China — An Economic Port in the Storm

There are plenty of other retailers that are jumping on the Chinese bandwagon:

* Barbie goes to China. Mattel opened its six-story House of Barbie in Shanghai, its first stand-alone store in China. "There's no reason why in five to 10 years, China shouldn't be the biggest market in the world for us," said Richard Dickson, Barbie's general manager.

* Chinese love Apple. Apple is opening a second store in Beijing. You know why? Apple's sales in China jumped by 49 percent in the last quarter.

* Door-to-door? No problem. Even multi-level marketer Amway is in China, where it increased its sales by 28 percent in 2008.

My point is pretty simple: You better take a long look at every stock in your portfolio and make sure that it has a well-defined and aggressive China strategy. For the next several decades, companies are going to fall into one of two categories: (1) companies that make a mountain of money from selling to China and (2) companies that get clobbered by their low-cost Chinese competitors.