August Portfolio

As you can see, I've allocated over 50% of my investments into China companies simply because I believe there is a shift in economic power.

Symbol	% of Assets	Description	Dividend Yield	Industry
PTR	28.23	Petrochina	3.30	Integrated Oil & Gas
BRK.B	7.84	Berkshire Hathaway Inc.	0.00	Insurance
SBUX	8.87	Starbucks Corp.	0.00	Specialty Eateries
N	8.81	NetSuite, Inc.	0.00	Business Software & Services
NFLX	8.09	Netflix, Inc.	0.00	Music & Video Stores
1211:HKG	28.57	BYD, Inc.	0.00	Batteries
CASH	9.59	Cash	2.01	Cash

Starbucks Addicts

In my opinion, there are 3 types of addictions people have in this world: drugs, alcohol, and coffee from Starbucks.

I initially made my purchase of Starbucks in December 2008 because I learned that the original founder, Howard Shultz, was returning to the company as CEO. This was the same strategy that worked with my Schwab (NYSE:SCHW) investment when Charles Schwab himself returned to the helm.

So Mr. Shultz immediately came back with guns blazing: shutting down around 600 underperforming stores, reducing staff, adding new drinks (my personal favorite is the Chocolate-Banana Vivanno), and buying new coffee technology like the Clover which is a fancy coffee maker designed by Stanford Engineers. Today I'm still sitting on my Starbucks (NYSE: SBUX) investment and will continue to be "married" to the company, as Warren Buffet likes to say, until Mr. Shultz decides its time to step down once again.