Dear rss free blog,
Having
recently visited South Africa, and being convinced that its supposed
evil lefty Zuma government will be no worse than that of Brazil’s
Lula (we bought some ADRs), I keep an eye on news from the Beloved
Country of author Alan Paton.
Today
we have news of Winston the South African Homing Pigeon from the BBC
(quoting Beeld, a Durban newspaper):
Broadband
promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery – but in
South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble
pigeon. A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a
4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest
web firm, Telkom.
Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry
the data 60 miles – in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the
data. Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm’s slow
internet speeds.
The idea for the race came when a member of
staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data
transmission on ADSL. He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.
Winston took off from Unlimited IT’s call centre in the town
of Howick to deliver the memory stick to the firm’s office in Durban.
They made sure there were no cats around the roof.
Take
Swiss bank negativism with a grain of salt. Following Paul Renaud’s
high negativism about the appeal of USA markets for Swiss money
managers (like him) yesterday, Artio resumed its attempt to
get a US listing. The original ipo for the asset management arm of
Bank Julius Baer was
schedules for Feb. 2008, but then the business cratered. My list of Swiss stocks we recommend yesterday failed to include a Global Investing Pro pick we also keep up with.
An
ETF for gold-bugs who want to be absolutely sure their fund really
holds the stuff, and in a safe place, is being launched. SGOG will
list on ARCA like the other smaller gold-holding fund. But it will
hold its gold not in London vaults (where European trading is mostly
done) but in the Alpine fastnesses of Schweiz. Moreover, there will
be an inspection twice a year of the gold holdings and the numbers of
the gold bars in the Swiss vaults will be published. Moreover, the
new fund will charge 1/10 of 1 percent less than the existing gold
funds. But switching from IAU or GLD would cost more than that even
with a discount brokerage.
With
so many copycat ETFs coming out, you have to make your new one stand
out. So SGOG is yodeling. The implication that the other two ETFs do
not in fact hold the gold that backs there shares is wrong, but it
may attract some conspiracy theorists.
News
about our companies, mainly regarding India and Israel, follows for
paid subscribers.
