Caveat Emptor

Revisiting the Fama And French Model Serious investors whom have a decent foundation in quantitative finance will have came across the Fama and French 3 Factor model in his readings. Huge amounts of investment research and literature and quantitative asset pricing models are based on this. Even hedge funds or robo-advisers whom reject the efficient market hypothesis / CAPM have their key assumptions / origins based on the writings of Fama and French. With the large number of market commentary commenting about the death of the value premium (including a professor I greatly respect), I am exceptionally lucky to come across a recent commentary by French (March 2020) whom originated the model. His views will be more factual compared to the marketing speak of robo-advisers / investment trainers whom like to tout recent market volatility as a permanent change of things, or based their materials on outdated data and analysis. For an active investor whom utilises hybrid active stock picking an...

Wire-card or Wire-Fraud Wire-card may be a familiar brand to consumers in Singapore. Singaporeans whom have paid for their food through EFTPOS terminals through Visa / Nets /Mastercard will have noted the terminals featuring this particular company. Never could I imagine such a large scale fraud could have happened within the shores of the Singapore financial center. Large scale fraud that I thought to be prevalent in S Chips (Missing cash and regulatory breakdown) in distant shores turned up at my doorstep. Although I am not vested in this company, to have directly used the payment services of a company that is engaged in large scale misrepresentation / fraud is jarring. A scuttlebutt analysis from vendors whom used its payment systems may simply have expected late payments from wirecard, instead of the entire insolvency of the company, which has a market cap of 18.26B as of 23 April. To quote some choice excerpts from the FT investigator / whistle blower Quote ht...

A biased and opinionated defence of SGX Please note that this author already holds a position in SGX and may be intending to acquire more if there is volatility in stock prices. The views of this author are his own and do not constitute as financial advice. Readers are suggested to do their own diligence before proceeding. 1) Strong balance sheet Management reiterated its commitment to a progressive dividend policy. Strong balance sheet suggest the ability to support dividends and concise valuation via Dividend discount model 2) Perceived negative Impact on SGX derivatives revenue stream MSCI contracts make up about 15% of its equity derivatives daily average volumes (DAV) and about 12% of total derivatives DAV. => 15% * 51 = 7.65% drop in revenue in the worst case (assuming no change) => So why are you so worried? 3) Perceived tailwinds for HKEX surely present headwinds to SGX HKEx has signed an agreement with MSCI to introduce new products based on MSCI Asia and ...