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The World Is Your Oyster: The Guide to Finding Great Investments Around the Globe - Hardcover

Opdyke, Jeff D.

 
9780307381040: The World Is Your Oyster: The Guide to Finding Great Investments Around the Globe
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0307381048 ISBN 13: 9780307381040
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

How Jeff D. Opdyke became a successful international investor is an Everyman tale that began thirteen years ago when he discarded conventional wisdom. At the time, Wall Street’s pros insisted that average investors buy domestic mutual funds that invest overseas. But Jeff ignored their tepid advice. Instead, he opted for the intrepid, opening bank and brokerage accounts from New Zealand to Hong Kong in order to buy the local stocks he wanted to own, not those that some fund manager deemed worthy.

Jeff did so with great insight: People are people no matter whether home is in Madrid, Memphis, or Mumbai. They drink beer and buy homes and the furnishings and appliances to put in them. As hundreds of millions of people around the world strive to move into the middle class, the companies that meet these basic needs are becoming the great investment opportunities of today and tomorrow. Only a fraction of them, however, trade on American stock exchanges.

So, armed with simple tools available to you and me (the Internet and an e-mail account), Jeff found companies intimately tied to their local economies but capable of expansion―to America, perhaps, or more important to Asia and other regions of explosive growth. One such company is Fisher & Paykel, a New Zealand–based maker of appliances that over the course of a dozen years has produced a steady stream of dividends and special distributions and has gained more than 17 percent a year for Jeff.

How to find companies like Fisher & Paykel is the heart of this book. You can indeed make the world your oyster by diversifying your portfolio, and Jeff provides indispensable insight and practical guidelines for every aspect of investing directly overseas. He shows how to research and track companies, set up foreign brokerage accounts, handle tax issues, convert currencies, and fund accounts.

Why venture beyond the United States to begin with? Because America is really just one small island. For every American public company, there are four beyond our shores―many of which are small to midsize and have huge potential for growth, which you’ll never find by trading in America alone.

If you’re ready to take the next step in building a truly diversified portfolio, you will gain a wealth of invaluable insight and information from Jeff’s engaging first-person accounts of his trial-and-error―but, ultimately, highly successful―globe-trotting career in search of worthy stocks.

The opportunities for investing overseas are indisputable. The World Is Your Oyster is your travel guide: pinpointing five of the best reasons to go global, detailing various ways for investors of every temperament―from timid to adventurous―to cross financial borders, focusing on how to invest directly in hot spots from China to Turkey to Eastern Europe, and revealing how the Internet and other twenty-first-century technology has opened a world of direct overseas investment opportunities for you.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JEFF D. OPDYKE covers investing and personal finance for The Wall Street Journal and is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal Sunday supplement syndicated in eighty newspapers nationwide. He is also the author of The Wall Street Journal Complete Personal Financial Guidebook and Love and Money.

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Chapter 1

Postcards from the Edge

Five Reasons to Go Global

Why go global?

When all is said and done, the answer defines this book.

Why, indeed, go to all the effort of putting money to work in places outside your home country when an abundance of opportunities to invest in some of the world's finest public companies exists right here in the fruited plains of the U.S. stock market? After all, in the world of 2007 more than 5,100 public companies carried the Made in America label, including some of the biggest, globally branded firms--McDonald's, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Wal-Mart, Exxon, and Boeing, to name but six. Own such companies and some portion of your money is at work in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. A Pakistani buys lemon-and-spice-flavored fries for lunch at a Mickie D's in Karachi, and you profit. An Argentine buys the family's household supplies while shopping at the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Mendoza, and you profit. The United Arab Emirates' flag carrier, Etihad Airways, orders five Boeing 777 jets, as it did in September 2004, and you profit. Sure, such transactions are infinitesimal on your individual account. Yet spread across millions and millions of global transactions, those infinitesimal slivers of profit mass into real dollars over time.

And here in the states, you're not limited to just American companies with global tentacles. You also have access to a few thousand foreign companies whose stocks are listed in various American markets. Many of these foreigners carry names equally well regarded stateside: Honda, Vodafone, Air France, and Unilever, among them. Indeed, you can collect a vast assortment of so-called American depositary receipts, the U.S. traded shares of foreign firms, from dozens of nations (including Malawi, the Dominican Republic, and Sri Lanka) without ever leaving American shores. Moreover, you can trade these companies' shares through a U.S.-based brokerage account as quickly and easily as you do American icons such as Apple Computer and Microsoft.

Venturing abroad, then, would seem an entirely unnecessary, if not extravagant, exercise.

Only it's not.

The world has entered an age increasingly absent the financial barriers that once derailed the flow of investment dollars across borders. U.S. companies today buy competitors in Germany; British companies buy in America; those in Japan cross into South Korea. U.S mutual funds, hedge funds, and pensions routinely invest a large portion of the money they manage in stock markets all around the world. And today we individual investors--the mom-and-pop investors, as Wall Street calls us--can ship our money off to work in far more locales than we've ever had access to. Good reason exists for doing so: Those 5,100 companies that are Made in America represented just 10% of the roughly 50,000 publicly traded companies listed on the world's various stock exchanges in 2007. Ten percent. In that context the American market, despite its prominence globally, seems a fairly constrained investment universe.

Certainly, many of the world's publicly traded companies aren't worth the effort. They trade in countries racked by war or political corruption or both; they trade on stock exchanges so small that you assume unacceptable trading risks, particularly when stock prices are falling; they exist in countries where you face limitations or restrictions on repatriating your money whenever you want; their corporate governance, assuming it exists, is questionable at best, leaving your investment in great jeopardy. Some are still owned in large part by various government entities and have about the same profit-making incentive as did those old Soviet collective farms. Managers aren't running such businesses to benefit private shareholders so much as they're running a business to preserve their job by keeping some lethargic, bloated, bureaucratic government agency content.

Vast numbers of others, however, are strong, viable, entrepreneurial companies, or those with decades of profitability in their past, trading in long-established markets, in long-stable countries with a long history of sound securities regulation. They sell proven products and services, with immense and expanding prospects to continue growing their business at home and abroad. Their corporate governance is robust and their managers and executives awake each day trying to make the company a little bigger and a little better for themselves and their shareholders.

The only "not" on their list: a presence in the USA.

If you want to own these companies--and there are very good reasons why you should--you have to go to them, because they're not coming to you.

Think about it in terms of, say, Japan's culinary staple, miso soup. You can shop your local hyper-super-megamart just around the corner from home and, though the store has thousands of items for sale, you're not likely to find two key ingredients: the miso paste itself and packets of bonito flakes, from which comes the soup's base. While the American hypermart will assuredly offer a few Asian selections along one-quarter of an aisle--if that much--it generally doesn't stock all that you need to cook up many of the truly authentic dishes. For that you'll need to shop at the Asian market on the other side of town, where the grocer stocks all the ingredients you need, commonly multiple selections in various quantities and quality grades, all the genuine brands sold back in the motherland. Plus, the Asian grocer's prices are frequently lower, since for the hypermart these are specialty items worthy of a marked-up price, whereas for the grocer's clientele, local Asians, these are everyday staples. And the locals are not about to overpay for everyday staples. Sure, the transaction across town takes more effort and more time, and you risk not being able to read the label and may even struggle to communicate with the shopkeeper. But the Asian grocer can answer your questions, point you toward a better product, and offer tips on how the locals really use the ingredients.

All in all, you're better off shopping where the locals do--despite the added sweat in doing so.

Grocery markets and stock markets aren't so dissimilar. For all the companies you can buy on the American hyper-megamart of stock exchanges, so many more that you might want to own are simply unavailable where U.S. investors typically shop. Though thousands of 7-Eleven convenience stores populate North America, for instance, you had better operate from a brokerage account with access to the Tokyo Stock Exchange if you want to own shares of the Japanese company controlling the chain--Seven & i Holdings Co. Want to profit from China's rapidly expanding market for home ownership? Better have an account in Hong Kong to trade China Vanke Co., a Shenzhen-based residential property developer in major Chinese cities. You'll need the ability to trade stocks in Milan if you want to own the leading tour operator--Gruppo Ventaglio S.p.A--that Italians call on when they're planning a holiday.

And why would you care to own the leading tour provider in Italy . . . or a Japanese convenience-store operator . . . or a Chinese property developer? That answer goes to the soul of this book--to what it means to be a global investor: People the world over do exactly the same things we Americans do, they just demand their services and products from local businesses that cater to and profit from local needs. So, just as we Americans like to vacation, so too do Europeans; in fact, each August it's as though the entire continent is on holiday. Whether it's Italians tanning on a Sri Lankan beach, Norwegians sunning on a ship trolling the Greek isles, or Brits jetting off to splash in the waters off the Balearic Islands, the cumulative billions of euros and pounds they're spending are...

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307381048
ISBN 13 
9780307381040
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
276
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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