Top Stocks For 2011, Best Stock Investments For 2011, Hot Stocks For 2011

You know they have to be thinking about it...

Well, if we could just shift to production... It's jolly well sealed at the top, after all.

Do the math and it's easy to see why.

Let's say BP could get 60,000 bpd from Macondo. That's $1.75 billion in annual revenue (assuming $80/barrel oil).

If the field lasts five years, that'd go a long way toward paying for BP's Macondo expenses — costs which are not anywhere near being totaled, by the way. These lawsuits and fines will drag out for years (though hopefully not a decade).

And that 60,000 bpd figure is conservative. The nearby Thunderhorse field peaked at around 250,000 bpd in 2009. Those production numbers are spread out among multiple rigs, of course.

If we estimate that Macondo prospect could produce 180k bpd, that's $5.25 billion in revenue per year. That's more than halfway to restoring BP's previous annual $10b/year dividend. And BP has already said it "may" drill into the reservoir again at some point in the future.

Diane Cunningham of Colorado Springs, Colo., no longer has a flat-screen television. She decided to sell it... so she could buy a shotgun.

Colorado Springs shut off a third of its streetlights this past winter, The New York Times reports, in order to save $12 million on electricity. Shortly thereafter, a chain of events convinced Ms. Cunningham she needed to be armed.

"Her tires were slashed, she said. Her car was broken into. Strange men showed up on her porch. Her neighborhood had grown deserted at night..."

Meanwhile, in East St. Louis, Mo., Reverend Joseph Tracy is convinced guns are the problem. (Guns in the hands of criminals, that is.)

Every year, I go to the Agora Financial Investment Symposium in Vancouver, both as speaker and attendee. It's jampacked with people from all over the world who gather at the Fairmont Hotel to share ideas. As soon as I walk into that grand old railway hotel, I know there will be some surprises. This year was no different.

Ideas were not in short supply, but some ideas were more common than others. More than a few speakers spoke well of gold and oil. Most had dim views of the economy and the hot stock market of 2011. And there were at least a handful whose best ideas hailed from some emerging market.

A couple of my favorite ideas came from investors based in Dubai and Moscow. Whole markets rarely go on sale, but here we have two examples of hot stock markets trading for about 6 times earnings.

Peter Cooper is our man in Dubai, as you may remember, and a friend of mine. From his perch in Dubai, he writes an interesting investing newsletter called ArabianMoney. He is also a self-made millionaire who made it in the Middle East. He sold out near the top. But now, Peter says Dubai is a buy again. In fact, Peter says, the whole United Arab Emirates is a buy.

Inviting a little bit of government policy to interact with private enterprise is like inviting a little family of rats to interact with a bakery. Before long, you've got more rat droppings than chocolate sprinkles atop your cupcakes. And that's just the beginning...

Every day, the rats are more numerous, more rotund...and more brazen. Every day, fewer baked goods make it from the oven to the display case. Eventually, the baker is in business to feed the rats...and there is nothing he can really do about it.

Feeding rats is expensive.

Top Stocks For 2012: China Tel (CHTL)

By Toby Smith

Growth stock specialist Toby Smith turns to a speculative micro-cap stock for his top pick for 2012:ChinaTel Group, Inc. (Other OTC: CHTL).

With the added disclosue that he personally own shares in CHTL, along with his clients at ChangeWave Research, the advisor looks to the firm's potential role in a new joint venture in the China telecom space.

"Our bullishness is based on a pending China Tel and Chinacomm joint venture as a 'basic telephone service' (BTS) licensed carrier in China. The other BTS carriers are all large companies with $10 billion+ market caps, such as China Mobile, China Netcom and China Unicom. Today's market cap for China Tel is $130 million.

"The Chinacomm/ChinaTel joint venture owns 37,000 kilometers of fiber-optic network and 3.5Ghz spectrum for wireless broadband in 29 of the biggest China cities. That infrastructure alone has a book value of over $1 billion.

"ChinaTel has su?ered a great credibility problem on the Street due to a set of failed capital raising deals that failed to close.

"But the delays in their closing equity financing over the last 18 months has turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the potential valuation for the China Wi-Max network has at least doubled since the previous failed deal.