Stock Screening Results - Mar 2019

With the recent cash from the sale of my M1 shares, I have to look for other dividend-paying stocks as replacement(s) to at least maintain and hopefully increase my portfolio yield.

So I turned to my best friend for help. Stock screeners.

Usually I used the StockFacts screener from SGX. However for this time I also tried Yahoo Finance screener for curiosity sake.

The criteria I set for the screen are as follows:

P/E Ratio: < 20

One of the most fundamental of valuation screeners. It is more meaningful if the PER is compared among companies in the same industry.

However in this case I usually set it to 20 as a rudimentary guard against overpaying.

Net Profit Margin: At least 10%

10% is the minimum margin in my opinion, for a company's sustainability.

Debt to Equity Ratio: < 50%

Obviously gearing is one of the most important metrics in terms of risk management. 50% is the most I can accept unless there are very good reasons for the high gearing.

Price to Book Value: < 1

I do not like to overpay for a stock. However having said that I have done it on a number of occasions usually due to a combination of other factors which paint an overall rosy picture of the stock. 

Dividend Yield: At least 5%

Ideally 5% is the minimum for my dividend stocks which is not too high honestly.

As you can see, the criteria I used are geared towards screening of income stocks suitable for my income portfolio. Not so much on growth or other value stocks.

Interestingly the result from Yahoo Finance screener is almost identical to that of SGX StockFacts screener except that the former includes one more counter in the screening result - Metro Holdings Ltd.

Here are the results.

                                                                         

Another interesting observation is that my previous screenings say 1 - 2 years back, almost always yield a 2 page long results.

However this time only 9 counters appear from the StockFacts screening.

Is the market worse or better than before? Or are most stocks overpriced now?

I think apart from the surface results from the screening, we can also delve deeper and we will be able to get a feel on the current market conditions.

Back to the screening results, I will do more due diligence into 1) Frasers Commercial Trust and 2) Sasseur REIT.

Goodbye to M1

I knew my relationship as an investor with M1 has came to an end when I saw a huge jump in my bank account yesterday.

True enough, it is the sum from my acceptance of Konnectivity's offer.

In all I made a small net profit of 4.9%. Good enough for me considering I was staring at huge paper loss at some point in time.

On the bright side I'm still walking on the sunshine with M1 for my mobile and broadband.

All the best to M1 for their new ventures which I had and still have high hopes for.

Next step for me is to redeploy the sum of money to another yield-accretive counter.

SGX Securities Borrowing and Lending Programme

It seems like a long time since I signed up for SGX securities borrowing and lending programme (SBL).

In fact I have forgotten about this until today when I realised $4.94 was credited to my bank account.

Upon checking my CDP statement, I found out that 11,000 of my M1 shares were borrowed (on loan) for 2 days last month.

In the probably 2 years since I signed up, this is the first time my shares got borrowed.. Haha

And of all shares, M1? This is some logic that I don't understand. Perhaps this is why I remained as an average retail investor.

As I can't find any formula online on the expected returns for borrowed securities, I decided to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation myself.

Calculations

No. of Shares On Loan: 11,000

Closing Price of Share While On Loan: $2.05 & $2.06

No. of Days On Loan: 2

Returns: 4% (this information is available online)

11,000 shares x $2.05 × 4% / 365 days x 2 days = $4.94

Please feel free to correct me if this formula is incorrect.

It's nice to have some additional lunch money sometimes.

Till next time.

Feb 2019 Portfolio Update

February 2019

Portfolio Value after market close: S$123,077.32

Purchases: Japfa @ 10,000 shares

Sold: None

Comment:

If price is right this will be a contra trade. If not I intend to pick it up for the potential capital gain.

Japfa just released a good set of results for FY18. It's impressive I must say though the gearing remains high.

Dividends:

RHT @ $7,520 (Special dividend)
MNACT @ $77.08
CCT @ $176.80
Suntec @ $103.60
ESR @ $67.28

Also subscribed to DRP for my Mapletree Logistics Trust dividend.

Yoogane - A Curious Tale of the Missing Tteokbokki and Potato Slice

Two days ago my wife and I went to the Yoogane outlet at Nex for dinner.

We made use of the 50% discount for reservation via eatigo + our $10 voucher from eatigo for this meal.

I guess the dinner crowd is not in yet or simply people are not patronising because including us, only about 5 tables were occupied.

All I can say is going to this place was a wrong choice.

Picture in menu

In reality

We ordered a 1 - 2 pax Charcoal Fire Chicken Galbi set which costs $20.90 and added a rice and noodles as sides.

After the dish arrived we were really surprised. It looks nothing like the picture in the menu.

The fact that there is only one piece of yellow and green bell pepper is not an issue since we don't eat that anyway.

But after we overcame our initial surprise we realised the tteokbokkis and potato slices shown in the menu are missing in our dish.

So I enquired with the waitress who was very helpful as she took a ladle and began digging into our dish seemingly to look for the ingredients.

Finally after a few rounds of digging, she seems satisfied that we were telling the truth.

And in what seems like an afterthought, she told us that the picture in the menu is for 5 - 6 pax and the portion for one person is 1 - 2 tteokbokki and potato slice each.

(we were thinking if that's the case, isn't that blatantly trying to mislead customers by placing the 5 - 6 pax portion picture in the 1 - 2 pax menu page?) 

(i guess picture is really for illustration only but still...)

Anyway I told her okay but that still doesn't explain the missing items. Thankfully she agreed on that and told us she will get the kitchen to prepare the missing items and give us 'MORE' pieces. Yeah!

Our missing items finally came after 10 min.

It is a grand total of 2 pcs of tteokbokki and 2 pcs of potato slices.

Yeah we finally got our missing tteokbokki and potato.

But wait. Didn't the waitress said she will give us more? So if 'more' means 2 pcs of tteokbokki and 2 pcs of potato slices, what does it means by 'normal' portion?

We didn't want to think too much so we hurriedly finish our food and went off.

The surprise doesn't ends here.

When we made payment at the counter, we found out that our order for the noodle side dish was taken wrongly.

Anyway since they said the price for the 2 noodles is the same we leave at that because my annual quota for MSG has been exceeded after eating at Yoogane.

We have to get some drinks. At another place. Anywhere but Yoogane.

In summary

Food: 5/10
Service: 5/10
Price: 2/10

Would I go back again? Probably not.

I can't imagine paying $20.90 for that kind of food portion and I can't accept dishonest / misleading practices.

On a side note, if you wish to register for eatigo and get the voucher, you can refer to my post here.

New Year, New Car

Hello everyone. It's a new year again.

Here's wishing everyone and your loved ones a Happy Lunar New Year!

Just a quick update for this week.

Over the weekend wifey, baby M and I went to the show room to check out some latest car models as my current COE is expiring next month.

On hind sight I should have started my car shopping earlier due to a reason which I will give below.

Prior to the show room visit, I have narrowed down my choices to two models:

1) Kia Cerato
2) A certain European brand starting with 'S'

Taking option 1 would mean less financial obligations and easier on the wallet for me. I also do not have to touch my investment portfolio.

Taking option 2 would likely involves me drawing down a certain percentage from my investments which would translate to lesser passive income for me from this year onwards and this is something I am very reluctant to do.

However the allure of driving a conti car for the first time is the reason why it is among my options in the first place.

Anyway my original intention was just to take a look, get a package price and decide later. However as we sat down with the SE for the discussion on the price and 'freebies' package, he was able to meet all my requests.

So in the end I decided to book the vehicle with him on the spot.

And my impending new ride is....

2019 Kia Cerato EX
(rims are of another design from this pic)

I am glad I chose the easier on the wallet option. In this way my investment portfolio remains intact, only downside is that I will have lesser cash for deployment.

Pros:

Best bang for buck car in the market now in my opinion
Nice design for both exterior and interior
Easy on the wallet

Cons:

Lead time of 3 months and above
Not so nice rims for the EX variant
(Probably will change them after getting my ride like what I did for my current one.. Haha)

And now it's a waiting game for the COE as I chose the 6 bids non-guarantee COE.

Review of InvestingNote

Was having my shower just now and my thoughts suddenly veered towards the investment journey I have taken so far.

It all started in 1996, 97. I was like a headless fly buying stocks based on volume and monitoring prices on the teletext. Made some money and after that I took a rather long hiatus before restarting my investment journey some years back.

Since restarted I frequent the Stocks, Shares and Indices (SSI) forum in HWZ.

I remember there was once I created a thread about what is causing the price of a stock to move and I suggested could one of the factors be algorithm trading.

Then I kena 'suanned' by this kid (I call him kid because he is in university and relative to my age) who asked me whether the price of pork in markets is controlled by algorithm also.

That was some unconstructive exchange of views in my opinion.

Anyway I still browse the forum for information and the diverse views.

But the title of this post is about my review of InvestingNote. How does that link up?

I was thinking I have written reviews of companies and my portfolio. So I thought why not write a quick personal review on InvestingNote, which is one of the platforms I frequent daily.

InvestingNote is now one of my daily must-go apps for keeping up with the news and on-goings in the financial world.

I enjoy the diverse views and news report shared among the members unselfishly.

Members are what make a forum.

People like Arsenal, Leslie_Shaffer, Hayashi8, SGNews, etc share news reports everyday.

People like Spinning_Top, uncle178, Grandpa Lemon, Sporeshare, opy, Hachiko, Master_GongJiaowei, CoryLogics, lynlynnakamori, jebus, luxcan, layers are some whose posts I enjoyed.

There are many more. I can't state all.

Functionality-wise, I find the app pretty intuitive. It is easy to toggle around. User experience is great.

Reading the posts, writing one, and making an estimate is very easy. If one can use Facebook and online forums, one would have no problem using InvestingNote.

Number and type of functions at this point of writing is fine in my opinion.

All in all it's a good job done by the InvestingNote team. I hope they can ride on the good work so far, continue to innovate and most important keep it free for members to interact.

Lastly I remember in the early days we were able to use our points to redeem rewards. Is that function still available?

Did not really follow this rewards thingy so any enlightenment would be appreciated. Haha.

P.s. This is neither a sponsored post nor a plp post hor..

Wow can't believe I took an hour to write this post..

Cheers and good night everyone.