World's Strongest Bank - Singapore's OCBC

Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp (OCBC) has been ranked the strongest bank in the world by Bloomberg, based on figures compiled by the leading financial news and data services provider. , Also in Mar 2011, Citibank in its latest Asean banks report, titled Top Guns and Dark Horses, which focuses on stocks to watch in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. The top guns represent its mainstream country picks, while the 'dark horses' are projected to deliver superior returns versus their country peers over the next five years, irrespective of present or future market shocks. Citibank singles out OCBC as Singapore's 'top gun' for the next five years. Apart from looking back at the last five years to see which...

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Small Cap Investment - Chasing the next emerging blue chip

Why small caps?  Well, every current blue chip company was once a small cap. Great acorns too came from small seeds. Small caps are out of institutional radar, and they are too small. As such, these is one area where the astute individual investor can have an edge over the Goliaths by being early and nimble. Investing in small caps can lead to multi-baggers, but of of course not all selections will be successful, and some will become worthless. Therefore, one must adopt a portfolio approach to such investing. However, to fully realize their value, positions must be held for long periods. It is like a farmer sowing the seeds, and letting successful acorns mature fully. This requires a long period. as such, the starting point must be a macro view of a mega-trend, or themes that...

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Posted in: Strategy

Confessions of an S-Chip Boss

The risks of investing in S-chips. Risk points include: -Many of them were leveraged to the hilt, borrowing from mainland banks to punt the Chinese stock market and property market in the mistaken belief that they would have no problems repaying their loans as they were sitting on huge paper gains on their investment holdings. - usually have a holding company that is registered as a shell company incorporated in a tax haven such as Bermuda or the Cayman Islands which do not have robust company laws in place to protect investors’ interests - game could have continued if not for the subprime crisis crashing the markets and un-ravelling their game. - similar to subprime crisis in US. So as we are chasing bulls, we need to be aware...

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Posted in: Stocks

Major Trends and Themes

Invest with the trend. The following are some of the long term mega-trends: - World population growing in numbers and in age.- Economic and political power is shifting from the developed to the emerging countries.- Rising middle class in the emerging economies is creating demand in consumer products.- Decline in supply of water, and commodities is coupled with rising demand from emerging consumers.- Global debt time bombs continues to tick away. Further reading:Long-Term Investing Strategies: The Final Four Ways to Invest in Global Demographic Trend...

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Posted in: Mega-Trends