Taoyuan Nights

Quick Asian housing news round up:
In Korea…
“SEOUL, Nov 4 (Reuters) – Housing prices across South Korea will rise in 2010 for a sixth consecutive year and by the fastest pace in four years, an industry association research agency forecast on Wednesday.” (when do industry association representatives ever say anything else?) , “Kookmin Bank [...]

“On Thursday, the Taiwan Institute for Economic Research (TIER) revised its economic forecast for this year, predicting the nation’s GDP would contract 2.89 percent year-on-year, worse than its previous estimate of a 1.91 percent decline.”
Funny, really, you’d think people who were predicting 3 significant figures of accuracy would be ashamed of not even getting the [...]

The following link (Telegraph) is one of the better pieces I’ve read lately.
As you may know, historically, economists/financiers seem to have held the view that although Japan had horrific government debt relative to the size of its economy (GDP), this was ‘OK’ since it was all lent by Japanese citizens (because of the high savings [...]

I wrote last October that I thought Shanghai’s stockmarket had reached truly epic levels of silliness, with price to earnings ratios being many times higher than that of developed countries, but with considerably higher risks and not obviously higher rewards.
Since that post, the Shanghai stockmarket has fallen almost 50%.
The FT article (linked above) is quite [...]

ETFs – Exchange Traded Funds – are something that I’ve suggested to all my friends, as a wonderful way to invest money in the stockmarket without having to learn much about shares, and without being screwed over by typical mutual fund charges.
An ETF is just a form of index tracking fund, that can be [...]

The wonderful people at Tealit beat me to it this month:
41292387 (match all the digits for the grand prize of $2 million NTD).
32971009 (prizes for matching 3 or more digits starting at the right hand side).
39376966 (prizes for matching 3 or more digits starting at the right hand side).
50336841 (prizes for matching 3 or more [...]

The Taipei times has an interesting article today about franchising in Taiwan. For those of you who don’t live in Taiwan, it might be useful to know that the country is nuts for franchising. Every street seems to have the same set of shops. I didn’t realised that these tiny franchised breakfast shops I see [...]

The Financial Times today published an article by Nassim Taleb which points out the sheer stupidity of the bulk of modern financial ‘theory’.
NNT is one of the few authors in Finance I take seriously; the others being Warren Buffett, and Benjamin Graham. His books, ‘Fooled by Randomness’ and ‘The Black Swan’, are must-haves [...]

You may remember that I blogged a few times about how crazy the Shanghai stockmarket had become, back in March. Well…. it’s not been sitting around twiddling its thumbs. It’s now a full 70% more crazy. The profits being reported are now largely fictitious. Companies are reporting increases in shareprices of companies they hold, as [...]

Having just returned from a trip to the UK, I was stunned to find that in just 2-3 weeks, prices have shot up on a number of items I typically buy.
Fruit and vegetables: subjectively, seem to be about 10% more expensive.
Yoghurt drinks: up 20%.
Bus travel: From $15, to $18 – and given the hassle of [...]