Taoyuan Nights

This alleged Chapter 11 filing by the recently collapsed Lehman Brothers, seems to suggest that Bank of Taiwan and Taipei Fubon might possibly be on the hook for $35 million US as creditors.
Lehman Brothers seems to have collapsed as a result of its exposure to the mortgage backed securities market (which has ‘imploded’ over […]

News just in: Taiwanese inflation hits 6% (officially, of course - in the real world outside of politics, it’s far worse). Higher inflation means that lenders require higher interest rates to compensate them for the devaluation of the money they are lending - or they simply don’t lend. And higher interest rates mean… more problems […]

Someone once said, history never repeats, but it does rhyme.
Here is what happened in Tokyo and Hong Kong when their property prices zoomed in the way that Taipei’s have. I believe that in ‘house-price-relative-to-earnings’ terms, Taipei has recently exceeded the heights of these graphs.
So, dear reader, I show you a possible - indeed, […]

Let’s first take a look at the Taiwanese Government’s website about investing in Taiwan.
“Taiwan’s housing prices will rise 5-10% annually through 2010 at least, according to construction company and real estate brokerage executives speaking at a “real estate summit meeting” sponsored by the Taiwanese real estate magazine Zhu Zhan in early November. Some even […]

The Taipei Times refers to housing troubles in the north of Taiwan…
Finally, it seems like we’re there. The number of house sales is continuing to collapse (minus 15% taipei, minus 30% taichung in just one month) at what should be one of the best times of year for sales in most cultures. In other words, […]

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 […]