EaglesNation (Holdings), Inc.

a way to get a discount

2009-10-28T11:25:00.000-07:00

is to buy gift cards from ebay.

the current valuation:

home depot cards are cheap, you can get around 10% discount.
the hottest is Walmart cards. you get 5% if u r lucky.
basically every chain store cards are available.

extras:

pay through paypal, you get protection. you can distribute and get refund.
ebay gives you about 2% rebate to spend in the next quarter.

confusion: some people make the sale guaranteed to loose money - they must have some tricks that i don't know about. i once bought a $100 walmart card at $95. i got the card directly from Walmart with Walmart envelope.

also, i have seen some (especially low value cards) cards are being sold for more than face value. e.g. $25 card is being bid at $26.

with ebay commissions, how did the seller make profit?!!!

credit scores - bad model of me

2009-10-28T11:04:00.000-07:00

did not grow up in this country makes me not very aware of the importance of credit.

learned my lesson once again - citi bank closed my shell mastercard before the expiration date. chase bank earlier this year lowered my credit so now i have only one c-card with $1K limit.

i used to have a BoA card with over $10K limit. they closed it after it expired two years ago.
i had a BonJovi logo card from BoA with $6K to start with. i only applied the card for BonJovi photo on the card, as well as a t-shirt and a cap with BonJovi logos. i cancelled the card as soon as i got the BonJovi gifts.
i had a Amex card with "unlimited" credit (but the bank must have a confidential limit thus rejected some big purchases) but cancelled it after they started to charge annual fees.
I had a chase card with $5K deposit to secure. but it was a credit card. it was used to build my scores when i first arrived. (at the time, many of my crdit card - such as the shell gas card - were rejected because i didn't have enough credit cards, IRONIC!!!) i closed it as soon as i had too many cards.
...

at the peak i had 4 cards with over $14K limit. but how come my score has become so bad?

one time i got a late fee from my Banana Rep. card (you know how the merchant charges the late fees, $39 on a balance of $19.) and the bank would not waive them. so i refused to pay it. they finally sold the balance to the collector. the collector was very hard to deal with. i refused to pay the $100+ balance. my wife got a call from the collector and paid in full (in contrast, she is very aware of the score.)
i did not use the online pay features and was tight on when to send the checks for payment. so the payments were late quite a few times.
for some reason, i have been victims a few times of identity hijacking. people used my card in Mexico (when my card is actually with me); people opened bank accounts using my name but different address. they even had set up online access with their own username and PIN and stuff.

Foreclosure buying

2009-10-28T10:39:00.001-07:00

Just bought a foreclosed townhouse. having a contractor fixing it right now and hopefully can resell it soon.

I basically jumped into this blindly. did not read any real estate investment books, no siminars attended. no expert / experienced help.

got the idea with a friend of a friend mentioned that a bizman here wanted to get a loan with 10 half-completed-but-foreclosed houses. the guy got rejected by the bank. those houses are too expensive for me but i thought buying a foreclosure and flipping it might work.

thanks har.com, i recently discovered that it has a section just for foreclosures. spent some time filtering through, bookmark the interested ones; also a realtor friend does not only offer low commition but has been very helpful and patient indeed.

however i have discovered that buying foreclosures are not an easy task:

since i am not an expert at fixing houses, i need a contractor to give me an estimate. i have not found a contractor that is 1) very trustful; 2) capable of doing a lot of stuff, not only painting/installing floors; 3) easily available to view the property and have time to take the job. i guess the contractor might end up making more money than i will.
many foreclosed properties have foundation problems. i don't buy those even though sometime they are so cheap. foundations are difficult to fix.
foreclosed houses attract multiple bids. this bidding is always closed, i.e. you don't know how many others are bidding and you don't know their bidding price, or even whether there are any other bidders at all or the selling agent is just bluffing.
foreclosures are owned by banks, who are very ignorant even they have a bad property in hands and are already loosing tons of money on it.
some strings are probably attached with the documentation. i always fear some potential traps.
i am buying it with cash (so you know how small investment it is), so no loan involved here. today's banks probably don't want to give me a loan for flipping foreclosures.
right now i am not confortable with leasing it out. but we will see.

i start with this small townhouse, which is not my best pick in mind. I prefer single family w/o monthly maintance fee. after all these obstacles, i just want to sell it with a few grands of profit. maybe 10% in a few months is satisfactory to start with.

Wish me luck.

Stock activities - sell sell sell

2009-10-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

Recently sold a lot of stocks, even some loooong time holdings (i.e. the tobbaco company). first, to rais cash to invest in real estate (will talk a bit later); second, not sure about where the mkt is heading to - but i am not a good timer. so mainly it is for the first reason... will reduce stock holdings futhur. probably don't have much money for stocks. only little cash left in IRA.

sold some LFC $70.80.
sold MO $18.55
sold some PM $50.75

Just bought one stock for IRA money - APOL at $59.90. have been watching it for a few months. this SEC probe hopefully won't affect it too much too long.

Recent Bond Activities

2009-10-28T10:26:00.000-07:00

sold 172967AZ4 $103.35 (see old post for bond details)

bought 02635PSK0 $85.50 Americdan General Finance 4% due 03/2011. S&P rating BB+

AAPL

2009-09-23T15:18:00.000-07:00

sold some AAPL at 187.05

recent activities

2009-09-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

sold:

172967CU3 at 103.843. net gain is 5% plus 7.25% interests for all these 6 months.

bought

254709AD0 at 90.999; Discover Financial 6.45% maturity 06/2017. BBB
013817AS0 at 97.75; Alcoa 6.75% 07/2018 BB+
984119AC1 at 90.50; Xerox 8% 02/2027 BB+
52107QAC9 at 99.25. Lazard 7.125% 05/2015 BBB
172967CQ2 at 91.499; CITI 5% 09/2014 A-

CIT finale

2009-08-19T13:28:00.000-07:00

It turned out that CIT did not file for bankruptcy and it redeemed my bond. this is my first redemption. E*trade just put the face value ($1000 per bond) to my account, no commissions. it recorded it as an investment gain. wow, a gain after all this! almost 7% in over 8 months, i.e. over 11% APY. not bad.

Recent Investment activities

2009-07-30T15:00:00.000-07:00

1, Sold some AAPL at 164.0;

2. bought American Express Floating Rate bond at 98.95. maturity date 03/2010. Just want to test how this works; the rate is 1 month libor + some (forgot, but probably than 10) BPS.

3. bought bond issued by American General Finance Corp. (Part of AIG) at 98.25, maturity date 10/1/09. only two months to go. i think i can get full principle back and some. again this is a test of this kind. couple rate 3.88%

CIT Bond redemption

2009-07-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Private-rescue-of-CIT-marks-apf-2442023652.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=2&asset=&ccode=

"...CIT launched the cash-offer for $1 billion worth of senior notes due Aug. 17. It is offering $825 for each $1,000 worth of notes tendered on or before July 31, and $800 for notes tendered between Aug. 1 and Aug. 17. Lenders involved in the bailout deal have agreed to tender all of their Aug. 17 notes, CIT said. The company and the steering committee of bondholders now will work on drawing up a number of debt swap offers designed to alleviate CIT's debt burden and further shore up the company's cash position. Failing to garner enough tender offers for the upcoming debt could force it to file for bankrupcy protection, CIT disclosed in the SEC filing."

i have not received anything yet for my CIT bond holdings. hopefully something coming in the mail. my investment is deemed to loose money since i bought it at 91...

CIT bankruptcy possibilities

2009-07-17T07:24:00.000-07:00

Remember that I mistakenly bought CIT bonds (originally intended to buy citi bonds)? while my subsequent citi bonds has a nice paper gains, as you may know, cit is on the edge of filing bankruptcy soon. Will learn a lesson what happens to the bonds when the issuer files bankruptcy...

cit bonds last traded at 35, down from about 85 two days ago, from 96 at beginning of the week. The price I got it at the end of Dec. was 91. Now I have the paper loss that is more than all the paper gains from my other bond holdings. My only hope is that it does not file bankruptcy. In these past days its shares are the most volatile I have seen, signaling the direction of the filing.

Not sure what happens to my bond if it gets bought by another bank, like CFC by BAC; if it files like Lehman bro. I will probably get nothing, if filing like the Auto companies, I will get very little. Will see. the press keeps talking about their billions of bonds due next year, but mine is due in 30 days, and mere a $61million note issued last August.

yet bought another bond

2009-06-30T09:36:00.000-07:00

A CD is maturing so bought a (relatively) short term bond since CD rates are so low...

37247XAC6, Genworth Global Fdg Trs Fr (not sure what the abbrivations are...), coupon 5.125%, Maturity 3/15/11, non-callable. S&P Rading A and Moody's Rating A2. bought at $98.00 so yeilding 6%...

first option play

2009-06-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

bought 01/2010 7.50 call at 0.60. This is the first time i bought option. the commision is more expensive than i thought.

let's c how this works out.

bought another longterm bond 620076AH2

2009-06-02T11:29:00.000-07:00

issued by Motorola, coupon 7.5%, maturity 5/15/2025, Baa3 by Moody's. bought at 71.1.

my first non-callable bond.

bought another bond 125509AH2

2009-05-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

Recently i discovered to my surprise that many bonds that sold at a large discount have gained in value. it is now harder to find them cheap. so in order to find those issued by a reliable company, i have to go easy on maturity date.

just bought a long term bond. issued by Cigna, coupon $7.65% which is very high, maturity date 3/2023. bought at $88. The rating is BBB (not very high) by S&P.

sold a bond over par

2009-05-12T18:55:00.000-07:00

JUST sold a bond 060505AG9 at 100.751. it is above the par. although it pays a good interest rate, i can still find something similar i think.

frankly i thought i would hold it until maturity. but above the par, just can't resist.

actually two of my other bonds are being sold near par too...

SKF

2009-05-06T13:36:00.000-07:00

I just can't resist the temptation any more. i set the limit price and it was executed this afternoon.

bout skf at 44.90

Bac

2009-05-06T09:21:00.000-07:00

http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/242096/Stress-Test-Shocker-BofA-Needs-34B-But-That's-%22Good-News%22-for-Ken-Lewis-&-Co.?tickers=BAC,C,XLF,SKF,FAS,FAZ,%5EDJI?sec=topStories&pos=2&asset=&ccode=

i do own a few BAC from the countrywide mess. since i did not do dollar average in the last few month, they are in bad shape. i am not too excited if it goes up 10% in a day since i am not planning to sell them all with a big loss anyway.

since it needs to raise $34B capital, i am not sure why it is up a lot this morning. the article above has put it nicely.

i personally never liked it as a bank although i banked there as soon as i came to this country 10 years ago. a friend was a loyal customer so she took me to a branch and had me opened an account. there were few choices in the neighbourhood at the time and BAC was the only major American bank. A banker sold me two mutual funds before i moved to Houston. He wanted 95% of my money to invest in 4 mutual funds that he recommended and lied to me about minimum $ requirement to invest. i did not know anything about mutual funds. I did not know that there are actually funds that do not charge a 5% fee as soon as you invest in them (front load). the funds did poorly and i sold them at a loss 5 years later. I actually did pick some no-load funds my self and they beat BAC recommendations badly. and my own stock picks did even better.

Ever since i opened checking/saving at Etrade bank, i seldom used my bac accounts and i closed them two years ago. they cancelled my bac credit cards too.

DXD

2009-05-04T15:03:00.001-07:00

Since the rally of the mkt has been a while, i have been more and more tempted to short it as a hedge. as a investment beginner, the index i pay the most attention to is of course DJIA. so today i started by buying DXD at 50.50. it has twice leverage so a little investment can have twice the power.

i am also thinking of SKF - it dropped almost 18% today - it is obviously more volatile given the sensitivity of the financial industry. let's start with the easy one and i will probably get into skf if the mkt continue to "recover".

Wumart 物美

2009-04-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

Zhao has been buying Wumart for sometime and I know that from last year. He now holds a 12% stake. I even opened an etrade hk account ready to follow his step. I am not sure how much commission + currency exchange fees Etrade will charge per trade so I have not funded the account. Yesterday 8277 was up over 10%, and traded at about HK$6.2. It has not been reached 6 for quite a while. I am not sure if I should get in or wait for a global mkt downturn to occur then pull the trigger.

What a bad name in English - sounds a copycat from Wal-Mart! its Chinese name is much better. wonder which came first. A Fortune article talked about the comapny. The article opens like this:http://www.wumart.com/Eng/NewShow.asp?NewsID=7573.

"If you want to get a glimpse of the future of retail, skip the trip to Wal-Mart, buy yourself a ticket to Beijing, and check out Wu Mart instead..."

The future of retail... What a compliment!!! It was a pity that I didn't know Wumart when I went back to china last year. (

There is actually a dark side of it. Its founder and former chairman 张文中 was sentenced for 18 years later last year for bribery. http://www.caijing.com.cn/2008-10-16/110020968.html I am not sure if he is really a criminal or just a sacrifice of politics. He resigned and was arrested in 2006. The company seems to have done well without him. http://blog.ce.cn/html/10/135610-181850.html It just released first quarter profits up 25% and its stock traded up 10% yesterday in hk.

Danyang Zhao 赵丹阳

2009-04-29T09:42:00.000-07:00

If you never heard of Danyang Zhao before and you are interested in investing in China, I would suggest you to do some homework. He is called Godfather of private equity in china 中国私募教父.

The private equity world was completely underground in china sometime ago. But a few years later (too lazy to check when) some star managers were recruited by public financial institutions to start mutual funds or hedge funds. Therefore had the name of sunshine private equity 阳光私募. His funds did really well, and was at least once named the best performing fund by Bloomberg.

But he really made headline in China at the beginning of 2008 by shut down of his china mutual funds. http://focus.jrj.com.cn/ygsmdyr.html has some good information on this topic in Chinese. He was obviously learning from the closure of the partnerships of WB in the late 1960s. although he missed more profits from the chinese stock bubble later, he avoided the crash followed it as well.

(But he kept his hk hedge fund open. Even after the mkt downturn and everything else, his hk fund still had Accumulated Weighted-Return (with dividend reinvested in the fund) Since Inception of over 420% since inception in 01/2003. Note 2003 was a sort of bottom of Chinese stock mkt.)

He later again made an international headline by winning the bid to pay over US$2m to have lunch with WB. I recall Mr. Duan who won the bid previous year was also a Chinese. I followed that person for a while and went back to NTES and made a little bit money. I think Duan paid less than $1m. wonder how much will the next winner pay to win the bid.

Pureheart's open letter

2009-04-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

Today I read an open letter to investors by ZHAO Danyang, founder of hedge fund Pureheart. http://www.pureheartchina.com/english/new10.asp. The letter was published at the beginning of 09. He believes "an important bottom will form in Chinese stock market in 2009". Is China really that immune from the developed world? i don't think the bottom will form in the US this year.

He also asks "Who will become China’s Wal-Mart, Toyota, Microsoft, P&G in the future?” Well, he obviously believes that Wumart (8277.hk) will be china's wal-mart, and probably BYD will be china's Toyota. Wumart and BYD are both interesting companies. I will talk about them more later.

If I have a lot of money (not sure how much but it would be a lot more than what i have now, I will invest some in purheart's fund). His new Natural Selection fund has a minimum investment amount of HK$250K, which is about US$32K. Not a lot really. But i am not sure if i have the extra amount to risk with him. Like hedge funds, he charges huge fees. I have never invested in hedge fund world before but those based in the US seems to require even higher net worth.

long term corporate bonds

2009-04-21T13:01:00.000-07:00

recently i have found some bonds from some good companies (i.e. companies that unlikely file bankruptcy in the foreseeable future) have some bonds availiable for a nice return. Wonder if i should try some of these. Example,

211327AB7 from Continental Corp pays 8.375% trading at about $90 yielding over 12%, maturity 8/15/12. I am sure Continental Corp. can survive 3.5 years. Moody/S&P rating Baa3/BBB-
316773CH1 from Fifth Third Bank pays 8.25% trading at around $65 yielding over 12.5%. well this one has the maturity in 30 years. rating Baa2/BBB+
984119AC1 from Xerox pays 8% trading at about $70 yielding over 10%. it has two callable dates at or above par. not sure which bonds will be called and which won't. maturity in 18 years. rating Baa3/BB+
925524AH3 from Viacom pays 7.875% trading $66 yeilding over 12%. maturity in 21 years. Baa3/BBB
260543BJ1 from Dow Chemical pays 7.375% trading $70 yeilding near 11%, maturity in 20 years. Baa1/BB-

which newspaper company will be bought out?

2009-04-21T10:33:00.001-07:00

noted that NYT has a big drop in price today. i think it will be only a matter of time before companies like this being bought by a privite equity firm or another media giant. but NYT is looking for other revenue genarating opportunities so let's just wait for a while.

My spots have been taken!!!

2009-04-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

both eaglesnation and listeningtotherain.blogspot.com have been REGISTERED!!! and listeningtotherain is in GERMAN!!! who else can be as poetic as me!!!