Over the weekend I had planned today to comment on the Chinese ban on mention of Winnie the Pooh, and on Weibo. This is because of an unflattering cartoon four years ago which compared the pudgy Chinese leader Xi Jinping with tall, slim Barrack Obama calling them Winnie and Tigger. Then in 2014 a cartoon showed Japanese Prime Minister Abe as Eeyore alongside a plump Pooh.

You are also now banned from making animated cartoons of the Pooh bear on Chinese sites. RIP is outlawed because it might refer to Nobelist Liu Xiaobo who died last week.

I was going to lead with this story about the renewal and extension of Chinese censorship which came out over the weekend from Asia, but it became front-page news in the Financial Times, so I have been gazumped. As China moves toward its 5-year congress we are not allowed to comment on Xi's pot-belly and build. Or all Chinese leaders' dyed black hair.

It makes our own rather vain president sound almost rational.

McAfee virus protection is removing the warning notice on our website, www.global-investing.com which called our site “risky to visit”. However they did not say why it was placed there in the first place. Our site was long called safe by Norton—and it is. The reason we were targeted (without being given a chance to explain) is that they decided my blogs are spam. Given that they go out in full only to people who pay a real price for them, this is astonishing.

Funds

*Today we are adding a new position to our funds, a Canadian ETF investing in loony-denominated floating rate notes to reduce our exposure to higher interest rates. It is iShares Floating Rate ETF, with the Toronto symbol XFR, managed by BlackRock which launched it 6 years ago, and covered by Morningstar. Its benchmark is the FTSE TMX Canada FRN Index, and it offers a DRIP for reinvesting your monthly dividends which I advise using. The fund holds under 50 positions and trades about 1000 shares per day max. Its fees and expenses come to 0.23% of assets held.

The fund is the best of a bad lot, having failed to match its benchmark from the get-go and doing dismally in 2016, the last year for which we have reports, earning 1.02% in C$s while the FT index it tracks gained 1.3%.

Half its investments are in Canada Housing Trust No. 144A, an institutions-only floating rate vehicle, in which it has invested no less than 57.29% of its assets. Its 2^nd and 3^rd largest holdings are under 10% in the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec, and 2.1% in the Province of Alberta. The rest of the pile is in Hydro-Quebec and Financement Quebec, jointly at 14% with the rest in the Bay Street banks' FRNs: Bank of Montreal; CIBC; Toronto-Dominion; and Royal Bank of Canada.Bank of Nova Scotia is not included because it is more global and less North American than its fellows.

It has virtually nothing in industrial FRNs because they barely exist even in the USA, for any firm whose paper you would buy. There are no options out.

Rating-wise it is 45%+ in triple A holdings; and 21.2% in double and single A ones, leaving 33.3% at higher risk. Duration is 18% less than a year; 21.74% 1-2 years; 28.14% 2-3 years; 28.73% 3-5 years; and the remaining 3.19% 5-7 years.

Had you bought this C$ issue when it was launched you would have made nearly 7% in the intervening period (as of June 30).

To purchase with Fidelity, I paid C$19 in commission, whereas US ETFs are commission-free these days, plus a 1% fee to change Greenbacks to loonies. My per share cost was $C20.12

*Kennedy-Wilson Europe REIT reported further institutional buying of its KWEIF London-listed REIT which is being taken over by NYSE-KW, the US parent real estate company.

Biotechs

*The ADR of Bioline RX Ltd, the Israel firm, rose another 3.73% yesterday to 96.5 US cents. We added it last week. It rose 3.7% also on Friday. There will probably be a reverse split unless it continues to gain daily

*Our other new biotech shares were bought Sunday morning in Tel Aviv, a trick that the clever Fidelity brokers specialize in. I paid $113.90 for Taro, NYSE-TARO, which was tipped as a back-passage to India by Barron's from Hong Kong last week as the smarter way to own Sun Pharma of India, Sun earns about half its profits from TARO which sells dermatology drugs to the US and Canada. It may have fallen because the print edition did not mention this idea from Matthews Asia's Sunil Asnani. Thomson Reuters consensus also upgraded TARO to buy. It is now at $114.02 here.

*GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has begun shipping its quad 2017-8 flu virus to the US. GSK is British and will hold an investor day in London July 26 for which I seek a volunteer to go,

*Teva (TEVA) now is back in the dog-house, its hire of Pascal Soriot of Astra-Zeneca denied, and because the European Union regulators have instituted a fine against TEVA and its later sub Cephalon because of a pay-for-delay deal over sleep disorder drug modafinil when they were independent drug companies. It can require a fine of 1% of sales when the deal was active. Teva is off 2.5% despite having denied the charges. Also Takeda won its patent extension case against generic-makers including TEVA over Velcade, against multiple myaloma, whose patent now runs to 2022.

Royal Bank of Canada reiterated its “outperform” rating on the stock.

*Managers at Eaton Vance Worldwide Health Sciences Fund tipped Shire (SHPG)  and two other stocks in an interview with, citing SHPG's hemophilia franchise as the cause for uncertainty for the Irish drugmaker. Samantha Pandolfi said: she sees a 40% upside for Shine whose price has been held back by investor concerns the company is losing ground to other manufacturers of hemophilia drugs, which Shire relies on for a large portion of its annual revenue.

"If the hemophilia fears persist, it could take two to three years to deliver those returns," she said. "If the fears abate, it will happen sooner."

*Bavarian Nordic (BVNRY) was up 4.5% but not in Denmark. 

Heavies

*Orocobre (OROCF) plans to hold its conference call on July 29 at 10 am Oz time despite its operations being in the Western Hemisphere, its most accessible listing being in Toronto, and its newsletter supporter being in NYC. I have written to the IR to protest. OROCF mines lithium in Argentina and has has problems lately because heavy snowstorms have stopped it getting mining supplies from Chile.

Santiago is having a blizzard right now.

*Perhaps because it is nearer its ports to Asia, SoQuiMiCh (SQM) was up yesterday. It also develops lithium in Argentina but mostly works in Chile. SQM.

Other Tech

*Naspers (NPSNY) made another new high independent of moves by its leading holding, Tencent. NPSNY is the quickest exit from South Africa. Up 2.8% it is now at $26.19

Writing in seekingalpha, Nicholas Krapels remarks: “It's a social network (or two). It's a gaming company. It's a bank. A VC fund. A video streaming service. A movie production company. A TV sports channel. A budding advertisement broker. A cloud services provider. A cashless payments solution. A sleeping e-commerce juggernaut. And literally hundreds of other stakes and subsidiaries.

“This is Tencent Holding Ltd.” He thinks is underpriced vs Alibaba (BABA) because its US listing is obscure while BABA is easy. Its trailing p/e to growth is less than 1.

However the Chinese censorship of cartoons and even looking up the Chinese characters which spell out “Winnie the Pooh” is banned on Chinese sites of both BABA and TCTZF, which by the way is an informal ADR of its Hong Kong traded stock, in US$s. It was down yesterday over Chinese controls.

*I got a notification alleging that “Bank of Nova Scotia Raises Position in CAE Inc” from someone named Juan Wells forwarded by consolidater marketbeat.com which gives daily ratings updates, but the article could not be found. Why doesn't McAfee go after market beat?

*Despite INFY beating consensus forecasts last week, the Nomura Infosys analyst warns its cannot continue to do this in an interview with Barron's blog.

Finance

*Santander's attempt to help small investors in Banco Popular regain something on their defaulted bonds and win their loyalty has not helped Mexican fat cats who owned stakes in its subordinated bonds, among them Antonio del Valle who owned 4.3% of Popular and sat on its board. He is suing in Spain and Europe for being excluded from the payout using his cousin, Jaime Ruiz Sacristan as a front, because the latter was not on the board. This was reported by Eduardo Garcia in www.sentidocomun.com.mx/ Other insiders from other countries are also suing.

Separately, Eduardo wrote that Comer, the Mexican company specializing in linking posh consumers to small-sized establishments, will move to Santander's Mexican stock services as its new market-maker, in place of Crédit Suisse.

*Belatedly, Investors Intelligence of Britain has decided on a bullish call for Standard Life PLC, (SLFPY) which made a medium-term relative base confirmation, whatever that may mean.