jasonw1

I have a couple of real estate investments I want to sell, both of them have sizable capital gains. My tax account suggest Opportunity Zone investments to defer the tax, even to eliminate the tax. I looked it up it seems very appealing, but not sure what would be the best way to go: should I set up something myself? that will require significant operation and time commitment; or should I just buy one of the opportunity zone fund, then which one? they all carry pretty high fees and relatively new. Anyone with experience to share? Here are some background of opportunity zone investing: https://www.wellsfargo.com/the-private-bank/insights/planning/wpu-qualified-opportunity-zones/ https://www.ncsha.org/resource/opportunity-zone-fund-directory/

This strategy hasn't worked well for the past 5 years. I keep hearing great returns with these kinds of screens but I haven't seen anyone claim big success these days. Several years ago I played with a couple of deep value screens and backtested for 20 years with good performance (25-30%, excluding any ADRs/foreign listed), but they haven't come close to SP500 index for the past several years. If you look at Gotham funds, where Joel Greenblatt runs them with Magic formula, they haven't been doing so hot either. As matter of fact I would say the past 5 years have been a humbling experience for a lot of the value investors. FUND NAME TICKER MONTH TRAILING 3 MONTHS YTD 1 YEAR 3 YEAR SINCE INCEPTION ANNUALIZED SINCE INCEPTION CUMULATIVE INCEPTION DATE Gotham Absolute Return GARIX 0.22% 1.72% 2.56% 9.92% 1.48% 8.72% 47.66% August 31, 2012 Gotham Enhanced Return GENIX 0.45% 3.59% 5.40% 17.11% 5.45% 11.23% 51.71% May 31, 2013 Gotham Neutral GONIX 0.29% 0.29% -0.29% 3.28% -1.58% 1.93% 7.26% August 30, 2013 Gotham Index Plus GINDX -0.16% 4.56% 5.46% 20.73% N/A 11.03% 24.35% March 31, 2015 Gotham Absolute 500 Fund GFIVX -0.27% 2.98% 3.37% 9.51% N/A 5.85% 16.92% July 31, 2014

Thanks for your thoughts, thepupil, your observation on China small caps are right on for the past several years, the two board members are indeed big red flag for JKS, I'll look into them more closely. I invested in a bunch of China companies in the past, and still have some positions today. I encountered several fraud cases with the smaller companies. I took a basket approach and got out some of them OK, made money with some of them, but got burned by CCME which I had a large position. For the micro-cap and small-cap there are full of land mines, while the big ones (Tencent, BABA, JD, CTRP etc) are good, and there are lots of companies in between. You will find some good, mis-priced stocks among these in between companies once in a while. For example, both QIHU and EDU had fraud charges raised by Muddy Water, they became significantly mis-priced and had great run after dusts settled. I never owned VIPS but it also had fraud charge from Muddy Water, so there could be opportunities there sometimes, but I agree with you the fraud risk is definitely there. Over the past 3-4 years my stock holdings haven't done well, mainly due to large amount of cash position, selling too early and some "value" stocks didn't go anywhere. I would have done much better if I haven't done a thing with my stock holdings in the past 3 years. I have had better luck with real estate during the period, it's been Davis-Double like with low-cost leverage and price appreciation, but I'm getting nervous with the double digit appreciation we experienced in Seattle area for the past several years.

I started a position in JKS lately, the stock has been volatile, here are the factors attracted me 1) Solar panel cost coming down while demand continue to grow strongly 2) JKS is the leader in volume and technology 3) Stock is cheap, PE<5 from continuing operation. There are definitely risks with the ASP pricing of solar panel going down, I'm betting on the industry continue to go through consolidation and price will stabilize, while at the same time solar power will become much bigger part of power generation, JKS will maintain its leading position. Here is a write up from a few months ago: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4051870-jinko-solars-time-come What's your thoughts?

Great points Picasso. Pokemon has been around for decades, kids would buy cards, watch TV series, which is very limited distribution channel comparing to making Pokemon available on mobile phones. I've probably spent hundreds of dollars buying Pokemon cards for my 2 kids, each Pokemon card is like a dollar bill, that's how much consumer pays per card. I expect all of that, plus a lot more $$ from new players, will go to the mobile games. Other point to note, this is the first time a game driving massive traffic in the real world, there is huge potential in terms of advertising, sales lead etc, a market Nintendo hasn't tapped. I bought some yesterday.

JD is interesting. E-commerce in China is the war between Alibaba and JD, two very different models, the more affluent buyers are moving to JD platform in the past several years. Top tier companies in China are pretty trustworthy, they are at the scale that they get enough scrutiny from VC firms, regulators, investors, and it's not worthwhile for the founders and CEOs to cheat. I consider JD to be one of them.

I don't seem to be able find anything interesting at this time, nothing I can be fairly convinced of, offers enough upside for investment returns. In the past couple of years my stock portfolio has largely been flat, I have a bunch of value names and they haven't done well at all, while I'm holding to them and think they should do better in the future, I don't find anything I'm convinced to buy either, it's been a drought for last couple of years. All of my gains for the last several years have come from real estate. I bought several properties from 2011-2014 and they have done really well. The price has went up a lot but I don't think there is bubble, however the deals are all gone and every interesting properties I looked at there have been bidding wars to drive up price. I have positive cash flow for all the properties I have, I don't think we're at the end of the real estate cycles, and I don't want to sell to trigger huge tax bill, so I'm just sitting on them and riding the wave out. Keeping money in the bank or in bond is clearly losing, however I just can't find anywhere which is interesting and rewarding to put fund to use. The only places I found in stock market which may be interesting are China/South Korea/Australia, they seem to be better value, I might just buy some ETFs while figuring things out. Any interesting areas you may have? And why?

Tim, can you share a link to the first CEO interview you're referring to? The only English one I'm aware is the one he did with NASDAQ last year. This stock is clearly being manupulated, with 10M shares float, it traded average 6M shares daily in the past 10 days, it also had consistent high short interest, with 6M shares shorted as shown. After reading through reports from Citron research and Muddy Water, I don't see convincing evidence of fraud as they apprear to be subjective, there are also errors and false claims in the reports which make them even less credible, I was able to find quite a few and verify the errors, for example the bus counts evidence provided in Muddy Water, which is misleading and completely wrong for several bus operators, I just followed the links they give and checked the sites. They are clearly incentived to bring down the share price and profit from it. I'm not sure why it's been picked out as such short target for pretty much the past year. But it does create the lingering questions and fear for everyone: are the shorts onto something? do they know something I'm missing? A lot of the company's past behavior don't suggest fraud, why would they hire a big 4 auditor? why would the insider buy $1.5M, why would Starr invest $50M+ through a couple of occasions, they are also starting dividend, from past converage in Chinese they're also a credible advertiser with substantial revenue. The biggest mistake the company made is taking the reverse merge route instead of doing an IPO, I'm also disappointed that the company hasn't really bought any shares back by the last earning announcement, although they have announced a $30M buyback program. If they haven't bought any in recen times, I would be very disappointed.

Thanks JEast and fellow board members for SSW idea, bought some and had order for more at $12 but it just took off. I guess I shouldn't complain too much when your holdings are going up. :) Has anyone looked at another shipping stock, NNA? I recently bought some @ <$4.

I wanted to confirm whether the roth coversion can be done in 2011, regardless of AGI limit, looks like it can done. http://www.irs.gov/publications/p590/ch02.html#en_US_publink1000230961 "Conversions to Roth IRAs. Beginning in 2010, the modified AGI and filing status requirements for converting a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA are eliminated.Also, for any 2010 rollover from an IRA other than a Roth IRA to a Roth IRA, any amounts that would be included as income will be included in income in equal amounts in 2011 and 2012. You can choose to include the entire amount in income in 2010. "

Is this only available in 2010? I couldn't find anything which states the Roth conversion can't be done in 2011 or later, so I assume this is still doable? I understand the tax defer is only for 2010.

Not sure your logic in deriving this. I like the $15 quote on YHOO, so much so that I bought the stock this year, thinking it's worth more than what I paid. I estimate YHOO could worth up to $25, if someone comes in to buy the company and offer a premium, $30 is not impossible.

I thought the offer price for YHOO was insane and was certainly happy to see the YHOO deal fell off. Now I think even if YHOO deal went through it's not waste of money, YHOO is worth more than current quote. Jerry knows it, he may be stubbon and attached to the company, he's no idiot though. He's got some really nice assets for YHOO. Most of the managers at tech compaines don't think like value investors, if they do there won't be much innovations and disruptions, and when they do, that means it's not much a growth technology company anymore, but rather an established business living off its past glory.

Cash under Ballmer would be my least worry. There are plenty things MS could have done better and need to do better, but they have wasted no cash and pretty much returned them to shareholders, except for the $6 billion aQuantative aquasition which is a total waste IMO. I don't know what the catalyst would be, maybe value itself, maybe one day people wake up and just feel different.

If any of you still using Vista, you should definitely upgrade to Win7, it's such a pleasure to use, everything just works. I have had my share of frustration with IPad software upgrade, it's a really cool device and I pretty much ditched my Kindle and laptop most of the time and use it for surfing and reading (don't try to write anything though, it's pretty frustrating). But right after upgrade the old button, a physical button, to lock orientation doesn't work anymore, instead it becomes switch to turn on/off sound. This is really annoying as I read on bed and it'll shift orientation automatically to make it unreadable. I couldn't find anywhere I can set this and finally found out Apple just repurposed the switch to be the volume switch in iOS 4.2, although there is a way to work around this but you got to do quite a bit leg work to find it. I don't understand why they make the switch as there is already volume control which makes the additional button to switch on/off sound redundant. If this were Microsoft it would have made headline news, but this is Apple and they could do no wrong. Apple has been on an amazing run in the last several years, but as investment its best days are behind it. Now they'll have to face upgrade and compatibility, and put some real test on their software. Things are going pretty well for Microsoft at the moment. Old cash cows are doing well, Bing is climbing back up, XBox/Kinect is such a hit I couldn't get one anywhere in States, Windows Phone 7 is decent which gets it back to the mobile game. Stock is cheap... ;D