Goldman Sachs let Warren Buffett learnt a bitter lesson

Warren Buffett, well-known as the "Oracle of Omaha", has been famous for value investing, and also declaring derivatives as the "weapons of economic mass destruction" and stated that he would never be involved in them.

He derailed from this belief, when Berkshire Hathaway in 2008, at the peak of the financial crisis, purchased $5 billion worth of Goldman Sachs' perpetual preferred stock with a 10% dividend and warrants on $5 billion worth of common stock at the price of $115.

Since then, Buffett has been talking good about Goldman Sachs and declaring his strong endorsement to its CEO Lloyd Blankfien. Last week, Ron Olson, one of Berkshire’s directors, once again defended Goldman  by saying that "Buffett invested out of belief in not just the strength of Goldman but its integrity."

To the great surprise of the whole world, it was just 3 days right after that "integrity" assurance from Berkshire, Goldman was accused by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of defrauding its investors. A civil charge was filed on 16 April 2010.

Goldman is accused to have promoted and sold mortgage investments to its investors, without telling the buyers that the securities were crafted with input from its client, Paulson (a hedge fund capitalize on the housing bust), who was betting on them to fail.

The SEC said Paulson paid Goldman roughly $15 million in 2007 to devise an investment which tied to mortgage-related securities that the hedge fund viewed as likely to decline in value. Separately, Paulson took out a form of insurance that allowed it to make a huge profit when those securities' value plunged.

SEC stated that, "Goldman wrongly permitted a client (Paulson) that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective 3rd party."

Goldman's investors of that securities have lost about a billion dollar in less than a year thereafter, while Paulson reaped in its fabulous profit.

In fact, Goldman had been warned on this fraud case, in black-and-white by SEC, as early as in July 2009. The question is: did Buffett knew about that? If he didn't, then why? If he did, well, well, well....

The stock price of Goldman dropped heavily after this allegation, causing Buffett to gave out most of the profit he made earlier in his Goldman deal. However, the blow to Buffett is minimal in monetary wise. The bitter lesson to Buffett is the deteriotation to the reputation and respect which he built for decades, which had won him the title as the "Oracle of Omaha".

Now, all the eyes is staring on him, especially when the AGM of Berkshire Hathaway is just a moment away from now.

All investors make mistakes, including Buffett. But this mistake he made is really very costly. Let's wait what he'll say...

Garmin releases MalSingMaps Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei NT 2010.20 for free update

Garmin has made available MalSingMaps (MSM) Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei NT 2010.20 for free update now.

You can click here to download the installation file of MalSingMaps Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei NT 2010.20 from Garmin server. The file size is pretty huge, 742,884kb.

The installation program will update gmapprom1.img, gmapprom1.unl and SGMYMAL.JCV in your Garmin GPS navigator.

During the installation process, you'll be asked for the unlock key. The key is stored in the existing gmapprom1.unl file in your Garmin GPS navigator, which you can open with Notepad or any text editor. Just copy and paste the key to the installer when asked.

The size of SGMYMAL.JCV has increased tremendously to 352,764kb. Therefore, we can expect many more road junctions to have Junction View in Garmin with this map.

Version highlights:

• Synchronize to Malsingmaps v4.08.
• Extending more JCVs around Malaysia
• Add new categories of Brand icons
• Add more POIs, postal code data and lane information

Have you upgraded your Windows Chinese IME to the new Microsoft Pinyin (MSPY) 2010?

Good news to all MS Windows XP/Vista/7 users who need to type Chinese characters using IME!

Microsoft has just released Microsoft Pinyin (MSPY 微软拼音输入法) 2010 which is free to download and install to upgrade the existing Chinese IME in your MS Windows operating system.

This new release of MSPY 2010 is jointly developed by Microsoft and Harbin Institute of Technology (哈尔滨工业大学) in HeiLongJiang, China. In fact, its beta testing version has been made available to the public since last year, and now it is finally officially released. It is expected to also bundled as part of the coming MS Office 2010.

MSPY 2010 loads up much faster than the previous MSPY 2007, and also has faster respond to keyboard typing.

By using MSPY 2010, we can type Chinese faster as it is more accurate in getting the correct words we want, and it supports short-cut input style as well as intelligent word predictions.

MSPY 2010 supports 2 different input styles, namely Simple Fast (简捷) and New Experience (新体验).

The Simple Fast typing style looks like this:

and you can see how fast the typing is by using short-cut input with accurate prediction of the IME:

The New Experience typing style looks like this:

MSPY 2010 can accurately predict many new Internet jargons. It also supports a vast variety of professional dictionaries to get more accurate results.

If you are still using the old IME to type Chinese in Windows, I'll recommend you to try out this MSPY 2010.

Click here to go to the official website and download page of Microsoft PinYin 2010.

PS: If you face problem in using Regional and Language Options to assign the keyboard sequence for calling out the input method, you can make use of IMETool to set your preferred keyboard sequence, and it never fail you.