Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Successful Value Investing in Asia - Tony Measor

I've not done a book review for some time, but this book that I read beckons me to review it, so that I can share with more people and also that I can remember the lessons taught.

This book that I'm talking about is: Successful Value Investing in Asia - 10 timeless principles by Tony Measor. To be frank, I saw this book from major bookstores before but I rubbished it away. Perhaps in the past I saw this book with a different light than what I saw now. When I finished reading it yesterday, I was wowed by the sensible insights of the author who wrote it.

In a nutshell, here's the 10 principles by the author:
1. Invest, cash is not king
2. Be your own fund manager
3. Learn the basics
4. Looking for dividend income
5. Focus on growth
6. Buy and keep
7. Beware of the quick profits of IPO
8. Gamble to win
9. Enjoy the ride with the market
10. Buy property for living, not for investing


I really learn a lot from chapter 3: learn the basic. Here, I found out that there are 2 ways to value a company. One is through its earnings and the other is through its assets. There is of course a compromise between the two. That statement alone makes me think about a lot of things already.

Without any doubt, the author is bullish on the banking sector as the ultimate growth stock. His favorite, which appears time and time again in the book, is actually HSBC which is listed in HK. He cited a very interesting insight - that HSBC forms a major component of HSI (from the charts, I agree with him). HSI might go up or down but overall, the direction is still up if you give it enough time to mature. It's the same for HSBC.

He mentioned that while valuating shares with earnings, one must also back the valuation with asset values. Asset values will form a safety net in case earnings fail to meet expectations. I would classify the author as a dividend value investor, someone who values dividend more than capital gain.

In the book, he mentioned several companies several times, and thus I think these are worth investigating further:

1. HSBC
2. Manulife
3. China mobile
4. China light & Power holdings
5. Hang Seng Bank
6. AIG
7. Huaneng Power
8. Cheung Kong


It's really a good interesting read for me, I might consider getting this book :)

4 comments :

JingXiong said...

Sian, No Chatbox!

It's rare to hear nice books on Asian Markets. I normally write off those books! Ha!

I'll be flipping them through in the bookshop soon. Thx for review, dude! =)

la papillion said...

Hi stub,

Aiyo, your computer still not fixed ah? Did you download all those pluggins necessary to make these widgets work?

JingXiong said...

Chatbox where got plugin one. Somehow it's only the chatbox that cannot work after usage for like 1 week already. Your new site now has a chatbox? I see none of it. Ha!

la papillion said...

Stub,

Wow...then it's serious. I dunno what's wrong man. Somehow your computer blocked certain sites perhaps. Not sure, i'm no computer expert.