Caveat Emptor

Chew is an exciting story, abeit a boring business. This stock was in my watch list for a very long time due to its easy to understand business, impressive profit margin, low debt and good cash flow. I held off buying the stock as it had just recently divested it's chicken farm in lim chu kang, and is holding on a huge pile of cash. It's pe ratio appeared cheap but I wanted to monitor it's usage of its capital and future developments before cashing in. A monopoly in eggs in sea cucumber in Singapore counts very little as there are much more cheaper alternatives in neighbouring countries such as seng choon in Malaysia. The nature of Singapore's high land cost and poor economics for poultry rearing made its long term economics highly uncertain. Sure, dangui and codecyps eggs sound cool, but there are not a required input in most dishes, and from a cost perspective they are simply unable to compete with rivals with lower costs of production. Unfortunately, speculators ha...

ETF Investment strategies by Aniket Ullal 1) Transition from traditional to emerging mindset Traditional Emerging Investment Approach Passive vs Active Trad-able beta Asset Allocation Usually by institutional and sophisticated investor Multi-asset allocation available to all Fund and security selection Undervalued stocks and 5 star mutual funds Find targeted ETF (sector-ail. Asset type, specific themes, country investing) Execution Quarterly reporting, end of day NAV Daily transparency, intra-day liquidity Transition from commission based to fee based advisory Informational advantage is no longer monopolized by specific brokers and fund managers. Research is widely available and any investors can access the same information. The supposed confidence in the expertise of brokerages and financial...

Stock Name Mode Qty Avg Cost Price Total Cost Percentage ASCENDAS-ITRUST CSH 2500 1.13 ASCENDAS-ITRUST 2,812.50 20.5554540471 ASCENDAS REIT CSH 1000 2.25 ASCENDAS REIT 2,250.00 16.4443632377 HYFLUX CSH 4000 0.57 HYFLUX 2,260.00 16.5174492965 RAFFLES MEDICAL CSH 2000 1.31 RAFFLES MEDICAL 2,610.00 19.0754613557 SINGTEL CSH 1000 3.75 SINGTEL 3,750.00 27.4072720629 STI ETF (Philips) Philips DCA 1859 3.047 STI ETF (Philips) 5664.373 41.3986698337 Singtel Maybank Cust 300 3.68 Singtel 1109.19 8.1066325598 STI ETF Maybank DCA 118 3.25 STI ETF 390.16 2.8515256715 Silverlake Axis Maybank Cust 2000 0.59 Silverlake Axis 1201.21 8.7791704732 Portfolio Book Value ...

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...