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

To: Spekulatius who wrote (60968)	7/3/2018 9:47:04 AM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78752

Housing -- stick builders. Have held on to all shares in my basket as stock prices have fallen. WLH near 12-mo low now, and I add a few more shares to my position this morning. Added to upmarket builder TOL recently.

To: Spekulatius who wrote (60968)	7/6/2018 10:09:18 AM
From: Paul Senior	Respond to of 78752

YY - "chinese Streaming and e-sports Company. looks cheap based on current results and growth" Agree. Followed you in with small buy, adding a bit more with stock dropping past couple of days. I am going with the metrics I see. Stock is too cheap on p/e vs rev growth, roe, etc. and should or could be higher assuming growth story continues---- and if the holding of this Chinese company doesn't bite investors with accounting issues, management dishonesty, management/stockholder alignment, government intervention. finance.yahoo.com

To: Spekulatius who wrote (60968)	7/13/2018 3:31:20 PM
From: Graham Osborn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78752

I looked at YY pretty closely yesterday (haven't checked this thread in a while but it came up on a screen). Perhaps I am a bit more cautious now after getting burned by UBNT last year.. but two things I always ask myself first thing after checking the numbers are: (1) do I like the product? (2) do I like the management? These are actually not trivial questions to answer for Chinese techs since most of us aren't already users. Even if you succeed in downloading the apps (generally speaking) the text is all in Chinese so you can't really test it. Websites are a bit easier since Google Translate makes them semi-understandable. When you go to YY's home page it is basically a bunch of young Chinese women who sing, dance, or otherwise entertain in exchange for virtual gifts. There are other service offerings, but this is clearly #1. The website is nothing remarkable - it basically looks like Yahoo 10 years ago. So I was trying to reconcile that with a growing user base and great numbers. As we've seen with Facebook and Twitter, measuring user accounts and user activity are challenging even for perfectly legit companies. But apparently there are ways for single users to open "blocks" of accounts on Taobao and elsewhere. This article originally posted on COBAF is a decent read, particularly as it is written by a Chinese guy (or girl?): seekingalpha.com In the US the SEC serves as a built-in error checker for regulatory filings - but for VIEs there is noone backing up management's claims on financials. And since they don't pay a dividend, there is nothing to keep these companies honest. So since the product seemed sketchy and there was no way to verify the user metrics, the first question was a obvious "no." For the second question I Googled the CEO to look for interviews - you can learn a lot about the top man/ woman by listening to them answer questions for half an hour. I could only find one video on Youtube from 5 years ago or so. The guy barely spoke English and looked like a couch potato. Neither of those is an obvious red X but when that's the only datapoint I have there isn't much of a basis to say "this is a guy I trust." So the second question was a default "no" as well. My evaluation of MOMO produced a similar result, except in that case the main Google results you get are alleged CEO fraud. You'd never believe it, but in my experience that's a big red flag.