Can you confirm when you last checked. Was it recently? Because they said that and then they updated saying that was no longer the case. A guy in a WhatsApp trading group who uses them also said its still available to purchase in an ISA though. Also Hargreaves used to let you have them in an ISA also is that no longer the case?
Just rechecked and Baba is definitely still available in the ISA. Nio was removed as were many others but Baba is still allowed hence my question to Freetrade.
I’m pretty sure some brokers allow it to be held in an ISA, the one my brother uses through the company he used to work at allows it to be held in an ISA.
Hey guys,
Spoke to support, and they realised they made a mistake and Alibaba is now available through the ISA!
Hong Kong stock exchange is recognised by HMRC, so we can hold it in an ISA without any problems.
I’ll be selling them from my GIA and buying them in my ISA today!
Quite a quiet thread through its recent turbulence so thought I might share some thoughts. Alibaba as a business is solid, they’re even more diversified than Amazon (not always a good thing, fan of McDonalds here with a layered business model).
They have good free cash flow, more than healthy margins. Their biggest threat comes in two parts (in my view): The CCP/Uncertainty - they (Alibaba and related enterprises) may be forced to split up, The public - The horrible 996 working hours which have allowed the tech sector to level up so quickly and the public’s patience in it is starting to wane.
Two big factors to consider while considering investing:
As always this is not investment advice, make sure as always you do your own research.
I’ve always favoured JD as company, but BABA’s value is getting pretty hard to ignore right now.
This stock basically feels like a binary option at this point, in that either it’ll return to fair value (~double) or it’ll drop to zero. I might pick up some LEAPS to take advantage of asymmetric risk.
Really important point you highlighted there. You can always be smart and make sure you’re buying up BABA at it’s floor/lowest price but it’s facing a dramatic and uncertain future. If China loosens it’s grip, the stock will soar but if it doesn’t the stock will have some shedding to do.
Yeah it might become a non-marketable security or in the worst case it’s technically possible that the instrument becomes completely decoupled from the value of the company. That would require a pretty exceptional political situation and have wider reaching consequences, but it’s possible.
its a bet. but bloomberg just announced 5 mins ago on their auzzy news that the CPP are cracking down on I.P. violations. I think that may, perhaps, affect the (local) peer to peer transactions which is 80% of alibabas renvenue, but, will defo affect the international trade (fake/rip off western goods), which is a fraction.
Very very interesting last couple weeks with this stock. It’s trying to figure out if it’s hit it’s bottom, let’s see if the resistance will crack but some real buying opportunities these last few days.
Some big fish (primarily value investors) have been digging into this stock over the last few days. Could have hit it’s floor.
i’ve seen that mentioned.
Aswath Damodaran just put out a good video that covered Alibaba and shared his models.
Fascinating, agree with his personal investment decision although I think he understated the weakness Jack Mao poses to Alibaba (China fear/don’t like him).
I’ve watched this guy before and heard him referenced often as a legend. He even replied to one of my YouTube comments.
My question is, if he’s so good at valuing companies then why is he not ridiculously rich? Investing is one of the most straightforward areas to measure results as there is a direct point system (your investment returns or how much money you’ve made).
I get that he is a professor and probably prefers doing that to working in industry, but if he’s following his own analyses and they are that good then he should be very successful in his investments. I like to read up on Buffet and Peter Lynch as their investing record is clear to see. I get that he may be fairly wealthy as well, but as far as I know we can’t see that.
Wall Street isn’t for everyone, seldom do the intelligent people rise or succeed. He has clearly found what he loves given he’s been writing books since the early 1990’s. A professor at NYU Stern and without isn’t worrying about his meal.
I mean it’s just the standard education vs business gap, why are Andrew Ng or Walter Lewin not super rich? It’s not like he’s running a fund or something so how would we know if he’d outperform them.
I think it’s very important to think about the environments that Buffett and Lynch invested in, while they were certainly highly skilled in a relative sense the absolute skill of the market was significantly lower back then. There are many reasons for Berkshire’s recent underperformance (size, decreased risk-free rates etc…) but a big one that’s less commonly discussed is that the mispricings that Buffett was able to take advantage of are much rarer now - much more time, energy and cpu cycles are spent seeking out and capturing those inefficiencies.
Or as Damodaran himself puts it:
Markets have changed since Buffett started his first partnership. His greatest successes did occur in the 1960s and the 1970s, when relatively few investors had access to information about the market and institutional money management was not dominant. We think that Buffett would have difficulty replicating his success, if he were starting anew in today’s market, where information on companies and trading is widely available and dozens of money managers claim to be looking for bargains in value stocks.
In 30 years time investors will probably look at today’s unsophisticated markets and remark at how easy it must have been to generate alpha and perhaps the principles that Damodaran has taught a generation will seem outdated.
Remember that an investment’s returns are not a measure of the quality of an investment decision. Although certainly 30 years of outperformance is a clear demonstration of skill beyond luck, so that doesn’t detract from Buffett etc…
For Andrew Ng, assume that’s the machine learning guy, I can read his papers or see how effective his models are. For Damodaran, I assume you could go back through his analyses and see how accurate they are.
Yeah I just meant I’m sure Ng could make loads applying the same skills to business.
I think the same holds true for Damodaran, it’s possible to assess his writings and models without the lens of portfolio performance.
The torrid me times continue for $BABA
Down 40% in the last 12 months.
