Is it Possible not to Like Alibaba's Jack Ma?

     I say no. I wrote the day of BABA's IPO that this guy was reason enough to buy the stock. It's amazing that coming in that one of the concerns about BABA before the IPO was Jack Ma having too much control-it's his company that he started in his own apartment over 20 years ago.

    http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2014/09/for-alibaba-jack-ma-is-feature-not-bug.html

    After watching this guy I felt that, yeah, maybe the Chinese government is big and scary but I'm not worried about it with Ma around-he's gotten this far. Anyway, the Chinese government isn't really communist anymore or it is but it wants China to be the most successful in capitalism in the world.

    I was struck by how smart and likable Ma is. Yesterday he gave us another gem: He learned public speaking by listening to Whitney Houston.

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/27/jack-ma-learned-how-to-make-a-speech-from-watching-whitney-houston/18040105/

    Maybe, he learned public speaking from her, but what strikes me is how well he speaks American. This is what's so disarming about him. When you think of the history of hostilities between our two countries-from the days of Chiang Kai-shek to Mao, to the famines. to the cultural revolutions, to American anxieties about China surpassing us -it all seems so remote when you listen to Ma.

   Or maybe, the Jack Ma moment is the latest in American-Sino rapprochement. of finding common ground that goes back to Nixon  going to China. Nixon would have liked Ma I believe. Again, Ma speaks such fluent American. His heroes, his reference points could not be further from Mao and any cultural revolution. He doesn't even mention Deng though he's the latest move in Deng's line. He speaks to us of our own real heroes-Forrest Gump and Whitney Houston.

   Washington DC may be our capital, but Hollywood is our Holy City.  He doesn't speak to us of Chinese ideology but rather of our own American ideology.

   I'm not really a buy and hold type of a guy. Part of this is I remember 2008. However, I don't think it's primarily because I fear losses. Obviously not as you actually can lose a lot more going short term or trading, etc. I'm just impatient and want the biggest potential bang for my buck possible. That's why I love options so much.

   However, Ma has made me a believer. Here is one stock I can see holding long term, if not forever. It seems I'm finally in the right positions. I have lots of shares in BABA and I have $104 November 14 calls in Apple. My price target for AAPL is $107 and it's now just touched $106.30 as we speak. When it breaks $107 I'll get out and with the profits-which should be about $2700-I'll buy more shares in BABA-I want a total of 100 shares and will be able to get them when Apple hits that level-just a question of when and that could be today.

    I don't think there's any queston that BABA and AAPL are the safest stocks in the market, the safest place to put one's money. Now today, these two superpowers are making googly eyes at each other-Tim Cook and Ma. Both stocks are at all time highs this morning.

    http://inagist.com/all/526929452509298688/

    My home girl Kim Kardashian is at the Mobile conference today in California and she revealed her perference is not Iphone but a Blackberry! Then Kevin O'Leary-of the Shark Tank-agreed with her. Is this a time to buy Blackberry? She mentioned buying them-just in jest?

    I see that she's showing up everywhere now as she was in 2 Broke Girls last night. I'm hoping this is the start of a bigger trend towards seeing her get into acting.

    O'Leary made an interesting point: Google maybe should just be evil. It may turn out to be a big tactical mistake not going into China. It's not really evil to operate within Chinese law when in China. How high would the stock go today if they had second thoughts on this?

     Of course, what I hate about Google is what they did to my blog-they dropped me from Adsense without any explanation.