Some years ago we went on a railroad safari in India which stopped at various sites, including the Taj Mahal, an idyllic way to travel without having to pack and unpack. Among the largely foreign fellow travelers was a Jain couple who also live in the USA. To keep their relatives from disowning them for Western heresies, they re-adopted a Jain religious marker during their travels in India: wearing masks.

This was well before the corona-virus and was based on the Jain tradition of respect for all life—even including insects that might innocently be flying around your face. The mask was the way to stop unintentionally taking an insect's life. While this is a visible way to show that you are a Jain, it would not work today when everybody is wearing a mask, not to protect flies and mosquitoes, but to protect the wearer. Other Jain tenets are also “in” now like vegetarianism, opposition to animal sacrifice, women's rights (the religion bars suttee, wives throwing themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres), and mass bathing in the disgusting Ganges River (or any other body of water for religious cleansing).

We all now look like Jains here in New York. I think they are still polytheists but will ask Wendy Doniger, my college classmate, the next time we meet.

Two stocks we sold are reorganizing in ways that may hurt or help shareholders. One is Cosan Ltd of Brazil which is putting all its logistics holdings into a single listed firm with its parent. It rose 12.2% on the announcement. The other is Canadian fund group Brookfield which plans to create a Canada listing for its Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P., allowing US investors to buy into it without penalties and normal 1099s for taxes.

Having defended Warren Buffett (who doesn't need my help) over his short-term exit from airline stocks, I am delighted that he has found a home for the money he raised by having Berkshire Hathaway buy $10 bn of Dominion Energy's transmission and storage facilities.

Today's New York Times tells about how a mid-cap German company used fraudulent accounts to get Berkshire's Precision Castparts to pay euros 800 mn in 2017 for Wilhelm Schultz of Krefeld, a tech firm in the oil and gas business. Its execs created false invoices, borrowed another 8 mn euros from Commerzbank, its creditor for euros 325 mn, to avoid insolvency, and deliberately crashed its computer systems for 5 days to fabricate backdated orders. The deal closed in Feb. 2017 and a month later a whistle-blower warned PC that the books were fake. The crooks by then had cashed out and despite a lawsuit against the family controlling Willhelm Schultz, and a win in arbitration, there is no money left. If you know anything about how Buffett does deals, the procedure used by the German crooks was well designed. Buffett doesn't like taking over firms that don't welcome his advances, making it very hard to find German tech firms to buy. German Boersen are a real wild east!

Fittingly, we start off today's blog with hot news from Abhimanyu Sisodia, our India correspondent, who is not a Jain, but a Hindu.

Energy & Users

*Mauritanian Azure Power fell 1.65% today. Here is why from our local reporter. “Private equity giants KKR and Actis are in talks with AZRE to buy 435 megaWatts of solar power capacity out of its total 7 gigaWatts for about $200-250 mn.” The money will come from India's Avendus Capital, KKR's vehicle to invest there, which AZURE will invest in new projects. KKR already invested in Indian solar from Mumbai's Shapoorji Pallonji Infrastructure in April. SPI is a major developer and exporter of renewable energy and other infrastructure worldwide, founded in 1865. Azure was founded in 2008.

*While we don't own any Dominion Energy we do own a small-cap which engages in storage and extraction of geothermal power, Ormat ORA, which is a bonus stock. It uses waterfalls to store geothermal power when it is not needed immediately because the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

*Royal Dutch Shell RDS-B whose B shares we own to avoid withholding tax in The Netherlands may move its trading site for both classes of shares to London according to the Sunday Times. This led Credit Suisse to up its target price to £17 and its rating to buy from hold. RDS is up 1.23%.

*BP plc meanwhile is under a cloud for its dealings with Hontop Energy, under investigation for fraud in Singapore. Hontop claimed it bought oil for private refiner Shandong Tianhong Chemical Co. BP is unlikely to have known that it was being resold elsewhere and the stock is up 0.8%.

*Ituran Location & Control ITRN of Israel, whose systems tracks trucks and rented cars, rose again on hopes of a corona cure.

*Electric car-maker Nio Inc NIO of China, recommended by Eco-Invest editor Max Deml of Vienna, rose 23.45% today to $11.58 after opening at a new high of $12.3. It rose 16% Friday after it reported strong sales growth, beating forecasts, as did Tesla. It is a favorite of newbie investors according to some skeptics, but Max is no newbie. Its sales in June were up 180% from June 2019.

*Uranium miner Cameco, which Max disapproves of on fear of nuclear, rose 2.72%. I like CCJ because it cut back output OPEC-style to boost the price of nuclear fuel and can now bring it on.

*Hollysys Automation gained 4.6% in China today. Japanese Fanuc gained 2.75% in sympathy. HOLI and FANUY make industrial robots.

Drugs

*Swiss Roche lost its appeal against a court ruling letting Amgen produce Myasa, a biosimilar of Avastin. RHHBY also lost its attempt to stop Amgen's Kanjinti, a biosimilar of Herceptin. The patent rules for biosimilars are still being created. Roche rose all the same.

*Danish Novo Nordisk, fell 0.6% in part because a French drug firm sold insulin to people aiming to lose weight. That is not what NVO does. Its Saxenda jab was approved for diabetes-linked co-morbidities like being overweight, having high blood pressure or cholesterol, but this was done after trials and regulatory approvals. The French drug, Mediator, sold by Servier, caused heart and lung problems but was kept on the French market despite being banned by neighboring countries. Its 6-month trial resulted in a fine of euros 15 mn and a 5-yr prison sentence for the only surviving exec involved, convicted of manslaughter, fraud, influence-trading (with French regulators). It still has to deal with 6,500 user plaintiffs demanding euros 1 bn in damages. More shockingly, the French medicine agency is being fined euros 200 mn for failing to protect patients. Servier is an unlisted private firm. But the main reason for NVO falling is that BofA Merrill downgraded it to neutral from buy.

*GlaxoSmithKline is likely to secure $624.5 bn for supplying Britain with a COVID-19 jab. The way countries are lining up supplies against the virus is a strong argument for MIT Professor Andrew Lo's call for pharma small-cap bond to finance desperately needed research rather than stocks. As a reader pointed out, the problem is that countries are seeking to beat each other with virus stocks once the best ones have been found, rather than working together. It's not just Trump; it's all of them. I note that GSK stock has fallen on the deal, as it should. GSK was cobbled together to own New Jersey's SmithKline.

*Beigene rose another ½ percent today. For the reason read on. BGNE.

*Zymeworks ZYME of Canada, recommended by Martin Ferara, is up 2% today after The Globe and Mail ran an article about how Canada missed the biotech boom.

*Astra-Zeneca rose 1.22% today. We are now back in the black with AZN which reports on July 30 and calls are nearly 10x higher than last week. It won a $127 mn contract to supply Brazil with an eventual COVID-19 vaccine.

*Israeli Compugen rose another 2.9% today making up for rises in Tel Aviv yesterday. CGEN is at $15.84.

*Even Teva Pharma TEVA is up 2.12%

*After rising last week Chembio Diagnostics fell back again 2% today. CEMI is a bad bonus stock...

*Another bonus stock, Thermo Fisher, was upped to strong buy today by CFRA. TMO's target price was raised $30 to $400 and its EPS forecast for this year to $13.22. It is $385 now and is my largest shareholding. I bought it 40 years ago with late Dean Witter's late David Karrick. It beat in Q2 sales of its testing products for Covid-19 and is now acquiring Qiagen. TMO rose 5.2% today.

*Dr. Reddy's is down 1.2% today on reports hedge funds are exiting by Asma Hursna of Insider Monkey. RDY was tipped by Abhimanyu before it partnered with Fujifilm last week for getting a license to make generic Avigan, an anti-corona drug, for India. Zacks tipped it today because the Chicago group likes to join bandwagons for shares.

China's Hong Kong Play

*Chinese ambassador to Britain Liu Xiaoming threatened the country with “consequences” if it allows Hong Kong holders of British passports the right to emigrate to the UK. About 3 million people in Hong Kong have British National Overseas status, having been born before the handover in 1997.

*The Hang Seng Index rose 7.8% Monday. It is the main Hong stock index and we own the local bank which produces the index, Hang Seng HSNGF, majority-owned by HSBC of Britain. It was tracking the Shanghai composite for China which rose after government mouthpiece China Securities Journal called for “a healthy bull market” in a front-page editorial. This is timed to offset crackdowns in Hong Kong and investigations of foreign shareholders in Chinese banks. China also used state sector entities to buy shares on both sides of the border with Hong Kong.

*AIA Group of Hong Kong gained 2.85%. AAIGF sells insurance all over Asia and doesn't need to be in Hong Kong except for reasons of history.

*CBOE Global Markets CBOE, whose shares I own, reported gains in its 4 options exchanges over June 2019 last month. Note that there were 2 more trading days in 2020. I own this stock to avoid any need to trade options.

Tech and Tel

*Nintendo NTDOY is up 4% after hitting a new high.

*Ericsson ERIC gained 7%+ today. ERIC is Swedish.

*Nokia NOK of Finland also rose, up 5.1%. Britain is cutting out China's Huawei from its telephone systems because of security fears. Ambassador Liu also threatened Britain with retaliation if it blocks Huawei from its phone system. This will result in PM Boris Johnson taking a Churchillian stance.

*Vodafone also gains from Chinese risks and today was rated buy by UBS analysts with a GBX190 target price. It is allegedly being exiting from by hedge funds too. VOD plans to sell its European cellphone towers for as much as euros 2 bn. It already yields 6.5% payable Weds.

*Mercado Libre gained over 3% today putting it back into quadruple digits per share at $1019. MELI is Argentinian but operates in dollars as a rival to Amazon all over Latin America in selling and funding sales.

*Orbia Advance Corp gained 50.7% to $3.3 today mainly because the stock is traded only rarely here as MXCHF. It was a winner in a US case against the EPA over hydrofluorocarbons used to replace substances that hurt the ozone layer after a DC court said the US agency exceeded its authority as Mexichem (as it then was) already had switched to HFC's in ruling them out in 2018.