Jim Rogers

Jim Rogers is a fun guy, not the ordinary fun guy, but a millionare investor who used to work with George Soros (made a fortune). These days he is very bullish on China, although I don’t agree with him on a lot of his investment ideas. I liked his light-heartness and his passion for travel. Here is video he took at China Jia Yu Guan (last fortress west side of China Great Wall).

And Zhong Shan Lin (the memorial of Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of modern China). Since this is the memorial day in China, it’s also a fitting moment. The memorial is located in eastern China city of Nanjing (a sister city of St. Louis).

Valuation of China A shares: raw materials

Chinese stocks are becoming more and more expensive. From different statistics, average PE of the market is in 40s. This is not cheap compared to around PE 18 of US S&P 500. There are many reasons for that, and I’m not jumping into it. But I want to share an interesting phenomena here: these days the fund managers, and individual investors are looking for valuation safe haven, or in Chinese terms, 价值洼地.

What does that mean? Lately because some of the blue chips are so hot, they got PE of more than 50. For instance, Vanke (000002), is traded at 32 Yuan, the est. year 2007 earning is 0.60 Yuan, so the PE for 2007 is about 53. Note this is No. 1 weighted stock in Shenzhen Index (about 16%), and its market cap (more than 200 b Yuan, or $30 b) is more than top 4 US home builders combined. (Vanke is No. 1 builder in China and it has about 1% market share). China Merchants Bank (600036) has similar problems. By the way, I believe those are two best managed companies in China.