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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Spekulatius who wrote (42221)	4/9/2011 2:25:31 AM
From: Spekulatius	Respond to of 78523

re Iceland - interesting development: Iceland to vote on Icesave-Landsbanki debt repayment bbc.co.uk Iceland looked like a hopeless case in 2008, their debt load (if you included their banks indebtedness) looked ridiculous for a small country with only 320K citizens (equivalent a medium size city in the US). Contrary to the Irish, which guaranteed their banks (lock, stock and with smoking barrels <g>) the Icelanders just refused to pay and split their banks into a domestic operation and the bad bank with all the international loans. Now the Icelandic economy has recovered (showing growth again) while Ireland is still in deep trouble. This is going to be an interesting case study - defaulting is not always worse than muddling through. Food for thought for other debt PIGs I think.

To: Spekulatius who wrote (42221)	4/12/2011 9:43:05 AM
From: Spekulatius	Respond to of 78523

re Japan - I sold of the remaining 1/2 of my Sumitomo Rubber position last night at 841.5Yen. It was the weakest case of my holdings in terms of valuation and near term business prospects. Of course the news last night about escalating the severity of the nuclear disaster does not help either. however, the biggest problem is the power shortage which is going to impact manufacturing.

To: Spekulatius who wrote (42221)	4/20/2011 12:11:34 AM
From: Spekulatius	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78523

re Sapporo 2501.T. Sold today at 326.5Yen/share - close enough to pre- Tsunami levels. I am not trying to push my luck in Japan. I believe the economy has taken a severe hit and will slide into a recession due to power shortages and further opportunities will represent themselves.

To: Spekulatius who wrote (42221)	5/24/2011 10:22:45 PM
From: Spekulatius	Respond to of 78523

Big in Japan <g>: Sold Sakura Japan 5189.T @180Y (flat). Reason: lousy forecast Bought: Nissan Chemical 4021.T @693Y. Interesting chemical company - products: Semiconductor material, Agrochechmicals, with above average profitability, shareholder friendly (30% of the earnings dividend payout ratio, plus additional stock buybacks). PE is around 10x and their forecast (5/13/11) looks OK. This is a starter position. A decent presentation is given here: nissanchem.co.jp Bought Nippon Seisen 6569.T@392Y: High tech (imo) stainless steel and metal fabrication company) PE ~6.5. I was impressed with their capabilities after looking at the products on their website, coming from a material science background. Their financial performance over the years has been good too, they never lost money, even in the recession. Products seems to be special alloys for springs, shape memory alloys and specifically they are able to produce SS wires with a Diameter of 1.2um. one application of this wire material is to make Semiconductor gas filters. For this year they forecast 59Y/share (almost flat), which is not too bad given the recession and their industry. Their balance sheet is in great shape too, with net cash of ~0.5 their market cap n-seisen.co.jp Forecast is here if you know Japanese (haha): n-seisen.co.jp My sale of Tsurumi Manufacturing 6351.T (the pump company) based on poor peer results was a bad choice. They issued a flat forecast with was enough to bump the stock up a few % and this while the market went down. Oh well...