another Julian Robertson dictum: to assess the outlook of a company, you talk to its customers. He found out who was buying ads on the Chinese portals, contacted the purchasers, and probed them on whether they were likely to spend more. The good news, Shleifer discovered, was that the e-commerce players that accounted for most of the ad buying were extremely satisfied with the results: more ads meant more sales for them. What’s more, their own businesses were booming, meaning that they would surely buy even more ads in the future; therefore, the stocks of Sina, Sohu, and NetEase were still
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