Life For Rent

Forget everything else! Forget business and sales. Forget everything.  Just do what one man does!

Before I go onto financials.. I read in today’s news that now it is said those who consume red meats and processed meats run accelerated risks of lung,liver and goodness knows what other cancers. Once again, whatever we do, we are screwed. Period.

Taxi fares are set to go up. Everyone should experience between 10-48% increase from next Monday. You may wanna confirm if Trans cab and prime cabs are raising fares. I know the latter does not intend to in the near future. So when you do take a cab, note that not all cabs will be on the same wavelength in terms of price. Everyone hates to pay more but it does seem the cab fare increases are one of the last to occur. Inflation rates are high and when it goes up the buses and MRT raises theirs first. Maybe one should consider buying SMRT and SBS Transit stocks long term then… grrr

 Moving onto the stock market, I gotta thank la papillon for going through my chart analysis. I have learnt a lot from him and have gone up at least 3 steps higher in the past couple days. My focus area was on drawing support and resistance lines, trend lines (eg ascending/descending triangles) and fibonacci retracement analysis. I also beefed up my MACD and candlesticks analytical skills. I have a long way to go with lots of practice to run of course.

I did an analysis of the STI last night. I do note that in Aug even with the sharp correction, it held very firmly at 50% retracement. The recent correction was a 38.2%. These are very crucial points and it does seem that the index held very well to these zones. There is strength indeed. Currently based on trendlines STI is in neutral position with symmentrical triangles. Should be looking for a direction, for better or worse. There is a strong line at 3315 which must not break, during a downturn. In terms of indicators, waiting for a histogram to turn green but such indicators are based on history and can change very quickly depending on market sentiment. I am testing out the ’4 red 1 green’ buy signal, while working hard on my trend-line drawing.

I am handling about 80k worth of stocks for my mom now. Half of it was used for long term high dividend and defensive play. I may look to expand this for one needs to have a basket of defensive counters to be truly defensive. Currently I hold 2 for her, First REIT and MIIF. I have HSBC for her as well which is trading in the hong kong market. I am looking at bank stocks during bear markets and recessions where I expect very good growth. There is news locally to where local banks will benefit from but I haven’t had time to fully digest the news yet. Local banks are trading at higher PER than HSBC but PER is not the only figure one should look at.

Out of the 80k, the other half are hand-picked by me for short-mid term plays. I will reassess the market sentiment, news and charts and decide if I should sell the holdings after riding out the uptrend. She bought First Resources yesterday when they began trading. First Resources of course, is into palm oil in Indonesia. They are also looking to sell their Golden Agri holdings but looking at the charts, I suggest they hold for now cause there is a bearish sentiment to the charts. My favorite holding for her is UOL. I spotted a pretty good chart that was in a downtrend and was recently whacked down quite badly. It has a lot of upside and daily charts showed buy signals last week. Weekly charts (which I usually use) just produced the 4r1g buy signal. I bought last week at 4.38.. think Tues or Wed. Currently it is trading at 4.74. The weekly charts should show a MACD crossover in around 3 bars, ie 3 weeks where the stock goes into accelerated uptrend (anticipated). I spotted a strong resistance at around the 4.85 region so we’ll be looking to see if this line can be broken convincingly. Short term outlook, at around 5.15 thereabouts. Will be looking at data to see if this is going on track.

Midas, China Hongxing and China XLX are also held. Midas is held by me for fundamentals and growth, while on a good chart. China Hongx should be trying for an uptrend soon. Strong support at 0.98 held quite well while the next strong support is at 0.86. I do not expect the 0.86 line to be broken. The resistance is at 1.16 which is quite strong but there is a strong gut feel this one will eventually break out of it due to several news, including a placement done at 1.18 recently. It is still a 50/50 thing now but I think it stands a good chance of an upside.

All eyes are on the fed meeting later today. Will it be a 25, 50 or 75bp cut? 25 is an expected rate and is already factored in. 50 will be a bonus but may cause a knee jerk reaction. 75 is unlikely, based on strong employment figures amongst other numbers that do not indicate any signs of a recession just yet.

I will do a post on some FAQs which I found to be quite useful, courtesy of la papillon’s blog, via bullythebear.blogspot.com.

Till then, have a good tuesday!

I have just produced a mixshow while my baby was at work. I am gonna give it to him to be played out loud at his workplace and hopefully when he is working hard and gets tired it will perk him and his colleagues up!

A mix of old and new pop remixes from the likes of Britney Spears, Rihanna, Sean Kingston, Gwen Stefani, and a few others. All my mixshows run for 1hr 10 mins thereabouts cause there is just how long a single music CD can handle. Thanks to my trusty 3 Pioneer CDJ 1000 MK2 and a DJM mixer with cool monitor speakers, I present to you my first mixshow in quite a few months!

PS: Here’s how DJ George Leong from Fabulous Sundays look like. Picture taken off his blog. He uses the Pioneer CDJs as well, seems like the common tool these days. In the past people like to use the Denon but I prefer the pioneer CDJ with its turntable feel when doing beat matching.

The retail malls are packed. Queues as long as the yellow river. Cash registers ringing non-stop. This season of Christmas shopping appears to have begun earlier, with consumers spending more. Terrible for me though, cause I am sooooo crowd adverse..

Nonetheless I have kicked off my routine Christmassy tunes right here beginning from the one from Johnny Mathis. If you do remember, this one is from the ST of Home Alone 2. Starring Macaulay Culkin (who looked sooo cute when he was young) never fails to bring on the mood and spirit for me. I remember we used to have this show on TV over and over again with its light-hearted feel to the whole season.

Over the next few weeks we’ll hear from Mariah Carey, Alvin and the chipmunks as well as something from Lonestar perhaps. Some did you knows for you. Did you know that the biggest Christmas single released was 50 million back in 1942? It was by Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. Those were the days..

For now, bask in the spirit of Christmas with me!

Many have approached me for advice on investment. I wrote an article a while back on it so do view back.

There are 2 main ways of doing analysis. Fundamental and technical analysis. Fundamental analysis studies the company and its management, fundamental, business etc. When you think of investing in a company, you ask questions like “What does the company do?. What are the risks? Who are the competitors? Who are on the management team and their credentials? Is their business sound and viable? Do you agree with their management style?” And you look at annual reports to confirm the above. An annual report is like the company’s report card. Most issue on a quarterly basis, summarising their results for the past quarter, half a year, and full financial year. For the purpose of this post, I will dwell more on technical analysis. This has been my area of research of late. Why? I found myself investing in fundamentally sound companies, buying at a low, aiming to sell at a high. What happens in the end? The price dips even lower. So much so for some counters I had to cut loss, for others I stuck onto it for so long the price went down so much it never recovered from the price I bought. What went wrong?

The idea behind all this is, while market conditions always change, human behavior NEVER changes. It hasn’t for the past few centuries (quoted by experts) and it never will. Hence, it is possible to anticipate (not predict, there is a difference) when happens in the future. In technical analysis, it is believed that prices precedes news. ie, price is already factored in before news comes out. Remember analysis warning of market corrections, etc? These are done via technical analysis. Which is more accurate? FA or TA? These are apples and oranges we are talking about so we should not compare. I have turned hybrid, integrating FA to pick out good companies, and using TA to time the market to a certain extent. You cannot time it perfectly, no one can. If we could, everyone will just sit at home and trade and we all do not need our jobs anymore. Simple. The good side of FA? You do not have to actively monitor price movements. You ride through volatility knowing you have a good company on hand. For TA, you need to actively monitor and there are reasons for this which I will go into in the next post.

TA is a social science. The study of human behavior and how they react to market movements. So what happens today, you can anticipate tomorrow. It is NOT guaranteed though ,but we have risk management techniques used to hedge against sudden market sentiment change.

In TA, we rely a lot on indicators. These are lines,  graphs, charts, etc, to tell us a story of what is happening. What goes up must come down. Everyone knows that. It is the same for the stock market. There are cycles of uptrends, downtrends, consolidation and accumulation. Uptrends and downtrends are obvious. Consolidation, in simple terms refer to a period where the price remains flat. The buyers and sellers tussle and the price goes nowhere. Generally, during consolidation, there are more sellers than buyers. It is also possible traders are ‘shorting’ the counter although this is more common during downtrends. The reverse is accumulation.

So what is shorting? Shorting is the process of selling a stock you do not own.  Sounds weird? Yes it can be done but not encouraged. The whole idea is, if you expect the price to dip, you sell in the morning in the hope of buying back at a cheaper price. Most people buy a stock first before selling. This is known as a ‘long’ position. Short selling is highly risky due to the very short time where you have to cover your positions and is not recommended for noobs.

So, each cycle typically lasts a couple months or so. The cycles do have always have to go in order. ie it does not need to accumulate before an uptrend begins.

More theory to come in future posts. If you have any questions, drop me a comment and I will try to get into it.   I am still however very green in TA so bear with me. Here is an introduction to what I look out for:

Some of the indicators I use are MACD, MA, RSI etc. MACD stands for moving average converge/diverge(divergence). It is a very important indicator but it relies a lot on price. The lines are defined by the moving average lines (26d – 12d).  Simply, when the blue line cuts below the red, a sell call is triggered. When a blue line crosses above the red, a buy call is done. The further the 2 lines are apart, the stronger the trend. When the meet, cycles change. However price alone is not a good indicator. It is often delayed as it charts the history only. Volume is an important factor, as it confirms a trend.  Some of the lines that are important include the very basic support and resistance lines. I urge you to research more on this on your own. In a gist, a support line is formed when buyers outnumber sellers. Hence the price stops falling. A resistance is when there are more sellers than buyers, hence the price fails to ‘break out’ to new highs. How are all these lines possible? Human behavior.

So when you hear analysts say things like “STI is nearing support” this is what it is referring to. Generally if the support is strong enough to hold, the price should not dip further and a rebound is possible. Same goes for resistance. Some chart patterns hover between 2 lines and this is sort of a range trade phase going on. People buying and selling at resistance. Hence it fails to break support nor breakout through the resistance.

(Click to enlarge)

The bar charts that you see (red and green bars) are extremely important. It indicates when a trough is bottoming out. Look at the cycles of buy and sell calls. You see a certain pattern. Hence, you can anticipate where you are at the moment on the charts. I am using FerroChina as an example as the chart is less complicated. .As of today, you can see it has begun on an uptrend. However what did happen was, the price ended lower than it’s opening. What you got to note is, the price did gap higher, and closed at around previous day’s high. You will see a black candle stick for the day. Candlesticks are VERY important. Different formations tell a different tale and can anticipate the next day’s activity. So collectively you consider what the  various indicators tell you and come to a conclusion. A single indicator is not enough to tell the whole story. There are many more indicators but these are some of the ones I use. I will go into candle sticks at a later time. Still struggling with it. A lot of practice needed!

Oh yes, one last indicator. The RSI. Tells you nothing much other than if the counter is in oversold or overbought position. Anything above 70 is overbought. Below  30 is oversold. Tendency is that when the counter is oversold profit taking will occur. When it is oversold, generally it should gap up as people cover back their positions. However you must remember to look at indicators collectively, not just 1 of it. You cannot know the whole story from a book on just 1 chapter right? Same goes for technical analysis.  There is a heck lot more of course which I will blog about in time to come. This one is an introduction to how TA works in a nutshell . How one can use charts to determine if it is time to sell, or buy. For TA, stop losses are extremely important. This is the technique I employ to protect my capital and profits:

Say I want to buy stock A. It is trading at $1 now. I want to buy 100 lots. That means, 100,000 shares. So the total purchase price is $100,000. There is a good chance that I do not have that cash of course, so I go on contra. When you buy a stock today, you do not pay today. You pay T+3 days later. T is today, so the trade is due in 3 days. If you have not sold it off by market close, on D day which is the 4th day, payment is due. If you do not pay, the remisier will force sell your shares at a price lower than the market rate (so that there is definitely a buyer). If you are on good terms with your broker, he may give you T+5. If you are VERY good, maybe T+7 but this is rare. You are buying something with money you do not have so you have very few days to sell and take profit. You can see from my charts, this is highly unlikely.. To maximise on a trend you need a couple months. So in this case people will leverage. If I own 10 lots, and the price goes up by 1c, it only moves up so much.  But when you talk bout 100 lots, 1 cent increase is significant. This is a form of leveraging. There are other tools such as margin  trading that work on leverage. My opinion is, leverage is a double edged sword. Live by the sword, die by it.  You can profit big, you can also lose big if you are not careful. I prefer to be able to buy and hold.

So back to the above scenario. $1 stock, I buy 10 lots instead.  That is 10k. A lot of money. But I issue a stop loss at say, $0.97. Which means, if I buy at $1 and it falls to 0.97, I made a wrong call. So I quickly exit. I lose 3 cents, which works out to me $300 bucks excluding transaction fees. That is more manageable than losing the entire 10k of course.  So I have ‘insurance’ against wrong calls. So let’s say I made the right call, the price climbs.. towards $1.1. I create a trailing loss, of say 4 cents. What this means is, if from $1.1 it falls to $1.06, I sell to protect my profits. If it continues to climb, I let it climb. If it hits $1.15, same story. If it falls back to $1.1 I sell. So the trailing stop loss moves with the price. I let the price go for as long as it is on the uptrend, or till my trailing loss is hit, maybe due to sudden bad market sentiment. So what do I have? I limit my possible losses to $300 initially. The worst case scenario. If I did a good call and the cycle goes on for a month or so, and it hits my target price of say $1.4 and I see the cycle changing to downtrend, I sell. I net a 40c profit per lot. This translates to $400 a lot, and with 10 lots I would have profited $4000.

Minimise losses, maximise gains. This is VERY important to remember. I made the mistake of holding onto counters that bleed. Not only did it bleed, it bled dry. Eventually I had to let go at a huge loss. Wrong method.

In summary, I do not intend to be a full time trader. I cannot afford the time as I have  a full time job. The risk is, if I am not quick enough and I miss my stop loss, I might be in trouble. The other day I made one mistake. The price hit my stop loss but I failed to look carefully. At the moment I sold, it was on an uptrend.  The counter was Tat Hong. I bought at $3.16. Stop loss at $3. I saw $3 and I sold but it was on a rebound from a lower gap. The counter eventually rebounded to close back at $3.16. So I took a loss of 16c. Mistake, but what is important is to learn from one and not make the same mistake over and over.  Most noobs make lots of mistakes initially but through my blog, I hope many of you will be able to benefit from what I have learnt, so that you do not make the same mistake.  As long as everyone invests wisely and makes profits instead of losses, I will be happy

More to come next round! I gota get back to doing some research on the counters I am vested on. Till next time, huat ah!

I will make this quick cause I am quite busy monitoring stuff and doing work.

The US market rallied yesterday after Bush announced plans to handle the subprime crisis. He will make his announcement later today. Technically, it appears the DJIA seems to done with consolidation. Poised for another surge.

Back in Singapore, stocks also rallied yesterday, mirroring the HSI. Following the rally in US, the STI is rallying today and has breached the very important resistance level, passing 3600 now. Yesterday’s volume was over 2 billion shares changing hands which suggests funds are coming back in. This also confirms a streak of rallying. If the rally today holds, we should be seeing 3750 sometime soon.

 I have changed my investment technique to a short term (1-2 months) plan. Using charts, I spotted initial uptrends in China XLX, UOL, Midas, yangzijiang, China Hongx. Vested at the moment and monitoring closely. I am maintaining around a 4-5 bid trailing loss to protect profit in case market conditions sour suddenly. Stop losses are mostly 2-3 bids below purchase price. At the moment I still maintain a bearish long term view. Will re-assess conditions again. As Goola says, there is always a sucker’s rally before a bear market. It can come very quickly and spares no one and spares nothing. Fund managers are known to trap retail investors at the top so charts to me are very important.

I am also beginning to study TA intensively and so far my analysis has been rather accurate thus far. Will be working to incorporate TA and FA together in the next year. Hopefully I will be better at it and make more gains, even in a bear market. Hopefully!

Have you ever wondered how it will be like if you woke up one day and you lost your voice?

Honestly, it is not impossible. I am no doctor, I just know a few things. There is a condition known as spasmodic dysphonia. Not many people know about it but generally, the vocal muscles that control the chords (which vibrate and hence you get sound) develop spasms. Treatment is but temporary usually. So it is very possible to wake up one morning to find your voice is no longer as it used to be.

Yesterday I received a package from a courier. We arranged to meet at my office lobby. I called him to inform him I was on the way down but did not get an answer on the mobile. Later I realised, he is both deaf and dumb. There and then I did not know how to react actually. I have this thing for deaf/dumb people. The sense of hearing alerts us of danger. Eg the horn from a car. Through our voice we can call for help, express oneself, etc. Deaf and dumb people can do neither. Their best buddy perhaps, is their mobile phone. If they need any assistance, they will have to send a text message. How soon will help arrive? How do they call the police if needed, in an emergency if there is no one around? There are some who are deaf but not dumb. They can lip read and respond accordingly through speech, just that it may be a little incoherent cause they cannot hear how it sounds like. There are many others who are both deaf and dumb through birh defects perhaps. After all the ear nose and throat are interconnected.  It is during such times that reminds me of how lucky I am to have all 5 senses. Some say I have a 6th sense but regardless of it all, I believe we should all be thankful for what we have, cause just round the corner you’ll find someone whom you’ll see what it will be like if what we have was taken away from us.

It is common knowledge to all what a drama mama queen you are whining on and off. You screwed and made use of pepople around me, saying one thing to one but to another you tell a different tale. I see through it all but I kept quiet. Till you began to screw with my dear. You want me to post out the entire chat log to show who started the quarrel? I can and I will if I want to. Go ahead, tell everyone how victimised you are and all. Go screw around anyone you want. But the last person you want to screw with is me.  You screw my dear, you screw with me. And when the day comes where I lose my patience, you will have no idea what I am capable of doing. Ask around. Everytime you are out, everytime you are in Play, you’ll be looking over your shoulder and wonder when Mark is gonna appear.

So don’t reinforce the fact that you’re more childish than you already are. There are many others born in 1987 who can stand up and speak for themselves instead of being a 2 headed snake. Cedric may be able to take shit from you but I can promise you I am no where near anything like him. My dear always apologises even when the fault doesn’t lie on him. However, this time round I see no good reason why he has to take this lying down. You don’t like the way things are? Deal with it. You’re sick and tired of blah blah blah? You aint the only one. Go ahead and do what you want with others but I’d highly recommend you don’t bring your nonsense into my arena. I’m only gonna say this once. Don’t fuck with me.

I was looking through my Outlook sent box to see the mails I have sent throughout. I have never deleted a single sent email so it goes all the way back to when Sillypore was first started and I began my first mail. At last count, I have sent 3239 emails! The really old ones don’t even have a date anymore… But it is probably sent in 2001, cause the next group which has dates are in 2002. 2001 is when sillypore.com was built.

There is a certain nostalgia when you look through old emails. The emails I used to send to my lecturers in Poly.. the long forgotten epals I used to have.. former colleagues and all. For those who remember, I did do a stint with Mediacorp radio’s 987fm (Perfect 10 987fm then). I partnered Daniel Ong (apparently after a big round about he is back on drive time, with another co-host) to co-produce Jive Drive.  I used to have to do lots of research on questions and answers (anyone remembers Ask Dan?) along with the joke of the day and other stuff which we packed into the 4hour show.

Perhaps over time I will share some good trivia along with nice jokes I had gathered back then. Here’s one from a really long time ago..  I am heading to the greenhouse @ Ritz Carlton for a feast later… yum yum!

 
Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime.

WHAT IS “IKEA”?

IKEA, the name of the worldwide home furnishings emporium, is an acronym. The founder was Ingvar Kamprad, accounting for the first two letters. And his family farm in Sweden was called Elmtaryd, by the village of Agunnaryd, providing the last two.

WHAT CAUSES EYESTRAIN DURING COMPUTER WORK?

Because the eyes work harder when viewing objects up close,

particularly on a computer monitor, it is the proximity of

the VDT screen to the eyes that causes eyestrain, not “radi-

ation” emitted from the screen. According to the American

Academy of Ophthalmology, using a computer or video display

terminal will not harm your eyes.

WHAT DOES THE WORD “KOALA” MEAN?

Koala means “no water” in Aborigine because it never drinks.

It gets all its liquid requirements from its diet of eucalyptus

leaves. Out of over 100 species of eucalyptus trees in Australia,

the koala feeds on only 12 of them, eating between one and two

pounds of leaves a day.

WHY IS HOUSEHOLD DUST GREY?

Grey household dust consists mostly of sloughed-off human

skin cells. Although humans are of different color, the

pigments are found below the layer that generates the outer

layer of dead skin. Dry skin is a translucent grey color,

and consequently, so is the dust. There is no other color

in it because the blood vessels are much deeper down and

they are not lost as the skin grows.

The two lines that connect your top lip to the bottom of

your nose are known as the philtrum.

Japanese bowing carries different meanings at different

angles.

- A bow at an angle of five degrees means “Good day”

(simple greeting).

- A bow at an angle of fifteen degrees is also a common

salutation, a bit more formal it means “Good morning.”

- A bow at an angle of thirty degrees is a respectful bow to

indicate appreciation for a kind gesture.

- A bow at a forty-five-degree angle is used to convey deep

respect or an apology.