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Because of continued problems with the internet, and Google (GOOGL) going down, I will delay my tables until the long weekend post-Thanksgiving day. We also delayed our planned London holiday visit because of the high risk of continued lockdowns. Instead, here is a special Sunday edition of my blog, mainly with news on our holdings.

To start with, "The Yellow Metal", a commentary by Mark Mead Baillie, formerly with Banque Nationale de Paris, who now writes at TalkMarkets like me. I am also a former resident of France where gold is widely accepted as an investment holding as a result of the history of French inflation in the last century. 

Baillie writes: “If you are a Gold Bull, which without saying you are (else you'd lack the common sense to be reading this piece, let alone own gold directly or by right), then this is your kind of market 'correction' wherein price rather than falling is merely consolidating.” That is only one of the ideas on the rise last week.

My oldest holding (which I cannot afford to sell because of taxable capital gains) is Schlumberger Ltd. (SLB), which I bought when we lived in Paris in the 1960's. SLB gained 12.3% last week as markets realized that the substitution of green fuels for oil and gas will not be possible until great changes occur in transport, heating, and electricity. (I wrote up a conference call by analysts at Goehring & Rozencwaig last week which called oil the impossible investment that people should buy now.)

SLB is incorporated in the Dutch Antilles and operates from Paris and Houston. But its largest shareholding bloc are French, who have learned from history that oil is a hot investment like gold. Among the new highs last week was an accidental US share I bought and recommended. The stock is Qualcomm (QCOM). I got lucky.

My US regional bank holdings, Truist (TFC) and Synovus (SNV), which have fallen this year, were recommended by Carleton English in Barron's for their yields (3.7% and 4.2%, respectively) and for future growth in the US economy. Truist, formerly BB&T, is also going to gain from cost cuts after its merger with SunTrust and tech saving investments.

The panic over Build-A-Bear (BBW) by my two eldest grandchildren at Hamley's, a once famous toy store in London, made me bearish on BBW. It duly crashed at last by 14% last week. I have been a bear on the stock ever since.

Another good performer was Microsoft (MSFT), which Randall Forsyth in Barron's noted made a tax-saving payout to its shareholders in 2004 — but dividend taxes were cut in the end. Now it may swing to make a capital gains tax cut. MSFT is a major US holding for me, along with Merck (MRK), which raised its dividend, and a foreign share, Vodafone (VOD), which did so as well.

But the real boost to our shares will come in this foreshortened week after Reshma Kapadia created an “International Roundtable 2020" with 20 non-US stock picks readers are likely to buy starting tomorrow. She interviewed 3 global fund managers in October and updated their ideas last week.

They include a batch of my own favorites: Kristian Heugh, who manages the global side of Morgan-Stanley's portfolios from Hong Kong, tipped my most recent stock pick, Trip.com (TCOM), which I wrote up last week based on research by Value Line (It did not recommend the stock as the issue printed before 2 COVID-19 vaccines were known about. I did because the revival of tourism next year is likely).

Heugh also recommended two Indian private banks which we looked into before the virus broke out, but did not spring for; ICICI (ICICIBANK) and HDFC (HDB) banks. If we buy them despite problems with New Delhi and funding, it will be after our Abhimanyu Sisodia in India agrees with Heugh.

A second analyst Kapadia got ideas from was Jenny Davis of Baillie Gifford funds from Edinburgh, Scotland, who tipped Hong Kong's AIA Asia Group (AAIGF), but who failed to give its US ticker symbol, something that makes it harder for Barron's readers to find the share. It is not only traded in Hong Kong as 1299.

The third knight of the round table is Chris Dyer who runs global equity at Eaton Vance and manages the Calvert International Equity fund from London. He recommended CRH of Ireland for the same reason as I did: the cement and aggregates company operates chiefly in the USA. A stock tipped by two of the fund managers is Taiwan Semiconductor Mfg. (TSM). Thanks to heavy investments lately it is expected to gain from the switch to 5G in cellphones.