Asia rising

I've become much more interested in the Asia investment arena lately, precisely because almost everyone else is running away from it.

As I've mentioned before, I still believe that the best way to invest in overseas markets is to buy global companies based in the US. Many of the components of the DOW 30 get more than 50% of their revenue offshore. With that you get access to a lot of information and at least some accountability (yes, I know the banks and brokers have let us down, but compare it to the skulduggery that goes on in many other countries and it looks bland). My reservation about investing in these areas is that it is so difficult to do what Phil Fisher called "scuttlebutt" (getting as much information in addition to the financial reports as you can to give you an edge over other investors).

One approach to this problem is to see what the value gurus are buying and imitate them. They do have a lot more resources than you have and if you can buy the same stocks they do in these faraway places at a cheaper price than they did, you may have an edge. OTOH, I don't like blindly following gurus as their goals, time horizon and asset allocation model may be radically inappropriate for my relatively tiny portfolio.

That said, I think there are a few gems that can be got for pennies on the dollar these days.

This Forbes article gives some Japanese examples of companies that are trading at or below their net liquid asset value.

l