At 30 years old, I had 6 years of investing under my belt.  But my returns was heading nowhere. One of the main reasons was that I was trying a lot of different things. So I told myself, its time not to mess around anymore and try one method that I feel goes best with my character. Then I doubled down on it. I lean towards investing for dividends. And what a friend said about respecting value makes sense.  So I doubled down on value investing with a focus on finding dividend paying companies.  I been doing that since then, and regular readers would know where to check how I am doing.  Why Investing with a Tilt Towards Dividends? Dividend investing has a lot of appeal, and I think the reason is that people likes to be validated that they are slowly getting a cash flow pa

You give some people whose job is to invest money, and by a lot of standards they are good at it.  Shockingly only 49% of their picks made money. Some of them was successful only 30% of the time.  At the end of these, almost non of them lost money. They still made a lot of money out of it.  I think this was the part of the article that caught my attention.  The main reason is that it is something that is not often explain in a book, or by course trainers, or in video how to navigate this problem.  A lot of the stocks that you come across will look like they are the best picks.  Some of these, you didn’t do the prospecting yourself. You followed someone you assessed as an astute investor (and correctly so by all measure), yet after 5 years, your results l

2019 started off very well as my portfolio recovered partially. Not in all but it has consoled my heart. Here are some of the updates.Asian Pay Television Trust I have a residual portfolio of 32,000 shares which I sold it earlier this year at $0.127. I know that it has recovered but I was looking at the statistics and I don't think there is any reason for it to go up. Thus, I sold it off and look for other opportunities.Sasseur REIT Looking at the statistics of Sasseur REIT and the recent drop in price, it has become attractive that I actually bought 60,000 shares at $0.64. Thus it is worth about $38,000. The reason is that it is trading at an attractive rate of 9.6% yield and it is also trading at the discount to its NAV. Currently, it is the highest yielding REIT which is still trading b

What an absolute nightmare it is for investors. The disastrous collapse of Asian Pay TV Trust unit price is something that I have never seen for a business trust. Since its IPO in 2013, the performance of APTT unit price is nothing short of shambolic. From IPO price of $0.97, APTT unit price suffered an incredible meltdown within six years as the unit price slumped to the current abysmal level of $0.13. In fact, investors never had a good sleep with this counter as APTT unit price never exceed the IPO price level after its much-hyped listing. Of course, die-hard fans of Asian Pay TV Trust would argue that this trust is one of the best yield counters in Singapore Exchange. In fact, over 43 cents per unit in distributions had been declared since IPO (including Q3 2018 distribution). But give

Most valuations' case study tends to focus on companies that are exhibiting positive growth rate in their earnings or cashflow over the next 5 years.They project the running cashflow rate by forecasting them over the next five years then discount them to the present value using a predetermined wacc rate.The alternative is to use the Gordon Growth Model to identify the company's terminal growth rate then have them discounted back over the present value using the same method.The terminal value of a company is a rough approximation of its future value at some date beyond which specific cash flows cannot be estimated.Example of a Gordon Growth Model using Terminal Growth RateIf you are a sell-side analyst working in a large corporation, it makes sense that you want to be covering stories that

Current Price on 28th Dec 2018 = S$0.335Yield = 8.77%  Price-to-book Ratio = 0.434Assets per unit = $2.138Debt per unit = $1.366 (including current liabilities and non-controlling interest)Gearing = 63.9%While reading and refamiliarising myself with HPH Trust, I realize that there is a substantial non-controlling interest appearing as equity in the balance sheet which unitholders don't own. Thus, it affected the price-to-book ratio which I have always been using to calculate so now I am including it as liabilities for ease of comparison for people like us. Here are the statistics.With 8.77%, it is yielding high although I think it is not high enough considering that it is a port trust rather than a real estate investment trust. Its price-to-book ratio is rerated to be 0.434 which mean

It has been a while since I write a blog here and I must admit that I am too busy with my own things to continue to analyze and keep up with my investments. Thus, I was very late in realizing that the market and therefore my portfolio has fallen by quite a lot which emotionally I was very sad.Moreover, I was hard hit by the sudden drop of Asian Pay Television Trust which has hit me really hard. Together with the broad-based correction of the market, the hard work that I have painstakingly built up, dividends and the profits were all returned back to the market. To think back, there were tell tale signs in the beginning but I have foolishly ignored them. Anyway, I have sold them, believing that it will not recover back to the previous levels based on current metrics.One thing that I ha

Time really flies these days when we are in our mid 30s, pegged by a combination of busy work and heavy loads of watching our children grow as each year past by.I wanted to wrap things up for the year given that I will be taking a holiday trip to Bali with my family for the next few days until Christmas, and wanted to do a reflection of my equity performance this year before I then wrap things up for 2018 on an overall scale. I received some good feedbacks last year on how I presented with my performance review, especially clearly positioning my winners and losers so I thought I’d continued with the same format for this year. Please bear with me as this will be a pretty long post.Overall Market ThoughtsThis was a tough and rough year for investors because this was supposed to b

In the last post, we talked about enterprise value and how you could use it to avoid making potentially loss making investments in dividend plays which were unsustainable. You can check it out here: What is enterprise value and how can it help you avoid losing money? [Case Study: Asian Pay TV] Another company which debuted to great fanfare but has languished over the last few years has been Hutchinson Port Trust. Digging deeper A typical characteristic of companies with high debt load are that they are extremely capital intensive in nature and require continual investment. This makes the dividend vulnerable in the case of Industry downturn Increase in CAPEX expenditures Increase in interest rates If management decides to pay down existing debt CAPEX expenditures (also known as capital ex

Here are some of the most popular articles that have appeared on The Motley Fool Singapore’s website for the month. Why Did First Real Estate Investment Trust’s Unit Price Plunge Yesterday? Units in First Real Estate Investment Trust (SGX: AW9U) have been ailing in the past week. As a quick background, First REIT owns 20 properties — mostly healthcare-related —in Indonesia, Singapore and South Korea. On 19 November, the REIT’s unit price tumbled more than 7%. What could be the reason behind the sudden fall? Jeremy Chia finds out more in his article. (Post-publication note: As an update to the market, on 21 November, the REIT’s manager announced that it is unaware of “any material information which has not previously been announced or otherwise made known in the public domain

Fear is rampant in the stock market right now. Investors have taken it on the chin but it is not the time to give up. Singapore’s Straits Times Index (SGX: ^STI) peaked in early May this year and proceeded to fall past the dreaded 10% mark in less than two months to enter correction territory. Today, more than six months after this year’s high, the STI is still down by around 16%. As the downturn drags on, some investors are beginning to feel the strain. In some ways, fear has given way to exhaustion. After all, it’s been a tough year for any investor to eke out any sort of gain. Consider these statistics: Less than a quarter of the 30 companies that make up the Straits Times Index are showing positive returns for 2018. The average year-to-date return of a blue-chip stock is negati

Will gold price ever return to its crazy high form? The recent meltdown of Asian Pay TV Trust (APTT) share price must have depressed many investors. Indeed, the Straits Times Index (STI), as a whole, had been performing poorly in 2018. Wealth builders who had ignored the wisdom of diversifying their portfolio in different assets are paying a heavy price now. Should stock investors run for their lives and shift their attention to gold instead? Recent stock market corrections do not represent a full-blown crisis. But it does not reflect a signal for investors to enter the stock market either. Wealth builders should heed the warning and start insulating their portfolios against the risks unfolding in the market. You certainly don’t want to be caught with your pants down when there is a viol

To say that this has been a tough year for investment is an understatement.Investing, as a general form of growing your wealth is so damn tough that for one not to be losing money is sometimes already seen as a form of success.I can totally relate why many people avoided them like a plague because contrary to many popular beliefs, it can jolly well diminish your money.Imagine yourself being invested in Asian Pay TV Trust at the start of the year, having intrigued by its stuttering share price and a high dividend payout.You might have thought the dividends they pay out is unsustainable hence you made a decision to project them conservatively at the fcf you think they can give out.When APTT announces their recent results, the management is even more conservative than you are and slashed thei

Call it sheer madness or whatsoever. Within the span of two days, Asian Pay Television Trust (APTT) share price plunged by nearly 50%. Investors with weaker hearts might have suffered serious heart attacks watching in horror at the meltdown of Asian Pay Television (APTT) share price. After all, you don’t often get to see value of business trusts being eroded by so much in a matter of days. Well, that’s investing in SGX stocks for you. In my previous article, Asian Pay Television Trust dances with the wolves, I wrote that investors should “hope for the best but expect the worst”. I was also bearish on this counter as I was not convinced that the management had the ability to turn around the trust. My view was that the unit price would come under further pressure. Recent Asian Pay Te

I am writing this dividend update quarterly in an attempt to compile my quarterly dividend performance for the year. With a rising cost of living under the belt, in particular with the two kids in tow and hence require some bits of maintenance spend to keep hold, it can be particularly stressful to keep up with the expenses or cash outflow. Many times, we are dependent on our sole income which comes from our source of salary which we received monthly. While these may be the norms in the beginning, it is not healthy to be overly dependent on it over long periods of time as it may anytime snap behind your back. This is the reason why all of us need to think ways to grow our side income while we can so that we may unravel opportunities that can supplement our monthly income fro

APTT's unit price plunged by about 50% today, closing at 16 cents a unit. Mr. Market was probably shocked by APTT's massive reduction in DPU to 1.2 cents a year. I was surprised by the decision too. However, I also applaud APTT for having the... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Asian Pay Television TrustSGX: S7OU0.16 SGD −0.16 (49.21%)With this type of drop of 49% in one day; how does margin calls work for this scenario?Forced selling?

I always had one eye on Asian Pay Television Trust (APTT). So did some of my friends. It is the ultimate Financial Independence Porn Stock. Why is this so? To find out how much you need for financial security, or financial independence or retirement, you can read my article here to determine your number. From the article we get the following formula: Wealth Required for FS/FI/RET =  Annual Expense / Rate of Return of Your Wealth Machine(s) to Generate Cash Flows for FS/FI/RET APTT pays a quarterly dividend and the last guided dividend was $0.01625. Annualized the dividend is $0.065. The price chart above shows the current share price to be at $0.315. Dividing the dividend per share by the share price we arrived at a dividend yield of 20.6%. That is a whopping dividend yield! Now acco