“The probability of China’s first onshore bond default is rising”; Fallen Angels Seen by Haitong on Record Downgrades: China Credit

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Fallen Angels Seen by Haitong on Record Downgrades: China Credit

Record downgrades in China suggest more companies will lose investment-grade ratings as Premier Li Keqiang pares state intervention, according to Haitong Securities Co., the nation’s second-biggest brokerage. A total of 152 borrowers’ credit grades or outlooks were cut in the first nine months of this year, exceeding 73 for the whole of 2012, according to data compiled by Haitong. The yield on Anyang Iron & Steel Co.’s 2019 notes has jumped 396 basis points to 10.8 percent since China Chengxin Securities Rating Co. reduced its ranking to AA- from AA on June 28. Globally, fallen angels, or notes downgraded to junk, pay 4.9 percent, Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes show. Read more of this post

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China Can’t Talk Its Way Out of Slowing Growth

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

China Can’t Talk Its Way Out of Slowing Growth

If imitation really is the greatest form of flattery, Shinzo Abe should be thrilled the Chinese are copying his “Abenomics” strategy to excite investors. The rest of the world shouldn’t be. China isn’t cribbing the Japanese prime minister’s actual blueprint, but his formula of spin and hype that has convinced the world something that doesn’t yet exist is real. The key to a great ad campaign is attracting customers and keeping them, something Abe has done with a brilliance that could teach the Edelman public-relations firm a thing or two. Read more of this post

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5 Ways Your Brain Tricks You Into Making Horrible Investment Decisions

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

5 Ways Your Brain Tricks You Into Making Horrible Investment Decisions

ROB WILE OCT. 27, 2013, 6:57 PM 15,860 7

Studies abound showing how our mental biases thwart sound investing decisions. Value Stock Guide has compiled the five main ways this happens into a nifty infographic (via Eddy Elfenbein). You should check out the whole thing, but real quickly, the 5 common ways your brain screws you up are:

  • You do what everyone else is doing because of herd behavior.
  • You confuse “cheap” with “value.”
  • You throw good money after bad.
  • You practice loss aversion and that leads to bad choices.
  • You think the future is more unpredictable than it is.

brain bad investing decisions 2

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Muddy Waters: NQ’s Top Ten Lies Since Friday

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Muddy Waters, LLC

October 29, 2013

Reiterating price target <$1

NQ’s Top Ten Lies Since Friday

Muddy Waters noted numerous lies and deceptions in NQ’s responses to our October 24, 2013 report. This report lists the ten most egregious falsehoods we noted from the October 25th conference call, and Co-CEO Omar Khan’s television interviews that same day with Fox Business News and Bloomberg. Read more of this post

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How to build a $100 million business; It took these entrepreneurs just three years to go from zero to seriously wealthy

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

How to build a $100 million business

October 28, 2013

Kate Jones

It took these entrepreneurs just three years to go from zero to seriously wealthy.

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Zero to heroes: Philip Weinman and Clive Sher

It’s the question every business owner wishes they had the answer to. How to build a $100 million business? Business veterans Philip Weinman and Dr Clive Sher have years of entrepreneurial know-how. Weinman has spent 30 years building and selling businesses, specialising in IT and travel companies. And Sher has developed numerous healthcare companies in the past 25 years. Between them, the pair has made a fortune from building successful businesses. Their latest company, Plan B, was launched in 2010 as a way of streamlining the expensive and complicated business of corporate travel. The turnover in its first year was $1 million, which jumped to $28 million the following year. Proving to be one of Australia’s fastest growing companies, Plan B is on track for a turnover of more than $100 million this financial year. The company initially started as an in-house corporate travel solution for Weinman’s management company, Deasil, before word-of-mouth launched it into a much broader market. Read more of this post

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Stuck in the comfort zone; We like to say it is better to be with the devil we know than the angel we don’t when we do not want to fight for change

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Updated: Sunday October 27, 2013 MYT 7:24:01 AM

Stuck in the comfort zone

BY SOO EWE JIN – SUNDAY STARTERS

We like to say it is better to be with the devil we know than the angel we don’t when we do not want to fight for change.

IF only I could. How often have we heard this phrase uttered when we are together with friends and loved ones? Someone struggling with work issues talks about giving it all up, moving to a job that pays less, but without the stress, and then finishes up the conversation with this phrase, “If only I could.” We may complain about being stuck in a two-hour traffic jam on the way to work from Petaling Jaya to Kuala Lumpur but we are unlikely to give it all up to work in a small town in Sarawak where it may take just five minutes to walk from our huge rented bungalow to the office nearby. Read more of this post

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Where Does Leadership Live? As we develop new ways of doing business, we must also develop new ways of looking at, and assigning, leadership

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Where Does Leadership Live?

October 25, 2013

Eric J. McNulty is the director of research at the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative and writes frequently about leadership and resilience.

For all the business community talks about leadership, there is little exploration of the basic assumptions we make about it—what constitutes leadership, who we should call leaders, and what qualities a leader should demonstrate. Yet those assumptions are exactly what we (and our organizations) base so much of our thinking and actions on. Perhaps this is why there is still not a generally accepted definition of leadership in business literature and why it can be so difficult to gauge the impact of leadership development programs. The most foundational question we must ask is: Where does leadership live? Read more of this post

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Life with a narcissistic manager

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

October 28, 2013 3:39 pm

Life with a narcissistic manager

By Naomi Shragai

Narcissism has received a bad business press over the years. The self-obsessed chief executive with a volatile temper who both charms and intimidates staff, takes all the credit for success while shifting the blame for failure on to others, has been a recurring character in corporate dramas. Compelling, charismatic, colourful, such people can initially draw people under their spell until difficulties and discord arise, when their deeper, darker personality begins to emerge. Read more of this post

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Going where no brand has gone; Providing samples is a relatively simple affair for many products. For toilet paper brands, however, getting consumers to try the product on the spot is decidedly more complicated

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Going where no brand has gone

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NEW YORK — Providing samples is a relatively simple affair for many products, whether it is fragrance brand representatives spritzing consumers in department stores or snack brand representatives handing out tortilla chips in supermarkets. For toilet paper brands, however, getting consumers to try the product on the spot is decidedly more complicated.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

NEW YORK — Providing samples is a relatively simple affair for many products, whether it is fragrance brand representatives spritzing consumers in department stores or snack brand representatives handing out tortilla chips in supermarkets. For toilet paper brands, however, getting consumers to try the product on the spot is decidedly more complicated. Read more of this post

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Thailand’s Rural Boom Yields Mercedes and $6,000 Jacuzzis

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Thailand’s Rural Boom Yields Mercedes and $6,000 Jacuzzis

When Tos Chirathivat and his billionaire family make acquisitions for their Thailand-based retail, property and hotel empire, they often do it in style. Seeking additional prime space in Bangkok’s congested downtown in 2006, Tos’s Central Group bought 1.4 hectares (3.5 acres) of the British ambassador’s front lawn, which it’s now transforming into a curvaceous luxury shopping mall in the shape of an infinity symbol, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its December issue. Read more of this post

Filed under Macro Trends

Boston Scientific’s Nerve Device Lowers Blood Pressure

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Boston Scientific’s Nerve Device Lowers Blood Pressure

Boston Scientific Corp. (BSX)’s Vessix hypertension treatment significantly lowered blood pressure levels in patients with a hard-to-treat form of the condition that doesn’t respond well to drug therapy, a study found. The treatment, which silences overactive nerves in the renal arteries that contribute to hypertension, reduced systolic blood pressure by 24.6 millimeters of mercury after six months. The benefit grew with time, yielding a 29.6 mm/Hg reduction after a year, the study presented yesterday at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics conference in San Francisco found. Read more of this post

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Fasting at Least Twice a Week Seen as Alzheimer’s Hedge

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Fasting at Least Twice a Week Seen as Alzheimer’s Hedge

For the past year, Stuart Adams has been fasting twice a week. While he has lost 15 pounds, the real reason he’s depriving himself is to stave off brain disorders including schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. “There’s a virulent strain of madness running through my family, and I reckoned my chances of going down that route were pretty high,” said Adams, 43, a freelance translator and interpreter in London who learned of a possible link between Alzheimer’s and diet while watching a BBC documentary last year. “Anything that could help with that was of great interest.” Read more of this post

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Kidney Disease Costs Medicare $41 Billion a Year and Yet Often Goes Undetected; More screening is urged for all Americans age 60 and older – not just those with diabetes and hypertension

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Kidney Disease Costs Medicare $41 Billion a Year and Yet Often Goes Undetected

More screening is urged for all Americans age 60 and older – not just those with diabetes and hypertension

Updated Oct. 28, 2013 11:12 p.m. ET

Kidney disease is fast becoming one of the most dangerous and costly health threats in the U.S., and new guidelines recommend screening for all Americans over 60. Laura Landro and Joslin Diabetes Center Kidney Services Chief Robert Stanton discuss. 

Doctors often don’t test for it, and patients may have no symptoms until they are in crisis. Yet kidney disease is fast becoming a dangerous health threat, and one of the most costly, in the U.S. Kidney disease is a frequent complication of diabetes and hypertension that currently costs Medicare about $41 billion a year in treatment, including dialysis. That figure is giving urgency to a push for widespread routine screening. Read more of this post

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A team of Israeli doctors have conducted heart surgery while monitoring their progress with a floating, real-time holographic image of the patient’s heart, the first time such a system has been used in the operating room

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

October 28, 2013 5:35 pm

Pioneering heart operation heralds Philips’ shift in strategy

By Matt Steinglass in Amsterdam

A team of Israeli doctors have conducted heart surgery while monitoring their progress with a floating, real-time holographic image of the patient’s heart, the first time such a system has been used in the operating room. The experimental system, a collaboration between the Dutch electronics group Philipsand the Israeli company RealView Imaging, has been used in eight trial operations so far. It takes the ultrasound and X-ray information collected by sensors during the procedure and uses it to project a three-dimensional image of the patient’s heart into the air, which surgeons can explore and manipulate much like the displays in Hollywood science-fiction films such as Iron Man. Read more of this post

Filed under Health, TMT Trends

Web Giants Threaten End to Cookie Tracking; Balance of Power in Ad Industry at Stake as Google, Microsoft Seek to Control Web Tracking

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Web Giants Threaten End to Cookie Tracking

Balance of Power in Ad Industry at Stake as Google, Microsoft Seek to Control Web Tracking

ELIZABETH DWOSKIN

Updated Oct. 28, 2013 6:50 p.m. ET

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The end could be near for cookies, the tiny pieces of code that marketers deploy on Web browsers to track people’s online movements, serve targeted advertising and amass valuable user profiles. In the past month, Microsoft Corp. MSFT -0.45% , Google Inc. GOOG -0.02% andFacebook Inc. FB -3.31% have said they are developing systems to plug into and control this river of data in ways that bypass the more than a thousand software companies that place cookies on websites. Read more of this post

Filed under TMT Trends

SAP’s Plattner aims to remove the bugs from the human machine

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Last updated: October 28, 2013 4:30 pm

SAP’s Plattner aims to remove the bugs from the human machine

By Chris Bryant in Potsdam

More than 40 years after he transformed the business software market by co-foundingSAP, Hasso Plattner has set his sights on an even more daunting challenge: prolonging human life. At an age when many of his peers are playing leisurely rounds of golf, SAP’s chairman, who turns 70 next year, is pressing the company to broaden its focus beyond helping businesses to run more efficiently, by helping human beings to run more efficiently as well. Read more of this post

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Netflix Wants You To Be Able To Watch Movies At Home The Day They Hit Theaters

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Netflix Wants You To Be Able To Watch Movies At Home The Day They Hit Theaters

ALYSON SHONTELL 16 MINUTES AGO 257 1

Netflix has found a lot of success creating its own TV shows like “Orange is the New Black.” It’d like to be able to disrupt blockbuster movies as well. But Netflix doesn’t want to just create movies. It wants to convenience people and help them watch hit films from anywhere, immediately. At least, that’s what its Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos communicated over the weekend. Read more of this post

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Is Wikipedia getting worse? Behind the scenes of its many successes, Wikipedia has been roiled with controversy

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Is Wikipedia getting worse?

October 28, 2013

Will Oremus

Wikipedia: Is paid editing making the site even less trustworthy?

Wikipedia is a glorious resource and one of the most dazzling accomplishments of the internet age. The online encyclopaedia, built and maintained primarily by volunteers, is the world’s largest repository of free information, and much of that information is quite good. A surprising 2005 Nature study found the quality of science articles on the site rivalled that of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The site today carries enough authority that Google uses it to directly answer search questions. Read more of this post

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Fund Seeks Overlooked Tech Gems; Health-Care Tech Gives Manager Relief From High Internet Valuations

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Fund Seeks Overlooked Tech Gems

Health-Care Tech Gives Manager Relief From High Internet Valuations

MATT JARZEMSKY

Oct. 28, 2013 6:48 p.m. ET

T. Rowe Price TROW +2.68% fund manager Henry Ellenbogen has made a career of discovering and investing in startup technology companies including Twitter Inc., and his $14.3 billion New Horizons fund has ridden Internet stocks to market-beating returns this year. But lately Mr. Ellenbogen is focusing on other areas—such as firms aiming to improve electronic records, care pricing and other aspects of the health-care industry, as well as innovators in financial payments—that he believes many market participants have overlooked. Read more of this post

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Electricity Use Impedes Aereo’s March; Streaming-Video Service Has Other Challenges Besides Broadcasters’ Lawsuits

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Electricity Use Impedes Aereo’s March

Streaming-Video Service Has Other Challenges Besides Broadcasters’ Lawsuits

SHALINI RAMACHANDRAN and AMOL SHARMA

Updated Oct. 28, 2013 7:50 p.m. ET

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Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia holds one of his company’s miniature antennas as he stands next to a power-hungry server array of antennae. Associated Press

Aereo Inc.’s upstart TV streaming service has provoked a legal onslaught from broadcast networks. But even if it wins that fight, it still has to overcome more-pedestrian issues, like making sure it can pay for the electricity it needs. The service depends on tiny antennas assigned to each of its individual users, who rent them to stream broadcast TV channels over the Web. Each of those antennas, which Aereo warehouses in centralized facilities, uses five to six watts of power. On their own, that isn’t a whole lot—a typical set-top box rented by cable operators to customers can use four times as much, or more. But the power for a cable box is paid by consumers, whereas Aereo is footing the bill for every subscriber.

Read more of this post

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Are gun sales on Instagram booming?

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Are gun sales on Instagram booming?

October 28, 2013

Will Oremus

art-gun-620x349

People are using Instagram to advertise guns for sale. Photo: Screenshot from Instagram

The Daily Beast’s Brian Ries this week wrote an interesting piece about gun sales on Instagram. By searching for various gun-related hashtags, he found examples ranging from an antique Colt to a “custom MK12-inspired AR-15”. It turns out that advertising guns for sale on the photo-sharing site is mostly legal (in the US at least), and Instagram has no special policy against it. Read more of this post

Filed under TMT Trends

Apple looks to put down roots for the next decade

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

October 29, 2013 8:39 am

Apple looks to put down roots for the next decade

By Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco

Exactly a year ago Tim Cook stamped his mark on the company he inherited from Steve Jobs – after less than 18 months as its full-time chief executive, he instituted thebiggest reorganisation to Apple’s executive ranks in years. Out went Scott Forstall, a loyal Jobs ally who had headed iOS, and John Browett, retail chief. Up stepped Sir Jonathan Ive to oversee design in both software and hardware; Craig Federighi to become head of iPhone, iPad and Mac software; and Eddy Cue, who added the troubled Maps and Siri voice assistant to his responsibilities as services chief. Read more of this post

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All companies are technology companies now; Technology is revolutionising the way even the smallest and most traditional businesses manage their operations

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

All companies are technology companies now

October 29, 2013 – 10:18AM

Sylvia Pennington

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Michelle Jones from Blerick Tree Farm visiting her crop in China.

From humble home services to rural concerns, digital technology is revolutionising the way even the smallest and most traditional businesses manage their operations. Although only a fraction of companies around the world would consider themselves to be in the technology business, increasingly the great majority of them rely on technology to stay in business.  But John Roberts, Gartner vice-president and chairman of this year’s Gartner Symposium, held on the Gold Coast this week, says businesses are still working out how to extract maximum value from technologies, including social media, mobile communications, big data and cloud. Read more of this post

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China’s Suning, Hony Capital to invest $420 mln in PPTV

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

China’s Suning, Hony Capital to invest $420 mln in PPTV

5:59am EDT

* Suning stake will be 44 percent of PPTV

* Deal values PPTV at $568 million

* Suning calls deal “strategic investment”

* Suning shares up 58 pct year-to-date

By Paul Carsten and Donny Kwok

BEIJING/HONG KONG, Oct 28 (Reuters) – China’s Suning Commerce Group and Hony Capital, an affiliate of Lenovo Group, will invest $420 million in PPTV, a Chinese online TV services provider, Suning said in a statement on Monday. Suning will invest $250 million to buy a 44 percent stake in PPTV and become its largest shareholder. It is believed Hony Capital will make up the remaining $170 million although the statement did not specify that. The deal values PPTV at $568 million. Read more of this post

Filed under TMT Trends

Girls, Girls, Girls: Alibaba’s Play for Mobile ‘Losers’

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

October 25, 2013, 8:14 PM

Girls, Girls, Girls: Alibaba’s Play for Mobile ‘Losers’

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Alibaba is calling on desperate men to build a user base for its fledgling messaging application, Laiwang. In a new promotional campaign that began yesterday, Laiwang is sharing with users the profiles of more than 30,000 models with users on its messaging platform. The women are a part of Alibaba’s Tao Girl platform, which was created in 2007 as a resource for merchants who want to use professional models to show off their products on Alibaba’s massive e-commerce site. Read more of this post

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China Property Firms See New Market in Old Age Homes

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

October 28, 2013, 3:20 PM

China Property Firms See New Market in Old Age Homes

China’s property sector has been a reliable money-spinner even in the face of a nearly four-year government campaign to hold the line on speculation. But at least some property firms are starting to hedge their bets, taking a look at fresh opportunities from China’s aging population. A number of companies that have a lengthy track record in real estate are looking to turn their hand at property management with a twist – managing facilities that care for the elderly. Read more of this post

Filed under Macro Trends

Local tastes tempt China diners away from Golden Arches

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Local tastes tempt China diners away from Golden Arches

Mon, Oct 28 2013

By Adam Jourdan

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Bearing rice burgers and lotus roots, an army of Chinese fast food firms is cooking up a challenge to McDonald’s Corp and Yum Brands Inc, tempting cost-conscious diners with healthy, homegrown fare and causing a drag on growth for the U.S. chains in the country’s $174 billion fast food market. McDonald’s said last week it was thinking of slowing expansion in China as diners are tempted by local rivals. KFC-parent Yum warned this month economic weakness in China would drag on a recovery in sales dented by a food safety scare at the end of last year. Read more of this post

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Hopes of Market Reforms in China Tempered by Political Realities

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

OCTOBER 28, 2013, 4:10 AM

Hopes of Market Reforms in China Tempered by Political Realities

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

China’s leaders head toward a major policy-setting conference next month bearing heady expectations that they have encouraged, and a proposal from a prominent government research organization has magnified speculation that they will embrace bold pro-market overhauls. The grinding realities of politics, however, are likely to force proponents of such overhauls to settle for more modest changes, experts said. Read more of this post

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Climbing the Value Chain Won’t Be Cheap for the World’s Most Profitable Car Maker

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Crack in the Great Wall of Profits

Climbing the Value Chain Won’t Be Cheap for the World’s Most Profitable Car Maker

ABHEEK BHATTACHARYA

Oct. 28, 2013 5:46 a.m. ET

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The world’s most profitable car maker may not wear its crown forever. Great Wall Motor, GWLLY -4.22% one of China’s largest SUV makers, sports higher operating margins than even ultraluxury players such as Ferrari. It has achieved this partly because utility vehicles, which fetch higher profits, make up a bigger proportion of its sales than of the average car maker’s. Great Wall has kept costs to a minimum. Research and development spending came to just 2.2% of sales in 2012, the lowest among major Chinese car makers, according to Goldman Sachs. Its global peers typically spend 4% to 5% of their sales on R&D. Read more of this post

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China Stocks Drop to 7-Week Low as PBOC Fails to Cut Money Rates

October 29, 2013 Leave a comment

China Stocks Drop to 7-Week Low as PBOC Fails to Cut Money Rates

Chinese stocks fell, dragging the benchmark gauge to the lowest level in seven weeks, as small companies plunged and the central bank’s first cash injection in two weeks failed to reduce money-market rates. Tsinghua Tongfang Co., a maker of personal computers, tumbled 6.5 percent to lead losses among technology companies. The ChiNext index of Shenzhen-listed companies sank 4.7 percent, the most since June 24. The fixing on the seven-day money-market rate rose seven basis points to 5 percent. A gauge of financial shares pared its rally to 1.3 percent after gaining 3.6 percent. Read more of this post

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