Justice gave six reasons why China is a buy now. These included the recent correction in crude oil prices, China’s high level of personal savings and the country’s massive foreign reserves.

Today’s Financial News editor J. Christoph Amberger says Justice is wrong about China. The Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges have plummeted since the opening of the Beijing games. J. Christoph says China now looks more like Japan in the ’90s than a strong buying opportunity…

Olympic medal counts look different to Americans than they look to the rest of the world. In the US, all medals count equally. The team with the most gold, silver, and bronze medals “wins” in the standings. Elsewhere, it’s just the number of gold medals that determines who leads the pack. Which may explain why China feels its superiority complex validated with 17 gold medals (vs. the United States’ 10)… while Americans really couldn’t care less about leading with 29 (vs. 27) total medals.

Still, for a country that just put on the most expensive halftime show ever, with lip-syncing girls, computer-generated fireworks, and thousands of young men in light-studded green “fruit suits” (as my teenage son called their skintight garbs), the stock market is sure looking like the last flea-bitten chihuahua in the pantry of a Korean short-order cook.

If China is leading in the medals count, the fruit-suit optimism isn’t filtering through to investors. Both the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange have simply plummeted since the August 8 side show. On Wednesday, the Shanghai Stock Exchange closed at 2,470 points, falling 135 points to close at a 20 month low after touching an even lower intra-day low of 2,372. The Shenzhen exchange slumped more than 6% to close at 698 points.

Shanghai set an all-time record last October at 6,092. That’s a drop of 3,720 points in ten months – a loss of 61% at today’s lows.

The last time I saw an index plummet like this was 1990, after Tokyo’s Nikkei had posted a record high at 38,912. The only difference: It took the Nikkei fully five years, until April 1995, to fall by this amount. China managed this in just 10 months.

There are now accusations that the government of causing the problem by misleading traders. (I’m glad this very Western tradition has finally made it to China…)

But here’s the odd part: There are some Western stock gurus who are not worried. In fact, one just came up with six reasons to buy China.

Let me summarize:

Reason to Buy China #1: The Silly Season Is Over. Now that the frenzy has subsided, real values are starting to show up again. The hot money has burned itself out, providing opportunities for those who see longer-term value and aren’t out to just flip a quick buck.

Reason to Buy China #2: Oil Is Coming Down. With oil backing off, China and India can breathe a little easier. The fear that high-priced oil might kill the Asian miracle is lifting. That gives them more time to tap alternative energy solutions and build economic strength at home.

Reason to Buy China #3: The Locals Are Optimistic. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center shows that most Chinese feel positive about where their country is headed. According to the survey, 86% are “content with the country’s direction.” (That’s up from just 25% six years ago.)

Reason to Buy China #4: The Growth Is Still There. China moves up the quality food chain. As China gets better at enforcing intellectual property laws, its high-tech skills will only increase… and profit margins, too.

Reason to Buy China #5: Personal Savings and Domestic Demand. Perhaps even more impressive than China’s long-term growth rate is the personal savings rate.

Reason to Buy China #6: Huge Foreign Reserves. China has somewhere between $2.3 trillion and $2.4 trillion in excess reserves.

Let me respond why I am hesitant to wear that fruit suit of optimism:

1) The “silly season” is over. If China managed to double and double again in two years on that supposedly “bad” hot money… where is the money coming from that will power the Shanghai to recover even 20%? Japan’s Nikkei has a cautionary tale to tell about markets that see the hot money born out. For the Nikkei, that meant a low of 7,831 in April 2003 – 80% below the record high. For the Shanghai, that would mean a level of 1,218 – another 50% drop. (Given the accelerated failure rate the Chinese, we could see this level within the next 16 months!)

2) Oil may be coming down, relieving some pressure on wafer-thin Chinese margins. But labor cost – China’s biggest competitive edge – is going up. So are environmental regulations… healthcare cost (they say breathing the air in Chinese cities is the equivalent of smoking 3 packs of cigarettes a day)… and unemployment.

3) Local optimism. May I point out that the people are fickle. Consumer confidence is the least reliable indicator of an economy’s health. More importantly: investors are chafing with just over 60%  losses under their belts… and more to come!

4) Growth will be there as long as Americans and Europeans place orders. Recession, anyone? Some analysts like to argue that the Asian economies have “decoupled” from the West. Someone must have forgotten to tell Japan…

5) Personal savings and domestic demand. The latter may be there… and is usually a prelude to the destruction of the former. Plus, those personal savings have taken a beating since Chinese citizens transferred their renminbis from their passport savings to their stock brokers by the billion each week last year. Add in inflation and tally it all up once you account for two months of forced idling of factories and work forces, and an overall low average income of just $2,025 a year (in 2006)… and those personal savings factor in far less than you might think.

6) Huge foreign reserves may be more than made up by huge non-performing and “special interest” loans… a looming real estate crash… and of course the potential for the predicted devaluation of these reserves, most of which are kept in dollars. (May I also point out that Japan’s incredible foreign reserves did not help it one bit from 1990 to 2005.)

In short: China is a potential train wreck in the making! Analysts who predict Armageddon for America based on a 20% drop in the Dow and discount a 60% drop in the Shanghai Stock Exchange may just have sand in their slide rules. Those who buy wholesome into official Chinese numbers and believe the U.S. government manipulates GDP numbers may not do their readers a favor.

The big Chinese companies that trade as ADRs, such as China Life Insurance Company Ltd. (NYSE:LFC), China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (NYSE:SNP), and China Telecom Corporation Limited (NYSE:CHA) have declined at a far less precipitous clip than their home markets.

Chinese solar stocks such as LDK Solar Co. (NYSE:LDK), China Sunergy Co. (NASDAQ:CSUN), and ReneSola Ltd. (NYSE:SOL) have actually risen in price as the Shanghai Exchange collapsed. Then again, they move with their global industries… not with China.

But while I am getting more bearish on China’s medium- to long-term prospects by the day, I think there are a small number of Darn Good Stocks you can make some serious money with.

P.S. J. Christoph says Today’s Financial News’ new trading service, Hot Stock Confidential, is currently pursuing a small company with key technology set to profit from big demand in China. This keystone technology will reach deep into China’s interior – tapping into its rural market and creating wealth on a scale like never before. It has been earning between $80-$100 million a year on total revenues of $450-$550 million in revenue.

The company has just come back up from a bit of a dip, and is charging forward with gains of 8% in a day. Hot Stock Confidential is already up 20% over the recommended entry price. But you still can buy it for less than five bucks. Read on here for more more details on how to profit from this China success story.

Worley Parsons says it wants to build 34 250-megawatt power stations in Australia by 2020. Now that is real vision! The goal is to provide alternative power to industrial customers in WA, who are currently vulnerable to any disruptions from the natural terminal at Varanus.

Australia is the buckle on the global sun belt

Source: Worley Parsons

As you can see from the image above (taken from Worley’s presentation to investors on its plan) Australia is in the world’s “Sun Belt.” As we’ve said in this space before, getting more energy from sun is one of the key challenges of Peak Oil.

By the way, our technical analyst Gabriel Andre, who has studied energy and engineering (along with currencies and trading) tells us that the X axis is the longitude (in degrees West and in degrees East from Greenwich meridian, while the Y axis is the latitude (in degrees North and South from the Equator). For the data in colours, what you see is solar radiation per annum, in KW/H per M2, which is the total amount of beam radiation that you receive from the sun on a particular area.

Got that?

One more note on this. Worley Parsons wants to use solar thermal technology, not solar panels. It’s a subject we’ve covered in the Australian Small Cap Investigator (although the best Aussie company at it is now doing business in America and is not publicly listed). It’s part of the “portfolio of energy experiments” we’ll need to produce energy in the future.

The trouble with silicon based photovoltaic panels is that there’s a limit to how much of the sun’s light they can convert into electricity. Experiments in thin film solar panels and in materials science (a kind of artificial photosynthesis that converts more light into energy) are designed to improve the efficiencies of photovoltaics. But progress is slow.

Solar thermal produces electricity, but uses sunlight to produce heat, which then produces electricity. Solar thermal concentrates the sun’s rays to superheat a fluid, which is then used to drive a turbine to produce electricity. The nice thing about it is that the superheated fluid can be stored, which means a solar thermal power station can operate at night, when the sun is not shining. It’s a great idea, and great to see Worley Parsons moving on it.

P.S. Solar investors may also want to check out J. Christoph Amberger’s ReneSola (NYSE:SOL) recommendation. He says strong quarterly earnings for Chinese solar maker LDK Solar (NYSE:LDK) indicate an immenent run-up for ReneSola…

Source: Worley Parsons (ASX: WOR) Announces Pilbara Solar Energy Project

Quarterly earnings tripled for Chinese solar maker LDK Solar (NYSE:LDK) on soaring demand for solar power, while ethanol producer Pacific Ethanol (NASDAQ:PEIX) reported a wider-than-expected loss on surging corn prices.

J. Christoph Amberger in Today’s Financial News says these results create a great opportunity for investors. Yesterday, shares in LDK Solar rose 15 percent. And J. Christoph reckons solar maker ReneSola (NYSE:SOL) may now do the same…

LDK Solar apparently is coping quite well with the proposed loss of German subsies. The company reported Q2 revenues surging 89.2% to $441.7 million after total wafer shipments increased 60.8% during the quarter. Gross margins ended up at 25.4%. (Obama, are you listening?! Can you spell “windfall profits”?)

LDK expects revenues between $486 million and $496 million on shipments of between 210 megawatts and 220 megawatts of wafers in the third quarter: “The company also lifted its full year guidance to between $1.65 and $1.75 billion compared to between $1.08 and $1.18 billion earlier.”The stock is still trading well below its 52-week high of $76.75. The stock gained over 17% today.

While most other publicly traded solar companies were gaining today, one in particular stood out: RenaSola another Chinese wafer maker, announced that it would report unaudited Q2 financials on Tuesday, Aug. 19, before the market open. The stock gained over 11% to trade at $15.36.

Call me crazy, but those earnings just might be something!

We’ll play: Buy RenaSola between $15-16 in view of an earnings-induced bounce of another 20% by next Tuesday.

Source: ReneSola is Our New Solar Earnings Speculation