Weekly links: Damodaran/China focus

Prof. Damodaran continued his series about value investing:
1. Contrarian Value Investing (must read, extremely interesting!!)
2. Activist Investing (more for informational purpose, since huge funds are needed to play)

And here the China focus:
1. Bronte Capital about Chinese kleptocracy (mostly state owned companies)
2. Research paper about Evergrand Real Estate Group (pdf, Chinese fraud, HK listing, very detailed!)

Its already Thursday, but better later than never!
A nice week!

Merkel meets british humour

British humour???

How online-newspapers make money with advertising

Collecting content for webpages in order to get advertising money through clicks gets increasingly popular.

This is one very good example I discovered this week (Handelsblatt again, they are very active with such things):

This is the picture line. That’s 25 pages of pictures.

Each time one clicks next, it reloads the whole pages, what is good since this generates more clicks. Every fifth image is a whole image full of advertising.

Despite the fact that the presentation method is quite useless, since it doesn’t yield any advantage, I wouldn’t mind so much.

However, on the first page one can see the source, on how what a wonder, there the ranking is presented as a table, what is just way more informational.

So remember this how-(not)-to-make-money-on-the-internet:

Find someone with some kind of content, take it, find some pictures (they don’t have to be related to the content at all, but should be free of charge!), copy some text and combine with not-related image, put one image per page, then advertise your great article.

Quality journalism at its best…

Another example I found today.

Also I read an interesting article (in German) about how the scam the new “output protection act” that has become a law in Germany recently. Very interesting and funny to read.

Interesting reads

So today is the day of the (second) election in Greece, what a lot of journalists are picturing as the final battle for/against the Euro: Good, old pro-EUR party (ND) against greedy, untrustworthy far left newcomers, screaming to get kicked out of the Euro zone.
In my opinion this is exaggerated, at least on the short run I expect Greece to stay with the Euro, since both parties want to -more or less- renegotiate the cuts and the EU (Hollande) will probably be willing to talk too, despite Merkels no-negotiation announcements.
Anyway im exited to see the outcome of the votes and market-reaction on Monday.

Now lets come to the links:
1. After his series of posts on growth (recommendation!)  Aswath Damodaran is following up with a series about Value Investing, starting two weeks ago with Value Investing: An Identity Crisis? and more recently Passive value investing: Screening for bargains. Interesting in the last post are, besides his very good instructions of how screening stocks is actually done, his closing thought on the moat of the investor and his odds of success.
2. The Brooklyn Investor on "the good old times" and todays market environment, with high-frequency trading, volatility, revolving doors and too efficient markets.
3.Value Walk on stocks and the Greek elections, seeing investment opportunities in Greece.

Thats it for now, have a nice sunday!