Challenged by a reader to prove that Confucius would have opposed today's Chinese familial political corruption despite his stress on filial piety, I was not short of citations. Here is the best:

“Choose the right people. If you put honest men above the dishonest, the people will have confidence in the government. If you put the dishonest above the honest, you will lose their confidence.

“But first of all there must be no greed in you yourself. Then those under you will not steal.”
(Michael C. Tang, A Victor's Reflections: China's Timeless Wisdom for Leaders, Prentice Hall 1999.)

Today I am facing an embarasse de richesse in my corporation's outside-managed profit-sharing account. An American Depositary Receipt (ADR) it holds, which I refused to buy or write up, is now a 10-bagger. The stock is Shire plc, the Irish drug-maker notorious for flooding the world with a nostrum for attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, handed out like popcorn to young minority-group boys who misbehave in school.

Today in UK trading SHP rose nearly 14% on news that it had rejected a £27.25 bn takeover bid from AbbVie, allegedly undervaluing SHP.

The outside manager of my company's profit-sharing account is FIC Capital Inc. I will introduce any reader who wants an outside wealth manager firm focused mainly on US shares to my son the CFA who is a fund manager and director at FIC.

More follows from Britain, China, Holland, Israel, Ireland, Japan, Mexico and Portugal, including a new stock pick.

*Buy Alkermes, ALKS, at under $50 to gain from the rush by US pharma and medical device companies into low-tax Ireland by merging with local companies. ALKS is not evil; it is a drug company with a serious product against schizophrenia which earlier this week was presented at the American Society for Clinical Psychopharmacology conference. Its Aripiprazol lauroxil, ALKS 5461 injected monthly in two dose sizes, has just aced phase III clinical trials with statistically and clinically significant cuts in the marker for schizophrenia symptoms, called Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale Scores (PANSS). In the lower dose, PANSS fell just under 11%; in the higher dose just under 12%. It plans to file a new drug application with the US FDA in Q3. It also has another schizophrenia drug in its pipeline, an oral drug called ALKS 3831.

ALKS is also doing trials for ALKS 5461 to treat major depressive disorder. Of course Aripiprozole lauroxil is patented, and uses Alkermes' proprietary LinkeRX technology. ALKS has about 20 low-margin commercial drugs it makes for other pharma companies. It also boasts a significant central nervous system drug pipeline. HQ'd in Dublin, it does research and production in Athlone and Waltham (MA) and has US plants.

Credit Suisse rates ALKS neutral, worrying about rival drugs from Lundbeck and Otsuka, partly misplaced (CS cites Abilify from Lundbeck which to my knowledge is a Parkinson's disease drug being developed together with TEVA, unlikely to hurt ALKS's mental illness drug.)

More to the point, ALKS loses money and trades at over 5x book value and a p/e of close to 35, moreover double its historic p/e ratio. The share has gained 90.5% in the past 12 months and 10.54% in the last quarter.

One reason is its most recent quarterly with a positive surprise, higher earnings of 11 cents/sh. This beat the consensus forecast of a dime, mainly because of its commercial drug production business doing better. It is expected to earn 14 cents in the current quarter. Its sales rose 58% in the year to Mar. But there clearly is a lot of hype in this stock

Most analysts rate it hold, 122, with 25 buys and 22 sells. It is an institutional favorite: funds account for 95% of the ownership of its 144.5 mn shares outstanding. Significantly, there has been some regular insider buying over and above the exercise of options

ALKS has modest debt for a drug company, which accounts for under 28% of its capital.

I hope a chemical cure for schizophrenia is in the offing, mainly because my friend Hella has had her life blighted by an afflicted daughter, I am not sure that ALKS can win this lottery.

However, it clearly can win the shamrock prize, for being Irish. BUY ALKS. More Irish news below.

*Chris Loew warns today that “gaming will still be DeNA's main business” and “their turnaround will hinge on launching many titles for smart-phones and tablets.” He adds based on a published Japanese interview with Ms Tamoka Namba: that “I don't think the Mycode [DNA] venture will be key to their growth.”

He writes that he hates to disagree with me, but here is the gist of why he thinks gaming is still the key to DNACF, and why he still like the stock despite it not moving away from what I called “horrible male online gaming” and into workforce management and genetic testing. Chris writes:

“Branching out into promising new areas is part of the strategy to make up for lower in-game buying using 'Moba-Coins', but is not the main thing. The real turnaround that would dramatically raise revenues would be a high game app for smart-phones that creates buzz, gets massive downloads, and boosts Moba-coin purchases.

“The Q4 report says 'Gaming has the potential for explosive growth and we will maintain it as our core business.' So don't expect it to be dropped soon. Creating a hit game is a crap-shoot but the chance of success (as in pharma) is feeding the pipeline. DeNA has launched two iOS platform games recently: Cross Horizon (action roll-playing) and Transformers Age of Extinction (combat runner game base on the movie series.) Releases like these, and lots of them, will turn the numbers around.”

Note that he is not telling us to sell DNACF, just not to take my diversification hopes too seriously.

*A complex settlement ended the fight over generic violations of 4 Teva Proair HFA (albuterol sulphate) patents by FDA between first-to-file rival drug firms Perrigo and Catalent. After Dec. 2016 and until June 2018, Teva will license both firms to sell Perrigo's generic Proair. After the there will be no limits. The license fee was not revealed.

Perrigo is how you can buy OTC meds on the NYSE and it did an inversion last year to become Irish by buying Elan Corp plc. It earlier bought Agis in Israel, which sell drugs and medical equipment there.

*It is not only Irish drug plays that are luring in American buyers. The Reckitt Benckiser boomlet (for a British household goods and over-the-counter meds firm, with a sideline in controlled substances delivery system) is possibly also tax-generated. RBGLY hit another 12-mo high today.

*Also at a new high again is Schlumberger Ltd on the need for more oil and gas exploration and its wellhead services. The Dutch firm hit $108.5. SLB. The head of NATO (Anders Fogh Rasmussen) today said that Russia is funding anti-fracking initiatives by environmentalists to keep Europe dependent on Gazprom.

*Anton Oil Services in which SLB owns 20%, listed in Hong but really Chinese with its HQ in Beijing, ATONY, is off mainly because its operates in southern Iraq where its stimulation process using coiled tubing acidization to boost well output is a favorite. ATONY offers lots of gizmos and goodies to improve well production but it has to also have technicians on the spot. It also trades as HK:3337.

*Paddy Power plc has new shareholders from the institutional side. UBS now owns over 8.2% of the outstanding shares of the Irish bookie. Internationale Kapitalanlagegesellschaft (INKA of Duesseldorf, Germany, a sub of HSBC yesterday bought over 5.7% of PDYPF Dublin shares.

*Fibra Uno (FBASF) used part of the proceeds of its equity issue to repay nearly NMP4 bn in debt, cutting the debt portion of its capitalization to just over 27% as part of its higher capitalization after the issue. I consider FBASF a play on Mexican government liberalization moves, which will lure in foreign direct investors who need premises and shopping.

*Chicago reader GZ spotted what he thought was an error in our tables showing the yield on preferred stocks from Barclays Bank. I admit that I get the numbers not by calculating them weekly, but from the tables at my brokerage account at e-trade, verified by numbers published by Barron's. The June 16 issue showed the yields on the BCS C at 7.6% and on the D at 7.9%. GZ says the coupon rate on these issues is 4% and the last price is above par, so the yield can only be between 3 and 4%. He seems to be only counting payouts in 2014 to date rather than the 4 payouts per year we get. The formal yield to date on the C shares is 7.75% and that on the D is 7.8% so indeed the yield numbers are too high with the prefs trading above par. But the difference is marginal.

There are also other BCS prefs statuatorily paying out 6.6% to 6.9%, but none in the 4% range. I think GZ (or his broker) is looking only at yields paid to date in 2014 rather than a full 4-payment annual dividend cycle.

*The delays on the payout at Portugal Telecom, PT, which I have written about at length, have now begun to hurt the ADR price. PT is off over 2 3/4% today.

*We are getting no quotes for either BTEBY (Benitec) or BRRPF (Bauer Performance Sports) because of restructuring, with a 5:1 ADR for the first and an NYSE issue and name change at the latter.

*However, my brokerage account now shows post-split Tencent Holdings again as TCTZF, the old ticker symbol. Tencent's WeChat messaging system has achieved new notoriety as it was allegedly used by a Citic Securities analyst, Ms Zhang Mingfang, to disclose insider information.