Friday, November 16, 2007

Short 'em All. They Aren't Worth the Paper They're Printed On

That was one of my mentors, looking at offering calendars some years ago. Jay Ritter's Journal of Finance paper:
"The Long-Run Performance of Initial Public Offerings"
would never cross his desk, but he knew.
Deep Knowledge.
Ritter has been cited in almost 1000 other papers,
my mentor has been cited by me.
Here's a story from MoneyWeek:

A sure sign that China's in a bubble

Is there a bubble in the Chinese market? Of course there is. You only need look at average p/es and at a chart of the Shanghai Composite to be pretty certain. However anyone still in any doubt need only look at the IPO of Alibaba.com (1688) last week in Hong Kong. The shares instantly more than doubled and ended their first day trading on a p/e of over 300 times.

But what does Alibaba actually do? It is usually referred to as “e-commerce company Alibaba.com”, a sign that not many people really know (yet another sign of a bubble…) but its basic business model is pretty simple: its website lists Chinese suppliers of manufactured goods to match them with buyers worldwide. Is it any good? Not according to the clothes and handbag designers I spoke to at the Billion Dollar Babes sample sale on Saturday.

One designer put it like this. “There are thousands and thousands of manufacturers listed. How do you know where to begin?...MORE