The private-side Chinese purchasing manager's index, run by HSBC, rose into growth for June, with a score of 50.8. Anything over 50 shows orders are rising. In May the level was 49.4. What this means for our portfolio is explained below.

The hammering outside my office where the scaffolding is being partly assembled reminds me of The Anvil Chorus. The perilous-looking tubular structure in the building courtyard was 1 to 2 stories below our apartment when I left for work. We really have to leave for Europe later this week. While this is partly a vacation it is also a respite from daytime racket and the need to close windows during the summer. The pound is near a new 5-yr high in anticipation of my spending.

With no fewer than 3 of my stocks topping the weekly and month top gainers, all up 22%+, I am getting fearful of a market top. My big winners last week were Covidien(which still counts as I only sold half); Shire, which my son put into our corporate profit sharing account; and Williams Cos, a US stock. Mark Hulbert is making bearish forecasts based on the level of mergers and acquisitions, M&A, which affected all 3, with WMB the buyer and the other two the target. Mark writes Hulbert's Financial Digest, which tracks our performance and is published by marketwatch, a Dow-Jones website.

More  from Britain, South Africa and Korea, China, India, Fin-, Scot-, and Ire-land, Spain, Brazil, Mongolia. Australia and Canada including a big annual report and a stock sale.

*Royal Bank of Scotland via its sub, Coutts & Co., whose clients includes Her Majesty the Queen and her relatives, is under investigation by German authorities for allegedly providing tax-evasion help to the family of Osama bin Laden. We own RBS preferred shares and the C shares of NatWest but none of the common. If this spills over into the pref pricing, it is a good entry point.

*Naspers reported a dividend hike and somewhat disappointing results (because of capex) and the share fell 6% in Johannesburg trading before recovering and is now off 4.6% in US trading. NPSNY is worth hugely more than its current price, also affected by worries of the rand, because its 34% of Tencent alone is worth $47 bn vs its total market cap of $4.49 bn. NPSNY also owns a chunk of Mail.ru.

Its full-years report for 2013-4 came out today showing that adjusted net income rose by only 1% to ZAR 8.6 bn ($810 mn) in the year to Mar. 30. TCTZF and mail.ruaccounted produced a profit of ZAR 10.2 bn which offset losses in other sectors. Part of the problem was impairment charges taken on an e-commerce unit in troubled Turkey and a miss over its lagging e-commerce arm and its results form Brazil print publisher,Abril SA.

Sales rose 26% to 62.7 bn rands. It spent 79% more on development, which hit R7.7 bn.

One reason for the messy market reaction may have been that new CEO Bob Van Dijk was on the line in Hoofddorp, near Amsterdam in Holland, while the results were published out of Cape Town where NPSNY is HQ'd.

Naspers may delay its growth plans going forward, Mr. Van Dijk says and also toldThe Financial Times today that it will “look carefully into M&A” after he took overApril 1. He hinted that Naspers may add to its heavy spending on African TV with more e-commerce and Indian travel sites. (It bought Indian online ticket firm redBus and Russian toy and children's clothes retailer eSky.ru last FY, before Van Dijk took over.)

The dividend was raised 10% to the equivalent of ZAR 4.25/sh. This will be 39 cents plus some fraction for ADR owners.

*Separately, Tencent and Alibaba got into a fight over the latter's cross-borderAlipay e-payments service as Chinese attempted to bet on the World Cup today. Alipay international is run by China Construction Bank, which is government-owned.

*Two of my stocks are getting together. GE is selling its Scandinavian Money Bank consumer finance arm for euros 700 mn (~$950 mn) to Banco Santander. SAN will have to boost its core capital by 0.08% (which is marginal) to take over the business from GE which wants to slash its financial services to under a quarter of its total business. The deal will close by year end.

*The National Institute of Health anthrax exposure news has boosted Bavarian Nordic of Denmark which makes an anthrax jab suitable for people with weakened immune systems. BVNKF is up 6.25% at a new high on the news.

*As I forecast (prematurely) the Indian rupee is off on concerns about India's dependence on imported oil. The impact on the price of gold and oil shares offsets this. Our former Indian holding, Dr Reddy's, RDY, has had to recall its generic Toprol XL anti-angina blood pressure med from US markets. The patented version is from Astra Zeneca and the generic failed to operate as expected in the human body. This is the 2^ndrecent drug recall by RDY, now on the India bad-guy list for quality control gaps. However thanks to post-election profit-seekers, the shares is up on the news with big volumes.

Infosys is down 2.2%, not yet enough to buy more. INFY's suburban campuses depend on generators to keep the workers and the computers happy.

*Mongolia has re-engaged in tax sanctions against Rio Tinto over payments by its 51% owned Turquoise Hill sub, developer of the Oyu Tolgoi mine. The dispute is over taxes owed for 2010-12, after a government audit. Every time Mongolia goes after unpaid taxes it delays the development of the $6.6 bn mine. The amount at issue is about $130 mn after RIO paid $1.2 bn in taxes already. The Mongolian government owns 34% of the future mine while Turquoise Hill owns 66%.

This will hurt our Mongolia Growth Group shares, MNGGF.

*Nokia, raised from under-perform to neutral by broker Raymond James (which counts as an upgrade) is up 1.5% today. Jefferies rates NOK a buy which may have helped along with David Einhorn revealing that he owns 2.5 mn shares. I think NOK's Medio Systemsacquisition is not being fully credited for the rise in its stock. Medio, of Seattle, does real time predictive analytics using big data on the cloud. This gives the phone end user quick information to act upon, and adds value to businesses advertising on Medio.

Medio's Hadoop platform has 140 mn users who generate a billion daily queries. It currently 'owns' 4 bn monthly recommendations, content, offers, and ads the users access via their smartphones and tablets. Tney can switch access to their autos, a tremendous business for NOK's HERE real-time navigation, mapping, and location systems. Still to come are Google wearables.

*Canada's Scotiabank was downrated to 'hold' by Desjardins Capital in Canada. Analyst Doug Young has a C$66 target price for Bank of Nova Scotia. BNS is now US$66.33, over 10% ahead of the target which works out to US$61.38.

Today BNS announced it's buying 51% control of Chilean retailer Cencosud's financial services and credit card arm which generates $1.8 bn in cash annually. That will cost C$278 mn (US$279 mn) up front, making the Canadian bank Chile's No 3 issuer of plastic. It will manage the jv for 15 years and will be cross-selling other services to Cencosud customers and eventually put up $1.2 bn (US) over the life of the Chile deal to improve funding of the Cencosud credit card portfolio, now high leveraged and using off-balance sheet instruments.

BNS is up over 14% in the last quarter. It yields 4%. Je ne regrette rien.

*Kratisto Investing's Stephen Simpson CFA wrote up Shinhan Financial as “a great Korean bank and priced like it” in www.seekingalpha.com which concluded with what I read as a hold:

“Shinhan should see some incremental leverage from lower provisioning expense and some operating cost leverage, but wider lending spreads would be a big help to the bank's ROE. I'm looking for about one point of ROE appreciation from 2013 to 2018 with spread (net interest margin) accounting for about half of that. Higher leverage would also be a potential driver for higher ROE, but I'm not looking for that as part of my core thesis.

“Wth that, I'm looking for Shinhan to post an average annual earnings growth rate of more than 12% for the next five years. Discounted back, that's worth about $41.50 per ADR, so Shinhan will need to generate better fee income, lower expenses, or use more leverage (relative to my base assumptions) to move significantly higher from here.” SHG is up 1.5% on the article which may reflect increased skepticism about seeking alpha being used by short-sellers. SHG has fallen in analyst ratings and now is only tipped by 36 of the 153 analysts who cover it, and 14 of those who do not rate SHG neutral say sell. That is EXACTLY the same score as BNS gets from the same group of “regional bank analysts” polled by smartconsensus. What this is all about is mass ill-informed macroeconomic forecasting about smaller non-US banks by 153 scared analysts, if it is not evident. SHG has gained over 5% in the last quarter and 40% in the last year.

*I sold my HK:0525 Guangshen Railway at HK$ 2.81, roughly $18.05 per US share. We took a short-term loss on the Red Rooster Railway based in the Pearl River Basin. That area, around Hong Kong, is no longer attracting the mass of Chinese exporters and the provincial influx to produce their goods.

*The Financial Times (and its Lex columnist) worry that so-called yieldco spinoffs may not be a good idea for income-hungry investors as the world moves (as it will, eventually) toward higher interest rates. Abengoa launched its UK incorporated yieldco last week which boosted ABGB's common shares but today the Spanish alternative energy site developer share retraced part of its gain, off 3.5%.

*A Sunday FT message about Brazil's “ethanol king” from the same paper resulted in my signing up for releases in Portuguese from Cosan SA but it turned out to be non-nws. Citing sources, the pink paper noted that ethanol is hard to make money off with Brazilian price controls for filling your tank with stuff, which we knew. But then citing no sources it forecast that “one of the survivors is expected to be Cosan”. It added that unnamed “analysts” are positive on CZZ. We all know Cosan, headed by Brazilian billionare Rubens Ometto has diversified into gas stations (bought from BGand Shell) and port and railway logistics in the last few years to cut its dependence on sugarcane. CZZ gained 1.72% in US trading today.

*The enthusiasm has spread to Vale, VALE, the iron ore exporter, on renewed monthly growth in China This may not result in more demand for iron ore as the construction sector is being held back by Beijing. Vale is up 2.37%. Iron ore is heading down. Vale also has logistics facilities in Brazil, also rail and port related. Mitsui owns 20% of Vale Logistics Services and a Brazilian pension fund nearly 16%.

*Covidien was downrated to neutral by Barclays Bank with a $93 target price after the Medtronics merger deal boosted COV stock. CEO Jose Almedia sold over $4.7 mn worth of shares when the deal was announced June 16 at $92 plus change according to a filing with the SEC. Also downrating COV: BMO Capital and JMP Securities (which I said wasJPMorgan Securities, in error, last week.)

*Despite being mentioned favorably in today's Barron's, Origin Energy is flat at $13.50 where it closed Friday, although the market maker is ready to pay $13.51 to buy or $13.92 to sell OGFGF to you. It is Australian. It barely trades here. And the institutional players only read Barron's on Monday and trade in Sydney overnight. Wait for it tomorrow.

*Resist the urge to exit Hadasit Bio Holdings Ltd. Keep HADSY for a write-off. Today the sahres fell 13.64% to 95 cents on volume of 5000 shares. The bid is 0.694 and the ask 1.34. It rose last week on marginally higher volumes. The total market cap is $6.7 mn so it is a clear potential takeover candidate if the structure of the bankrupt Hadassah hospitals' investment arm would allow it to be taken over.

*The Canadian anti-spam law has resulted in ridiculous emails from Pure Technologies asking me to consent to receive PPEHF press releases. And a notification from Veresen that their press release announcing a dividend was not for distribution in the US (although it was posted in my e-trade account were I hold my FCGYF.) Whatever is intended the result is a new bottleneck in information. Yeck.

*Oops 1: Reader Dr MR, a psychiatrist, writes that anripriprzole, the generic of Abilify, in unlikely to get a large market for Alkermes as there are other formulations which have been on the market for 3 years. I probably looked too hard for a reason to buy the Irish drug firm beyond its merger appeal for so-called inversions, using Irish HQs to lower US taxes.

*Oops 2: Yesterday I guessed that the mystery stock in my portfolio at e-trade was Benitec, BLT-ASX, developer of ddRNAi (the DNA-directed RNA small interference) which is listing in the USA. It wasn't. It was in fact Bauer Performance Sports, BRRPF in the process of becoming Performance Stock Group, NYSE-PSG. I know how to get an idea of the ticker symbol to come using the cusip, which is alphabetized. But the cusip was for the old share, BAU in Canada.

Benitec which is about A$1.14 now has a target price of A$4 from brokers Maxim Groupwho last week initiated coverage. My e-trade telephohe "platinum" broker told me it is worthless. It's not.