Expect the unexpected

Despite China's increase in interest rate and dow's bad performance last Fri, STI held up, along with the rest of the asian bourses. Shanghai, surprise surprise, managed to close 3.81% higher while its counterpart, HSI, closed up 0.32%. Nikkei however dropped 1.07%.

A strong recovery by STI throughout the day saved STI from a potential -30 to close just -16 pts at 3635, well above support levels. Volume is a rather small 3.7 billion. Property and banks are the usual ones to fall, with the top volume hogged by warrants and pennies.

Is the worst over? Hard to say. I'm optimistic when market selldown and pessimistic when it's we ran up. Since we're still in the midst of earnings seasons, I doubt any selldown will be longlasting and severe. But after national day, it's hard to say. I heard some rather bad macro news: Bank of england might be looking to increase interest rate by 0.25%, after china's increase of 0.27%. This might be closely followed by Japan after the election. With 3 major banks conspiring to bring world equity market down, we better get prepared for the worst.

Have you notice there's a surge of rights, bonds and placement shares recently? KS energy is the latest to join this crowd. Past companies include occulus & swiber (that's all i can remember). South sea bubble, anybody? Hmm...

Straits asia reported director's buying in shares from the open market. They also reported an increase in holdings by fidelity funds from 4.81% to 5.01%. While there are many reasons for directors and funds to sell off shares, there's only one reason why institutional and important stack holders like directors want to buy a company's shares -- they are bullish about it's prospect. Straits reached an intra day high of 1.57 before closing at 1.54.

Lian beng broke 52 weeks high after break out of resistance level at 0.540 (intraday high of 0.565) with high volume (82 million compared to 25 million average). Hope it can reached my flag target (26th June to 3rd July) of 0.585. Recently a lot of construction have what I called intraday rallies. It will shot up, bringing all the usual gang like yongnam, csc, koh bros, ces together, before closing a weaker towards market close. Highly speculative...people must be betting the next construction awards this week.

I'll be looking forward to reduce my holdings in construction when they announce.

CHoffshore

Wow...made a very good run today. Broke out of breakout level for flag pole at 0.895, and ran up all the way to $1 before closing at 0.980 today (+0.115, up 13.3%). I've never see CHoffshore ran up so much before. Either the quarterly reports are fantastic or there's contracts announcement or upgrade in target price by brokerage firm. But I didn't see any. Yet.


My target price for this stock is $1.04. If all goes well, might see it tmr already. Cheong ah!

Dow is up 75 pts, europe mostly green.