Caveat Emptor

https://www.cheerfulegg.com/2017/06/20/nobodys-naturally-good-at-pitching/   No One Is Naturally Good At Pitching June 20, 2017 by Lionel Yeo Lots of people downplay the amount of preparation it takes to achieve something impressive. I was first introduced to this idea by Ramit Sethi in this blog post : That behind every every impressive feat lies a HUGE amount of preparation. You only see the results, but you almost never hear about the hours and hours of grunt work: Situation: Your friend lost 10kg in 3 months and looks amazing He says: “Oh I just watched my diet and exercised more” Reality: He ate chicken breast and steamed broccoli every day, hired a personal trainer, and worked out 5X a week === Situation: Your colleague gave a game-changing idea during a meeting that impressed your boss She says: “ It was just something that popped into my head!” Reality:  She spent 2 hours of pre-reading through the background material, and the last 3 da...

https://www.cheerfulegg.com/2017/08/16/the-overfitting-fallacy/  When I was in college, I was an obnoxious smart-ass. Like every ambitious, testosterone-driven Singaporean male, I believed I could trade my way towards becoming a millionaire. So I bought some trading software, some market data, several hundred dollars worth of trading books, and begin to craft my own strategy. Back then, “rules-based” technical trading was all the rage. I coded these rules into my software, making my trading model complex, layered, and sophisticated. In my back test results, the model performed wonderfully. It was projecting a 5% returns per month , which would make me a millionaire in less than a decade. Armed with statistically-significant data, I started trading with “seed funding” from my parents… … And it was a total disaster. I lost over $10,000 in a few months – an exorbitant amount of money for a poor college kid. What went wrong? I Committed The Overfitting Fallacy Th...

My interpretation of the telecom war in Singapore 1) Development of unlimited data plans and price competitive sim20 plans from all 3 telecoms, for competing against each others as well as to crowd out the new telecoms main product offerings. TPG is known for its affordable broadband packages in Australia, with prices beating those of its competitors. The firm plans to start offering services here in early 2018 and establish a mobile network with nationwide coverage by September in the same year. On top of its S$105 million winning bid for the spectrum rights to become Singapore’s fourth telco, it expects to pump in an extra S$200 to S$300 million in capital investment, to get its nationwide mobile network running. The company expects to become “EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) positive” when it snags a market share of between 5 and 6 per cent, which it believes would be reached “within a short period of time”. MyRepublic was targeting a...

Shamelessly reblogged from the boring investor http://boringinvestor.blogspot.sg/2017/02/do-telco-investors-need-to-fear-fourth.html#comment-form Ever since the Government announced that they would allow the entry of a fourth telco, share prices of the 3 existing telcos have been on a down trend. In Dec 2016, the name of the fourth telco was made known; it would be TPG Telecom. Do investors of the 3 telcos need to fear the fourth telco? Firstly, some background information about TPG. TPG is the second largest internet service provider and the largest mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) in Australia. As a MVNO, it is able to offer the full suite of mobile telco services such as voice, SMS and data. However, there are important differences between a MVNO and a full-scale telco operator such as the 3 local telcos. MVNOs buy network capacity from full-scale telcos and resell them to retail customers. In the case of TPG, it buys network capacity from Vodafone. Thus, wh...

 I had read an e-book, Thinking Fast and slow and I have read it in preparation for my Toastmaster speech before. Only then, several months past that particular speech, that I came across this video and cursed myself for falling into cognitive fallacies that I once told others to be wary of. Now, as a cool-down period of my purchase of silver-lake axis and remorsefully looking at the share performance of Hyflux and Raffles Medical, I decide to do some stoic meditation and reflect on the triumphs and mistakes I made so far. 1) I need to find a wife and getting her pregnant to continually have kids. So that when I lose a kid, I will be sad for a while. Then I get her pregnant again and have another kid. This is by far the greatest opener in the video so far. Jokes aside, Life is not all about investing and I need to find some filler to tide through this long investing marathon ahead. Maybe I should get a girlfriend, coax her to be my wife, get her pregnant, so that when I ...

Why did Buffet buy IBM 1) vendor stickiness of services 2) vast global customer base, allowing it to thrive regardless of how technology evolve 3) management ability , divesting low margin business, growing high margin business (consulting , outsourcing) 4) favourable long term prospects at that point of time (outsourcing processes 52%, largest systems and it integration consultant,) 5) management financial management ability, use debt wisely, made value adding acquisition from cash, share buyback 6) technology services companies are less prone to cyclical shocks and growth is more stable , growth industry ,highly dependent on discretionary budget of clients for it services 7) IT outsourcing has Moat like qualities as it is core for technology driven firms (utility) . Switching costs and scale advantages discourage Why did Buffet sell one third of his stake at IBM 6 years later 1) tough competition 2) new disruptive technology (cloud computing) bring great profits for ibm, bu...