Friday, September 14, 2007

STI at 3536 at low volume - warning signs?

Must say I'm rather surprised by how STI performs nowadays. Rain or shine, Dow plus or negative, it's more likely to see STI performing well than not. Today STI went up 32 pts to close at 3536 (up 0.91%) with a volume of 1.9 billion (warning sign).

Is foreign funds entering STI again after our massive selldown in Aug? Strong underlying strength in STI is all I can see. It's interesting that even though China raised interest rates by 27 basis pt, HSI and Shanghai did not do any drastic drop today. Or maybe they already did when China announced their inflation and trade surplus data recently. So will Monday see HSI and Shanghai going red? A lot of questions but no ready answers.

Swiber announced another important strategy to establish their foothold in Brunei. It signed an MOU with Rahaman, a company in Brunei to form a joint venture company named JVC (with Swiber taking 51% ownership). Rahaman is a Brunei based company involved in oil and gas commodity and trading business. With JVC, Swiber will have another avenue (apart from Swiber's brunei branch) to source and secure onshore and offshore oil and gas projects in the regions. MOST importantly, the Brunei-incorporated JVC will allow Swiber to bid for projects that are ELIGIBLE ONLY to Brunei incorporated companies.

Damn smart, their management. This effectively creates a very good economic moat that will cause Swiber to get strong earnings for long periods of time. Fantastic! As I've said in many posts, all that needs to catalyst Swiber to new levels is the sweet deal of contracts winnings in these new regions.


Straits asia is quite remarkable today. Today it went XD (gosh, I didn't even know!) and instead of falling on XD to reflect the value of the stock after it gave cash away to investors, the price went up even higher. The price went to intraday high of 1.42 (already mentioned in previous post that 1.42 is a significant resistance). Closed up 0.070, really powerful. I wonder what's up with this stock, no announcement.

Dow is down 20 pts presently, Europe all red (around 0.7%). Total portfolio losses now stand at 9.3k. When I'm a bit more free, I'll update my portfolio. Basically I haven't changed much since I didn't do anything much during the selldown.

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