Jan 2025 Investment Update

Happy Chinese New Year everyone!

3rd day of the new year and it seems like most are not back to work yet. Traffic is smooth throughout the day. For me, I have resumed my work, albeit in a slower manner.

Just to do a quick update for my recent investments which can basically be summed up in the following sentences:

Buy what, what drop. 

Sell what, what rise. 

1) BABA

I cut loss for this counter at 84.78 at the end of last year partly due to their drastic price cutting of Qwen. Have briefly talked about this here.

Then on the first day of CNY they released a new version of Qwen (Qwen 2.5-Max) which supposedly surpasses DeepSeek-V3, GPT-4o and Llama-3.1 in performance.

Share price immediately shot up. At this point of writing, BABA is trading at 101.92 pre-market.

What a difference a month makes. 

2) NVDA

Added this counter at 137.80 one week before CNY. Seeing some decent profits in the first two days.

On the third day, DeepSeek was released. NVDA share price went south. As of now it is still recovering from the twin pressures of Qwen and DeepSeek.

Talk about timing again. 

3) MIT

Added MIT at 2.19 on 24th Jan. Three days later unit price went south. Probably due to worries to their DC assets from DeepSeek release.

4) Venture

Around two weeks ago I identified five stocks as potential investment to reduce my REITs concentration. Subsequently after delving into the respective AR and latest business updates I whittled it down to 2 stocks of which Venture is one of them. 

The company has been doing share buyback recently at 12.98, 12.93, 12.95, 12.56, 12.66 and 12.81.

This caught my notice and I decided to pay closer attention to the price movement. At one point it went below 12.60 but I missed the opportunity. It shot up after that and I decided to add MIT instead (as above).

Subsequently the price dropped below 12.70 earlier this week and I added some  at 12.68 on 27th Jan. I feel this compares well and comfortably against the prices added upon by the company. If they feel those are fair values for them, this leaves me with sufficient margin of safety as well. 

5) In General

I have identified Venture and another counter to diversify away from REITs. However I ventured into Venture first partly because the share price of the other counter is stubbornly resolute and refused to drop to my TP.

Nevertheless I will continue to monitor both and prepare to add when opportunities arise.

Recently Powell has sung a different tune to Trump's order to reduce rates further. The latest signal from Fed was to hold the rates at status quo for now.

This prompted a big rise in the share price of local banks and drop in the price of local-listed REITs in general.

Overall effect on my portfolio is still a net positive. 

Local portfolio value stands at S$182,776.40

Some thoughts that came into mind with the present market situation. 

1. Should I take profit off my DBS and OCBC? The capital gains now are roughly equivalent to 16 to 20 years of dividends. This is an age old question that has come to haunt me again.

2. If the current unit prices of the local-listed REITs are the fair values assigned by the market in this climate of 4.25 to 4.50% interest rates, then these price points could form the basis of my TPs (+/-) moving forward.

Last but not least, Heng Ong Huat Ah!