days take possession of the sale/leaseback situation. now floors w/i the building is bid at 38% premium and ask at 49% premium to gold citadel’s closing price. i ate dinner at "kyoto joes" japanese restaurant last night and at the next table was the esteemed grand poopa alan zeman en.wikipedia.org of freedom island hong kong restaurant and bar trade as well as chairman of ocean park forbes.com . i broke protocol and expressed my gratitude as a hk resident for his good works everywhere in hk and particularly at ocean park that is within easy walking distance of gold citadel’s industrial estates. i think gold citadel has done well to have bought into what essentially are concrete shells at construction cost, leased back by industrial bakery tenant vendor needing cash and weighed down by near-impossible to move equipment, and quietly wait for a well deserved tripling, say, but doubling for sure, within the 4.5% yield-on-cost lease period (5 years, including 2 years option at no more than but for sure 10% annual rental increase for the option periods). <<solar companies>> as to solar energy companies, there are 15+/- serious rest-of-worldwide wafer/cell/panel suppliers, and 100+/- china suppliers (growing fast). germany is the largest adopter of solar energy, or so i am told. there is apparently market tightness in solar cell supply. it will be corrected. by december i will know all there is to know about solar. perhaps best to be a supplier to solar cell companies, and monopolize the their inputs, rather than jumping into the arena with them or against them. chugs, tj p.s. life is so varied when one tries :0)

To: Seeker of Truth who wrote (35822)	6/19/2008 5:28:44 PM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 217487

Money magnet Jun 19th 2008 \| SÃO PAULO From The Economist print edition Playing the commodities boom, Brazilian-style IF BRAZIL'S commodities-fuelled boom had a face, it would belong to Eike Batista. On June 13th the entrepreneur floated some of the stock in OGX, an oil company he created last year. It has yet to start drilling and therefore has no proven reserves. It has fewer than 100 employees. And yet the initial public offering raised $3.6 billion, giving the company a similar market value to Google when it floated in 2004. The idea for the company apparently came to Mr Batista mid-air, while he was discussing the remarkable hit ratio in terms of wells sunk to barrels found of Petrobras, Brazil's national oil company. Petrobras's monopoly ended in 1996, but ever since then it has taken advantage of its dominant position, persuading potential competitors to work with it rather than take the company on in its home waters. Why not, thought Mr Batista, hire those Petrobras people who are so good at finding oil, pay them more than they used to earn, and use their expertise to decide which drilling rights to buy at auction. Mr Batista put in $300m of his own money and raised a further $1 billion from venture capitalists. Then in November Petrobras said that it had found a large deep-water field called Tupi (some think that the timing of the announcement was spurred by the imminent competition from OGX). The government quickly withdrew the blocks adjoining Tupi from a forthcoming auction of exploration rights. Undeterred, Mr Batista invested $100m in research and then bid for some other blocks in shallower waters. Each bid ended in 63, Mr Batista's racing number when he spent his time burning hydrocarbons in powerboats rather than looking for them under the seabed. Some thought he paid too much. But those venture capitalists have already made more than four times their money, on paper at least, in under a year. OGX may not even have to produce any oil for them to make more. If exploration results in its reserves moving from the hypothetical to the proven, Mr Batista would probably find that his asset would attract big oil firms. This would follow a precedent set by MMX, an iron-ore company that Mr Batista partially floated in 2006. He sold half of it to Anglo American, a mining firm, just over a year later for $5.5 billion, before it had produced much ore. In some ways buccaneering is emblematic of the new Brazil. Mr Batista talks up his wealth in a country where discretion is the norm (he has a silver sports car parked in the living room of his house in Rio and a dozen more in the garage). His recent success would not be possible without the country's vigorous capital markets, which have grown enormously this decade. Brazil's recent sovereign-rating upgrades from Standard & Poor's and Fitch, two rating agencies, have made the place easier to sell to foreign investors. And everything Mr Batista has done recently has been helped by high commodity prices. And yet Mr Batista's story also holds something of the old Brazil, with its mix of politics, influence and state-controlled firms. He was a big donor to the re-election campaign of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president. His father was once mining minister and later ran what is now known as Vale, a big mining firm. His father's contacts launched Mr Batista in the mining business. Yet plenty of other people start with such advantages. If Mr Batista uses them to shake up those parts of Brazil's economy that are dominated by a single huge company, so much the better.