How to begin learning stocks from SCRATCH

Just had a meet up with someone new to investing. I totally understand how hard it is to read up all the jargons and finance related stuff when I started long time ago. It's like this big mountain of jargons in front of you, and in order to hold an intelligent conversation, you first have to learn the language and what those terms mean. That's one of the main purpose of this blog - to help newbies go through this path that I once walked alone. The...

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I've Zero networth!

I've finally reached zero! But what's the big deal? Zero is not a big deal, right? Well, not if you begin with positive, became negative, and then back to zero again. Reaching zero means you've erased the negative and now you're on a fresh start to begin being positive again. What am I talking about? It's my net worth! I still owe HDB $440k now. I halve this to take into account the portion shared by my wife, so that's $220k. The last I've checked,...

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Low hanging fruits season

POSB is giving another low hanging fruit for us to pick again. I've blogged about a previous exercise here and here where POSB celebrates National Day with a 1.5% pa bonus if you put in fresh funds for 3 months, up to a cap of 10k. Well, it must have been hugely successful and drawing a lot of new funds for POSB, because they are doing it again with some conditions upsized. This new exercise that POSB is doing is a little different. It...

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The 10 functions of money

What's money good for? From Richard Templar's book, "The Rules of Money", money is good for 10 things. I found the list quite exhaustively, though some points are really be lumped together as a single point. But here it is: 1. Security I think money provides a huge security for me. I need to have a certain amount in my bank before I can feel safe that I can tide through the month. I also need to save up a certain amount for my future retirement,...

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The role of parents in an uncertain world

The hardest thing about bringing up a kid is the values that you want him to inculcate. It's never a straightforward equation, where you put in the right input and you get the right output. Different kids respond differently to the same input and produce vastly different outputs. Take for example a parent who always tries to teach his kid to save up and be frugal. He did it in a way that forces his kid to scrimp and save and the kid grew up having...

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Valuation of ST Eng based on order book

ST engineering had been dropping like crazy the last few weeks, and very recently in the last few days, the sell down persisted at a much greater pace. I know that they had a weak quarter, and possibly they will end this financial year with similar revenue but weaker net profits. My class got cancelled, so I had some time to crunch some numbers. Here's a fancy 5 yr key financial data taken from their site: A few things to take note: 1. The...

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