The first domino falls

We just heard news of Swiber sudden winding down. DBS is one of the main banks that loans money to Swiber, so their exposure is about 700 million. That's not a lot of loans, relatively speaking. 700 million is about 0.25% of their total outstanding loans in 2015 and it's about 15% of their total 2015 net profit. But they are confident of getting half of it back and after tapping onto their general provision, they are net loss of about 150 million....

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Trying to be SMART on SMRT

Stupidity induced by greed. That's the only way to describe it. Upon announcement of the offer by Temasek holding for the delisting of SMRT at $1.68, I wanted to arbitrage on any possible price difference between the opening price and the offer price. These are the assumptions I make: 1. There's a dividend of 2.5 cts waiting for me 2. The price that Temasek Holdings offer is too low ball and will be revised upwards With that, I queued...

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Growing my investment portfolio

There are only two ways in which my portfolio can grow without leverage - the first is to inject it with fresh capital, and the second is to grow it organically from dividends/capital appreciation. To grow it by injecting fresh capital, it will have to come from savings. And where do savings come from? From work. After subtracting all the necessary deductions, I'm left with 30k to inject into my warchest every year. When my portfolio is small,...

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The day SGX stopped trading for 5.5 hrs

On Thurs, 14th July 2016, SGX had to halt trading for all its counters around 1130 am. At first, it's supposed to resume trading at 2pm after lunch, but at 2pm when I was eagerly waiting to see if there's any movement from my brokerage platform, I was disappointed. Nothing moved. Later it was announced that it trading will be resumed at 4pm instead. Yet again, at 4pm, none of the counters moved. The last announcement regarding this screw up was...

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Who is being speculative?

A value investor, a trader and a gambler goes into a bar. After a drink or two, they started arguing over which of them is speculating in the market. The value investor says that the other two are not basing their investments on fundamental reasons and treating the buying of their part business ownership like digits, hence the two are speculative. The traders says that the other two did not consult the technical aspect and the price action...

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Croesus Retail trust preferential offering

Those holding Croesus retail trust needs to fork out money again. This was after their most recent rights back in Oct 2015 which I've blogged about here, here and here. There is now a preferential offering exercise going on, and in all respects, we can treat this as a rights exercise. Here's the details: The dilution isn't that much. It's an offer of 10 new shares for every 259 shares held before it goes XR, priced at $0.797 for every new...

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