For his Technical Swing portfolio, Covestor model manager Michael Arold uses technical indicators in conjunction with a discretionary view of trending stocks and sectors to capture profits in short term price swings. Current top holdings include ProShares UltraPro Short S&P 500 (SPXU), Cameco Corp (CCJ) and iShares Silver Trust (SLV).
On March 22, Arold added a new position in Baidu.com (BIDU) to the portfolio. BIDU is a Chinese-language Internet search provider.The Motley Fool recently discussed recently broken news that BIDU is attempting to enter the mobile operating system market:
Just as Baidu has followed Google with its own tweaked versions of search, Adwords, and Adsense, China’s leading search engine is now apparently setting its sites on rolling out a mobile operating system.
In a Financial Times interview published yesterday, Baidu CEO Robin Li discusses a stripped-down platform that would open to a single Baidu search box. Li’s vision of “box computing” may seem ludicrous at first. Who wants a dumbed-down smartphone? Who wants a tablet that doesn’t open up to shiny icons promising multimedia goodness with a single tap?
Will this be enough to differentiate Baidu in a sea of mobile operating systems? It probably isn’t going to help that theFinancial Times claims that it will be another three to five years before Baidu’s platform is released. It promises to be an entirely different landscape by then, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.
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Baidu obviously has a branding advantage in the world’s most populous nation, but it still needs to cultivate the hardware relationships to make this happen.
BIDU shares rose 4.32% as of the end of day 3/24.
Sources:
“Is Baidu Phoning It In?” Rick Aristotle Munarriz. The Motley Fool, 3/23/11. http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/03/23/is-baidu-phoning-it-in.aspx
