New ADR: SouFun Holdings Limited

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SouFun Holdings Limited started trading on the NYSE on September 22nd with the ticker symbol SFUN. SouFun operates a leading real-estate website in China. The company “provides marketing, listing and other value-added services and products for China’s fast-growing real estate and home furnishing and improvement sectors.”

The initial ADR price was set at $42.50 and 1 ADR equals 4 Class A ordinary shares.The total ADR offering value was about $143 M for about 3.3 million shares. On the day of listing the stock jumped 73% confirming the continuing investor appetite for all stocks related to China.

Last October another China real estate information services provided named China Real Estate Information (CRIC) was listed on the NASDAQ market.From a peak of over $16 the ADR reached as low as $8 before recovering to $11.10 now.

The Shanghai Composite Index is down by double digits this year.Speculation is rampant in the Chinese housing market despite the central government’s best efforts to crack down on speculators. Hence foreign investors need to be cautious before jumping into the China bandwagon especially IPOs stocks related to the real estate market.

The 10 Most Profitable Swiss Companies

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The 10 most profitable publicly-listed Swiss companies that appear in the Forbes Global 2000 list for 2010 are listed below:

[TABLE=580]

Nestle (OTC: NSRGY) is the world’s largest consumer goods company that owns about 6,000 brands. ABB Ltd (ABB) offer power and automation technologies to industrial customers and the company has operations in about 100 countries.

Related ETF:
iShares MSCI Switzerland Index (EWL)

21 Foreign Stocks Yielding More Than 5% Dividends

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With the third quarter over, I wanted to identify some foreign large cap ADRs that paid dividends of over 5%. So I ran the stock screener with the following criteria:

1. Stocks must trade on the NYSE
2. Market cap. must be >= $5B
3. Must have dividend yields of 5% or more

The search resulted in 21 ADR stocks that are listed below:

[TABLE=561]

The only financials in this list are Banco Santander(SAN) of Spain and Mizuho Financial Group (MFG) of Japan. Santander’s recent acquisitions should help the bank increase its earnings in the long run. This year the banking giant has acquired a 24.9% stake in Grupo Financiero Santander(Mexico), bought the German retail network of Sweden’s Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken, bought 318 U.K. branches from Royal Bank of Scotland and picked up Allied Irish Banks’s (AIB) 70% stake in Poland’s Bank Zachodni WBK.

The three electric utilities Companhia Energetica Minas Gerais (CIG), Companhia Siderurgica Nacional(SID) and CPFL Energia S.A.(CPL) can offer exposure to the utility sector of the hot emerging market of Brazil.Ten of the ADRs noted above are in the telecom sector. Spanish telcom company Telefonica (TEF) has a strong presence in Latin America. Mobile TeleSystems OJSC (MTS) is a telecom services provider in Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Armenia with a subscriber base of about 98 million at the end of last year.

600 Banks Have Not Yet Repaid TARP Funds

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In an earlier article I wrote about the success of the TARP program. This $700 billion bailout government program is officially ending on Monday. According to a Wall Street Journal piece, more than 600 banks are still holding $65 billion of the bailout funds.Many of these banks are too weak to repay the government funds.

The graphic below shows eight banks that haven’t repaid TARP capital:

At the height of the financial crisis, regulators allowed the Cleveland, Ohio-based National City bank to be taken over by PNC Financial Services (PNC). But three other Ohio-based lenders, KeyCorp (KEY), Huntington Bancshares(HBAN) and Fifth Third Bank (FITB) survived the crisis partly due to the TARP capital infusions.

Some small banks such as New York Community Bankcorp Inc(NYB), Chemical Financial Corp(CHFC) and Smithtown Bancorp Inc (SMTB) refused to participate in the TARP program due to the heavy restrictions that came with the loans.