Global Opportunities
By
Timothy Lutts, Cabot Chief Investment Strategist and Editor of
Cabot Stock of the Month ReportFrom Cabot Wealth Advisory 3/12/08
Sign up for free Cabot Wealth Advisory e-newsletterTwelve months ago, I took a 10-day trip to China. Among the highlights of the trip were these experiences:
- Ridiculously inexpensive food and taxi rides.
- Ridiculously competitive traffic (pedestrians have no rights).
- Pampered Chinese children.
- Heavy air pollution in the cities.
- Unintentionally humorous translations into English.
- Omnipresent construction in the cities.
- Bathroom facilities that challenged my wife's sensibilities.
- Delicious food. Notable were the xiao long bao (soup-filled
dumplings), ubiquitous in Shanghai, and the "bullfrog in a clay pot" I
washed down with beer in Beijing.
- Spending a night in the architectural delights of the "Commune by
the Great Wall" and then hiking up to an unreconstructed part of the
wall through spring snow the next morning.
- Bargaining for faux antiques and other souvenirs. The more time you
spend on bargaining, the lower your ultimate price...but the seller
never loses!
- An excess of willing labor.
- And above all, the industry of the people, who are working very
hard to grow their country's economy, and watching their living
standards improve dramatically as a result.
In the end, my most lasting thought is that the trip exceeded my expectations more than any other trip I've taken.
And now
Paul Goodwin,
editor of
Cabot China & Emerging Markets Report, is going to China!
In fact, he's very likely in the air, traversing the North Pole, as you
read this. He's traveling with a business class from the University of
New Hampshire, so his itinerary includes factory visits and talks on
Chinese industry and international commerce.
Me, I'm looking forward to visiting Brazil or India in the year ahead, though I have no firm plans yet.
What good is all this travel? Does it really help us provide better investment advice? No...and yes.
No
plant visit or luncheon with management is ever going to sell us on an
investment. The detailed work of finding compelling growth stories,
examining the numbers, and monitoring the charts still takes place here
in our office. To my mind, the objectivity gained from distance is a
wonderful thing.
The value of visiting foreign countries is
that it opens up our eyes to new cultures. It breaks down the barriers
we have against investing in the unknown. It reminds us that more and
more we are a global community, with global investment opportunities
that don't stop at our borders.
Now, I can't claim that my
visit to China had anything to do with Paul's success last year, in
which he guided Cabot China & Emerging Markets Report to a gain of
74%, the best performance of all the newsletters in the country. But I
know it didn't hurt!
I can't claim that Paul's visit will
enable him to duplicate the feat this year, but I can say this: There's
no doubt that China and India and Brazil and Russia are all growing
substantially faster than the U.S. There's no doubt that money is
leaving the U.S. and flowing into these four countries every day,
finding the best growth opportunities. And there's no doubt that Paul
will recommend numerous excellent growth companies in the year ahead
that will give you the opportunity to double your money and more.
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