08.05.08

Fund Mojo - Never ending process to find best money managers

Posted in Technology Ventures at 5:05 pm by Ray Wu

After months of delay, I have finally decided to take one of my ideas to the market in a site called Fund Mojo. Throughout my last 15+ years of investment history, I have found it is hard to find a good fund manager who can consistently beat his peers. Statistically, the investment world follows the same 80/20 rule: 80% of the fund managers can’t even beat their own category index. Given the expensive management fee, it is just a waste of money. But 20% of fund managers are decent enough to be able to beat their targeted index over some period of the fund’s life. What’s truly amazing from my analysis is that there are these top 1% - 2% fund managers who not only can beat their peers and category index consistently, but also accomplish it with a reasonable fee structure and better risk profile. Problem is that they become so good that either they are lured into hedge fund or their funds size increases dramatically to make it harder for them to manage. The key is to identify these managers through a consistent evaluation formula, monitor their performance and believe in their capability, and stay with them for the long run. It has panned out very well for my portfolio and now the Fund Mojo systematically exams over 26000+ mutual funds in the US and starts to replicate that model on a larger scale. In addition, Fund Mojo allows users to figure out what these top fund managers are doing so that we can all benefit from their wisdom, including stocks they buy and sell.

If you are interested to see more, check out Fund Mojo site: http://www.fundmojo.com.

07.25.08

China says its population of Internet users rises to world No. 1 at 253 million

Posted in Technology Ventures at 6:39 am by Ray Wu

This is quite interesting from the news:

China’s booming Internet population has surpassed the United States to become the world’s biggest, with 253 million people online despite government controls on Web use, according to government data reported Friday.

The latest figure on Web use at the end of June is a 56 percent increase over the same time last year, the China Internet Network Information Center said. It said the share of the Chinese public using the Internet is still just 19.1 percent, leaving more room for rapid growth.

The United States had an estimated 223.1 million Internet users in June, according to Nielsen Online, a research firm. The Pew Internet and American Life Project puts U.S. online penetration at 71 percent.

06.05.08

Global Inflation and Opporunity

Posted in Technology Ventures, Random thoughts, Globalization at 10:10 pm by Ray Wu

Fed Chief Ben Bernanke talks about his worry on inflation in the last 2 days. The problem is that Fed can no longer control the pricing alone in this globally integrated market. Since 70% of US GDP comes from service sector, it is almost impossible to see how heavy inflationary environment in China and India is not going to have a significant impact on US. We have seen heavy demand on not only industrial commodities such as oil and gas, but also agricultural commodities like rice and pork. As a matter of fact, Costco is limiting number of bag of rice a person can purchase at one visit. As more of more citizens in the developing countries become richer, they will also seek better life that most Americans get used to: better and more food, a car, a house etc. Imagine several billion of people flood to this new demand curve and its impact on the overall resources? We as a human race will come up solutions to deal with this resource demand/supply gap overtime, but the shock is unavoidable. It is actually good for the digital economy because digital economy is based on bountifulness of unlimited supply (ie. 1M download of a software is not going to be add noticeable cost than a single copy of download). While physical economy gets more constrained, the digital economy would be in favor. For example, as airline ticket goes up, people would use virtual meeting more than flying to meet in person. I see a lot of opportunities for us in the valley to benefit from this trend.

06.03.08

Donate to China earthquake

Posted in Random thoughts, Globalization at 7:13 am by Ray Wu

I have always been an advocate of donation efficiency. It took me a while to find a few donation services that pass 100% of the donation back to China. The one I decided in the end is Silicon Valley Tsinghua Network that is run by about 15 volunteers who are helping all donation and website details. So I donated a few thousand bucks for this effort and hope you can join me to help relieve the suffering just a little. 60K+ death and counting, what a tragedy! There is an incidence where a school building collapsed and every student died. Thinking of this makes my heart ache as I know how sad it is to lose a loved one, especially a child.

05.30.08

Back to root

Posted in Technology Ventures, Globalization at 6:21 am by Ray Wu

After going back to China almost every month this year, I start to really appreciate my root a lot. Since I left China in 1986, there are tremendous amount of changes in that country every year. But it is only until recent few years I start to see not only infrastructure upgrade, but also human capital upgrade. For the first time, I see people make it big not because they have connections and know how to wine and dine, but because they work hard. I see government officials clearly and openly outline their 5 year plan and push hard to make change happen. I see construction and booming everywhere. The latest stats came out last month that consumer spending is growing 22% Y/Y in April 2008. As a matter of fact, China is the third-biggest consumer of luxury goods in 2005 that accounts for 12 percent of sales worldwide. The analysts expect China to be second-largest purchaser of luxury goods by 2015 and account for 29 percent of the world’s luxury sales. According to Goldman Sachs, China GDP will bypass US by 2040, but that’s assuming Chinese currency would stay flat. With current currency appreciation rate, I expect China GDP to pass US within the next 15 years. This is a figure business week mentioned in one of its articles a few weeks ago. From a technology perspective, China is the largest Internet countries in the world with 225M users and counting, 53% Y/Y growth in 2007. It is also the largest Cell Phone Market with 400M cell phone users vs 202M in the US at the end of 2007. Consider China cell phone penetration rate is only at 30+% vs 70% in the US, you can see why all the handset manufactures treat China as the most strategic target. So many possibilities and so little time…

05.20.08

What’s new?

Posted in Technology Ventures at 10:45 pm by Ray Wu

It has been a while since I blogged last time. I guess I dropped the ball here. With a new baby, various consulting and investing projects and traveling, it becomes hard for me to blog. I will try to do more going forward :)

Here is a picture on the Beijing street as the earth quake happened on May 12th. Luckily, my building was very solid that I hardly feel the building shake, but everyone was running.

bj_earthquake.jpg

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