SPAC Info

Ascend Acquisition Corp. reported that the company had made an agreement and plan of  merger with Longhorn Mergerco, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Company. Besides the merger agreement with its subsidiary, the SPAC also planned to acquire and merge with The Washington Special Opportunity Fund, LLC, and Patriot Investment Management, LLC. Both are Delaware limited liability companies.

The merger transactions will be consummated on the condition that Ascend Acquisition executes and delivers an asset purchase agreement with Longhorn, The Washington Special Opportunity Fund, Inc, and Patriot.

According to the acquisition agreement, the Board of Directors will comprise at least three directors after the consummation of the transactions. One of the current director, Stephen L. Brown, is expected to resign from the company’s Board of Directors. The other director, Don K. Rice, will retain his seat and be employed by the company as a consultant after the merger.

Ascend Acquisition was a SPAC that planned to acquire the Hong Kong semiconductor maker e.Pak in 2008. When the transaction failed, Ascend chose to stay as a shell company.

In part 1 of this 2 part series on investing in Indonesia stock market, I already gave a brief explanation on Indonesia and list several blue chip stocks traded in Indonesia Stock Exchange.  In this part, I will continue with explaining several ways an American can choose from to invest in Indonesia stock market.

An investor can select one of four ways to invest in Indonesia:

• Open an account with Asian based brokers. It is actually not easy for retail investors to open accounts with these brokers, because most of them only serve foreign institutional investors. But you should check Kim Eng Group if you want to take this path.
• Invest in Van Eck Global Market Vectors Indonesia Index ETF (NYSE:IDX).  This is an exchange-traded fund listed on NYSE that gives investors exposure to the Market Vectors Indonesia Index. This Index tracks the overall performance of companies that are domiciled and listed on Indonesia Stock Exchange.
• Invest in Aberdeen Indonesia Fund (NYSE:IF). This is a closed-end fund listed on NYSE, having Indonesian equities and debt securities as its underlying assets.
• Buy an Indonesian company’s ADR traded in the United States. Unfortunately, there is only one Indonesian stock that has an American Depositary Receipt that trades in NYSE. It’s Telkom (NYSE:TLK), the telecommunication company I mentioned in part 1 of this series.

If you want to avoid complexities involved in buying shares in a foreign country, investing in the funds or the ADR should be easy enough, as long as you already have an account with a US broker.

Indonesia is the largest country in South East Asia region. Having population of more than 240 million, which is growing steadily, Indonesia is a really promising market. The large number of population create huge demand for goods and services. As a result, the GDP growth of the country is driven mainly by domestic consumption.

Indonesia has only one stock exchange, the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX), which is based in Jakarta, the capital city. IDX has listed 399 public companies, with market capitalization reached about $250 billion in April 2010.

Below is a list of several blue chip stocks in IDX that an emerging market investor should be aware of.

• Telekomunikasi Indonesia, or Telkom (NYSE: TLK) (IDX:TLKM). Telkom is the  largest telecommunication group in Indonesia which offers both fixed line and fixed wireless telephone, data and internet services. Telkom also offers mobile cellular services through its subsidiary, Telkomsel.
• Unilever Indonesia (IDX:UNVR).  The largest consumer goods company in Indonesia that was founded during the Dutch’s occupation in 1933.
• Astra International (IDX:ASII). The leading automotive company which also engages in other business lines: agribusiness, information technology, financial services, heavy equipment, mining and energy.
• Indofood (IDX:INDF). A total food solutions company, producer of the most popular instant noodle brands in Indonesia
• Perusahaan Gas Negara (IDX:PGAS).  A state owned company that engages in transmission and distribution of natural gas to residential and industrial customers.

This concludes part 1 of Investing in Indonesia Stock Market. In the next part we will look at how an American can invest in Indonesia stock market.

57th Street General Acquisition Corp. announced that the company has closed the sale of 456,300 units subject to greenshoe option granted to the underwriters in its initial public offering. With the company’s IPO of 5,000,000 units and an offering price of $10.00 per unit, the units subject to over-allotment option amount to $7,500,000 or 750,000 units. The remaining 293,700 units is not going to be exercised, according to Morgan Joseph & Co, which acted as the sole book running manager of the IPO.

A greenshoe or an over-allotment option is the right given to the underwriters of a company’s public offering to sell an additional 15% of total shares in the offering. This will help the underwriters stabilize the price after the shares become eligible for public trading.

This additional 456,300 units brings total gross proceeds to 57th Street General Acquisition Corp. to $54,563,000. The company’s registration statement was declared effective by the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 19, 2010.

Click here for the release.

Navios Maritime Acquisition Corp. (Navios Acquisition) announced that the shareholders of Navios Acquisition approved the acquisition of 13 vessels at the special meeting held today in New York. The acquired vessels, consisting of eleven product tankers and two chemical tankers, plus options to purchase two additional product tankers, cost $457.7 million.

To finance the purchase, Navios Acquisition will draw $123.4 million from existing cash. The rest, $334.3 million will be taken from debt financing.

With this approval, Navios Acquisition will reimburse the initial payment of $171.1 million made by Navios Maritime Holdings Inc. on May 19, 2010.

Besides the acquisition of vessels, the shareholders also approved amendments to Navios Acquisition’s articles of incorporation that will change the status of Navios Acquisition from a SPAC into a permanent and operating company.

Our credit history is a very important factor in determining whether we will get our loan application approved. Although we are financially capable, if we have bad credit history it will be very hard for us to get financed for a home, a car or any other things that need financing. Even if we somehow managed to get approved, it would come with a very high interest rate that would drain our paychecks.

Realizing this fact we might ask, “Is there a way to fix my credit?” In the Internet, we can find many companies offering credit repair services for people with bad credit history. One of those companies is DSI Solutions.

From the company’s website, I find DSI Solutions provides easy ways to get our credit repaired. We can register online through the company’s secure server, sign up over the phone or send the order form through mail or fax. The most interesting part, DSI Solutions offers a full money back guarantee plus an additional $50 if we see no improvement in our credit history.

Navios Maritime Holdings Inc. (“Navios Holdings”) has made the initial payment for 11 of 13 tanker ships that are planned to be acquired by the Navios Holdings’ sponsored SPAC, Navious Maritime Acquisition Corp. (“Navios Acquisition”).

The initial payment of 171.7 million dollars was funded by $133 million taken from two credit facilities and $38.7 million drawn from available cash. The initial payment for two other tanker ships has not been made.

Navios Maritime Acquisition Corp. announced in April an agreement to acquire 13 tanker ships consisting of eleven product tankers and two chemical tankers for $457.7 million. Navios Acquisition will solicit shareholders’ approval of the transaction in the special meeting that will be held next week on May 25, 2010.

In case the shareholders of Navios Acquisition do not approve the transaction, the purchasing of the tanker ships will still be done by Navios Holdings that will manage the fleet.

Click here to see the press release

In a previous article, we already discussed briefly what was meant by fundamental analysis and what made it different from its counterpart, technical analysis. In this article, we dive into more detail on fundamental analysis and learn about the term “Capital Structure”, which is a measurement often used by analysts when evaluating the balance sheet of a company.

Capital structure is a composition of a company’s long-term or permanent capital, which consists of some combination of equity and debt. Equity can be further categorized as common stock, preferred stock or retained earnings. When it comes to debt, financial analysts have different opinions on what constitutes the debt component in a company’s capital structure. Some analysts only consider long-term debt, while others argue that short-term debt should also be considered to be part of the capital structure.

When analyzing a company’s capital structure, analysts use several different ratios that compare the company’s debt to total financing. The most popular ratio is debt-to-equity ratio, which is often referred to as the company’s leverage. Rating agencies such as Moodys and Standard & Poor’s use Retained Cashflow (RCF)/Net Debt ratio and Funds from Operations (FFO)/Net Debt ratio. For example, please have a look at Reuters Group (RTRSY) Capital Structure, that shows the capital structure of Reuters Group from year 2005 to 2007.

As stock investors, sometimes we need to know how a company’s capital structure changes over time. Of course, we can always search through SEC filings to find it, but there’s an easier way. We can use the new feature provided by Wikinvest, which pulls sections from annual reports and matches them up, as can be seen in NRG Energy (NRG) Capital Structure. Another example is Transocean (RIG) Capital Structure. This Wikinvest feature will save us time and effort when analyzing a company’s financial statements.

The emergence of e-commerce has enabled business owners, ranging from big corporations to the startups, to showcase and sell their products through the Internet. Dynamic website technologies such as PHP and JSP lead to the creation of shopping cart software, which makes online shopping more intuitive for online shoppers.

Besides shopping cart software, true e-commerce websites also depend heavily on electronic payment solutions. Because of the increasing number of Internet crimes such as fraud and identity theft, secure payment processing solutions are very important for protecting both business owners and consumers. These systems will ensure customers that all of their sensitive and personal information will be kept confidential and not fall into wrong hands. At the same time, business owners will feel confident that they will only receive payments from genuine customers. This, in turn, will minimize chargeback risks for them.

One of the companies providing payment and security solutions is Payvision. This international payment solutions provider offers multi-currency payment processing solutions that allow e-commerce website owners to accept payments from clients in more than 160 countries worldwide using their local currencies. To ensure confidentiality and prevent tampering, Payvision employs a secure, PCI compliant SSL connection to deliver all credit/debit card transaction information.

57th Street General Acquisition Corp. has filed the fourth amendment to Form S-1 Registration Statement on May 11, 2010. This  latest amendment may be a sign that the IPO will commence in the near future.

The filings contain several structural changes to the SPAC, with the most prominent ones are the elimination of shareholder vote and proxy solicitation. Instead, the company will announce a merger within 15 months from the date of the prospectus. Along with the merger announcement, the SPAC will also announce a tender offer to accommodate shareholders who prefer to get their money back.

Another change included in the amendment is the increase in the number of insider warrant purchase from 3 million to 3,5 million. As a result, the total purchase price also rises to $1,750,000.

About The Company

57th Street General Acquisition Corp. is a Special Purpose Acquisition Company formed on October 29, 2009 for the purpose of acquiring, through a merger, capital stock exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization, exchangeable share transaction or other similar business transaction.

The SPAC is headed by Mark D. Klein as  CEO, who also serves as a director of Great American Group, Inc.

Click here for the release