The Most Successful Dividend Investors of all time

Dividend investing is as sexy as watching paint dry on the wall. Defining an entry criteria that selects quality dividend stocks with rising dividends over time and then patiently reinvesting these dividends while sitting on your hands is not exciting. While active traders have a plethora of hedge fund managers on the covers of Forbes magazine there are not many well-publicized successful dividend investors. Even value investing has its own superstars – Ben Graham and Warren Buffett. I did some research and uncovered...

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Most valuations (even good ones) are wrong

Now this can be shocking to you if you spend a lot of time arriving at that magical number (intrinsic value) that helps you ascertain whether you must buy a stock or not. Damodaran talks about three kinds of errors that cause most valuations – even the ones “meticulously” calculated – to go wrong: Estimation error…that occurs while converting raw information into forecasts. Firm-specific uncertainty…as the firm may do much better or worse than you expected it to perform, resulting in earnings and cash flows to be quite different from your estimates. Macro...

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Pay for Retirement with a Cup of Coffee and an Egg McMuffin

Pay for Retirement with a Cup of Coffee and an Egg McMuffin$3 a Day Can Add Up to a Serious Nest EggBy Joshua KennonHow many times have you swung by McDonalds on your way to work for a cup of coffee and an Egg McMuffin? It may seem like small change, but the $3 a day it is costing you to buy your breakfast can fund your retirement. Don't believe it? Let's take a look at the numbers.The stock market has historically averaged a return of around twelve percent. If you began investing $3 a day at twenty five years old and earned the same rate of return,...

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Looking at Inari to understand Insas(Revised)

Anyone who puts in money in Insas over the last 4 - 5 months would have made decent sum - increase from RM0.50 to now RM0.94, which coincidentally was about the period which I wrote about the company. In this particular article, I wanted to know what makes the sudden rise in the stock price whereas it has been in trading in the RM0.40 to RM0.60 for a long time.I wanted to know what type of character are behind the owners. As in my previous article,...

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Why Padini is the leading Malaysian fashion retailer

There is no doubt that I like retail business and I like the leading player best. Hence there is no doubt that I have bought and sold some of them - like in buying into Bonia and Wing Tai. The thing about retailing business is that I personally felt that Malaysia is doing extremely well. I in fact like Malaysian retailing than Singapore or Bangkok or Jakarta for that matter. In Asia, besides Hong Kong, there has been some positive work done by Malaysian...

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Credit Card Interest Rates:What you need to know

Credit cards allow you to pay for everything you need: basic necessities like food, school materials, and gas. You don’t even have to carry money around. Just a piece of plastic and you’re all set. You can use it to pay not just for anything, but to almost anywhere in the world through online shopping. There are some credit card owners, however, who apply for credit cards so they can buy big purchase-items such as a van, or maybe a trip to Europe, or just about any other thing that usually takes the average consumer months to save...

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Credit Card Interest Rates: What You Need to Know

Credit cards allow you to pay for everything you need: basic necessities like food, school materials, and gas. You don’t even have to carry money around. Just a piece of plastic and you’re all set. You can use it to pay not just for anything, but to almost anywhere in the world through online shopping. There are some credit card owners, however, who apply for credit cards so they can buy big purchase-items such as a van, or maybe a trip to Europe, or just about any other thing that usually takes the average consumer months to save...

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Budget 2014: Up to 61% tax incentives for youths through PRS

Now, I know Budget 2014 is almost 2 weeks ago but I am surprised no one really puts this into perspective. In fact, many are unaware of this very fact because GST and removal of sugar subsidy stole the limelight. I am referring to the RM 500 one off incentive (read: almost like cold hard cash) to Private Retirement Scheme  (PRS) contributors with minimum cumulative investment of RM 1,000 - to be implemented from Jan 2014 onwards for a period of five years. Let me explain. If you are in the mid to late twenties, chances...

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The Value of Patience

Price-value gapTheoretically, with higher trading volumes, the price-value gap should narrowdue to better price discovery.   Yet, in reality, this is not the case. The increase in trading activity actually widen the price-value gap; often increasing the noise in the system and leading to spikes in volatility that we see often in the stock market. An explanation, which is not surprising, is the majority of market participants are speculators and not investors.  Rather than narrowing the price-value gap through...

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Four Steps to Prepare for a Crash

But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that Time’s cover is wildly bullish and did send a legitimate bear signal to the world. Or maybe tapering will sink stocks. What would be the proper course of action for investors in a bear market? 1. Understand your time horizon If you invested 10 years ago for an event this year, you might seriously consider selling your stocks and converting them to cash — but that’s regardless of where you think the market is going. If you need the money in the short term, it doesn’t belong in the market....

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Nine lessons to learn from Seth Klarman

SO WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT HOW KLARMAN INVESTS? HERE ARE SOME INSIGHTS INTO HIS APPROACH. What’s your advantage over others?  The investment markets are crowded. Thousands of professional investors spend their days trying to find the next big thing, but they can’t all win. In order to get ahead you need to do something or know something that others don’t. This is not easy. Are you really smarter than the crowd? Buy what others are selling Going against the crowd can be profitable. People often sell assets due to temporary, short-term factors....

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