Investment Moats Weekly Reads 29 Jan
Here are this week’s reads
Money Management, Portfolio Management
- 5 Traits of highly successful sales people (Inc.)
- The advantages of day trading (ppearlman)
- 20 Common Sense Investing Rules (Reformed Broker)
Technical Analysis, Cycles and Sentiments
- 5 Indicators that shows it may be a Risk On market (Ivanhoff)
Dividend Investing
- Should you pay out dividends or retain cash? How does it affect ROE? (Frankly Speaking)
- The case against using simple matrix such as dividend yield and buybacks (Aleph)
Personal Finance, Budgeting
- The megatrend seem to indicate fee based independent advisors over brokerage (WSJ)
- How an investor will rationalize his cancer treatment alternatives (Asset Builder)
General Trends, Individual Stocks
- Explanation what is LTE-Advance (Gigaom)
- Why banks and telecoms must merge (strategy+business)
- The economics of iPublishing (Atlantic)
- How France’s “Free” cell phones disrupted the market (Fast Company)
- Why Kodak went bankrupt (MarketWatch)
Don’t miss the best articles of Investment Moats (iMoat) sponsored by TradeStation
First REIT Full Year 2011 Results Stagnating
First REIT this evening announced their 4th quarter and full year 2011 results. Here are some take-aways
- Net property income is climbing gradually: 13.0 mil > 13.1 > 13.47 > 13.77
- Rental Income climbed in all regions, not just in Indonesia but also for their Singapore and Korea properties
- Larger distribution this quarter similar to that of 3rd quarter, as part of the sale of Adam Road property. Total distribution investors will enjoy is 1.93 cents.
- This years distribution is 7.01 cents. At 77 cents that is 9.01% yield this year.
- Assets continue to increase in fair value.
- Debt to property is 16%
- Net Debt to Asset is only 9%
- Indonesian property values have been rising compare against Singapore properties which are not doing that well.
- Korea Hospital is freehold. Based on rental yield it seems the yield is only 4.9% which is rather low. Freehold is great but I don’t remember the property yield to be this low.
- First REIT have first rights of refusal to Lippo Karawaci’s hospital pipeline. On top of this there is a slew of government measures aimed at making healthcare more affordable to Singaporeans. All these presents opportunity to First REIT
- NAV of 80.5 cents > current share price of 77 cents
Excluding the special dividends from the sale of Adam Road, the distribution did not grow much. I wonder whether that will be a trend. There are rental escalation build into it so we would have expected more.
Then again I may be over analyzing since they sold Adam Road and added a Korea Hospital yet was able to maintain the rental distribution.
Will be expecting much dividends as this is currently my largest holding.
I run a free Singapore Dividend Stock Tracker . It contains Singapore’s top dividend stocks both blue chip and high yield stock that are great for high yield investing. Do follow my Dividend Stock Tracker which is updated nightly here.
Apple becoming a mega important stock! Can anyone stop them?? $AAPL $GOOG
This morning as I was scanning through my feeds, I have been flooded by some startling numbers from Apple. Basically it was the second most profitable quarter for any company, trailing only Exxon Mobil’s record quarter in 2008 due to the oil price surge.
Now the crazy thing about Apple is that it started off the quarter as a megacap, juggling position with Exxon Mobil as the largest stock in the world by market capitalization. The amazing thing is that its growth rate may still be able to accelerate.
The recent initiatives to move into textbooks on iBook shows that they are building a platform ecosystems that transcends technology into a way of life.
The obnoxious thing is that it’s a closed ecosystem that Google does not want it to be.
As one tech commentator Gina Trapani says, “I prefer Google’s values over their products, and Apple’s products over their values. When either are compromised, we should worry”
Here are some crazy things about Apple
Crazy Growth Rate
- (splatf)
Basically the quarter was enhance greatly by a climbed in iPhone 4S. It vindicates the last poor quarter that people are really waiting for iPhone 5.
-(ReadWriteWeb)
More growth figures. For a megacap that is a crazy growth rate. The game has changed really, they are building an ecosystem that is mixing and meshing and giving you the iLifestyle that will just keep feeding itself! Its closed but it works!
Crazy amount of cash!
Now we know that tech companies based on intellectual properties have lots of cash. Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco have shit loads of it.
- (asymco)
Well, Apple added 38 billion out of their total 97 billion last year! How much is 97 billion? Enough to buy 474 of the S&P500 companies! Only 52 other stocks worldwide cannot be bought by that cash holding!
Conclusion
What I would really like to tap your brains is given this closed and integrated platform/network/ecosystem that feeds itself, how can the rest stop it?
89 year old Joe Granville predicts 4000pts Dow fall in 2 weeks
This is probably the most bearish call I heard in a long time. For someone that experience to go against the market I hope he is right because he sees this rally ending soon and we may get to validate his call very soon
I realize how important frugal is this Chinese New Year
Its Chinese New Year I wish to firstly wish all my readers Gong Xi Fa Chai, Shen Ti Jian Kang, Shi Shi Xun Li!
This year is the year of the dragon. Typically this seems like a good thing since Dragon usually symbolizes prosperity and wealth. Not so. Judging by most accounts, this earth dragon year will be very challenging.
For those born in the year of the monkey this is an average year, and best not to invest in the stock market (!!!)
The worse thing is that health would be bad this year for most.
During Chinese New Year, we usually went house visiting and it’s a time to catch up with friends and family that you seldom meet.
I heard some really good experience, I heard some bad ones.
Most of all being frugal has a lot of upside. One of my uncle got retired in his 40s and have been living frugally for 20 years and was able to make ends meet. My other uncle did well in his career, owns a semi-detached yet remain very sound and frugal in his every day living. It pains me to find out another of my uncle struggling to stop working at an age of 60+ because they are still needing money day to day.
Living a minimalistic, de-cluttered lifestyle and having a frugal mindset about how you plan and spend money can not just enable your money to work better for you, makes you focus on what really matters and most of all give you confidence in life.
