It's like ratatouille.

Attendees:  Bickford and Brian

Syria:  It's not Iraq.  Stop saying that it is just like Iraq.  Maybe think about Rwanda.

Egypt:  Curfews are impacting business.  Some large firms are at least temporarily closing shop.  Do we run in while everybody else is leaving?  We may see some impact to oil prices, but it may minimal since we're getting more from our friends up North.  The change over to natural gas is also minimizing the impact.

England:  Due to population density, you are always in someone's backyard.  The people appear to be pretty unified against it.

Australia:  Second in donations to political causes by energy companies.

Portfolio:  Not doing so hot.  ATT looking to buy the remnants of Vodaphone.

American Football:  "Oh my God, it's football season..." - a third party.  Read as being a bad thing.  Imagine a lot of disappointment in the voice.

What's in a name:  A friend of the blog is a part of a small company that is looking to purchase the rights to a company name that those of us who are at least in their late twenties will remember.  The idea is that the small firm can use the name recognition of the brand to pull in customers.  It can be thought of as a way to get past the idea of an unknown company producing a product.  This was an interesting prospect and led us to a few questions.  How many companies that we see don't have ties to the original organization?  How often do products go under different companies?

Next Week:  Avi Stocks

Profit!

A Nigerian prince approaches you about a lucrative financial opportunity...or investing in Africa.

Members present: Brian, Bickford, and Danak

We started talking about EWZ, which has been the bane of our portfolio for some time now. Is it time to get out? If not now, when, and why?

Next, we decided it was high time to compare some potential investments in Africa. The table below outlines some of the pros, cons, and mysteries of a few prominent Africa ETFs. Most of the information from this was gathered from Morningstar as well as the holdings pages from the various funds themselves.

Fund	Pros	Cons	Good/Bad?
EZA	·      Mostly Africa ·      Heavy consumer discretionary ·      Good expense ratio	·      Heavy in financials ·      Low diversification of holdings
GAF	·      See above	·      Only slightly more diversified than EZA
AFK	·      Good expense ratio ·      Good diversification in both holdings and countries	·      47% financials ·      13% energy
NAFAX	·      17% Industrials ·      14% Consumer Cyclical (These are sectors we don’t have a lot of)	·      Heavy in financials (23%) ·      High expense ratio (2.5%)	10% of the fund is Nigerian Treasury Bonds.
WAFMX	·      Good diversification in holdings ·      50% Consumer Defensive (staples) ·      20% Consumer Cyclical	·      High expense ratio (2.25%)
CAFRX		·      Really strange, with lots of moving parts. See next column	·      Two different indexes in its top holdings. (EZA as 18%, AFK as 14%)
EGPT	·      Diversified well by company ·      Not super-heavy in Communications (17%) and Financials (15%)	·      Egypt may be a volatile state to invest in	·      58% of the fund is small companies
MES		·      46% Financials
GULF		·      High in Financials and Communications

Looking at this, there are reasons to not invest in all of these. However, we didn't do this sort of pro/con analysis for our previous investments. NORW was 50% Energy, but we ended up using to balance our portfolio. Right now, we want to avoid going too heavy in Telecom.

For next week:

• Do we try to balance our portfolio, or do we try to get into Africa? 
• It might be nice if our portfolio was eventually less than 20% in anything. 

Profit!