BT INVEST
A Personal Finance and Investment Arm of The Business TimesMARKET TODAY:
Show Me the Money
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18 May 2013
Room for appreciation in some bourses
STOCK markets in many parts of the world are hovering at multi-year highs. Should investors be scared? I looked at five markets this week - Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and the US - to ascertain their prices relative to their value over the past few decades. -
11 May 2013
Accurate data will dictate success
IN a paper entitled Real Estate Prices in Beijing, 1644 to 1840, Prof Susan Wachter of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and two other colleagues hand-collected from archival sources transaction prices and other house attributes from the 498 surviving house sale contracts for... -
04 May 2013
Taking a long-term view pays
REGULAR readers of this column would notice by now that I like to tease out stories by manipulating massive amounts of data. From the kind of "manipulation" I do, I am able to compress time and show events that have taken place in the last 20 or 30 years in my graphs. -
20 Apr 2013
Developing a 'giver culture' to make corporates effective
AFTER the tragic events of 9/11, a team of Harvard psychologists quietly "invaded" the US intelligence system. The team, led by Richard Hackman, wanted to determine what makes intelligence units effective. -
13 Apr 2013
'Temperament determines a person's fate'
I NOTICED lately that whenever I watch a movie, there is always one line in it that strikes a chord with me. In Cloud Atlas, that line was: "Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future." -
06 Apr 2013
Be an emotional oracle: trust your feelings
MANY many moons ago, when I didn't know that much about the stock markets and thought that putting one's money with unit trust managers was the best way to grow one's money, I went to a bank and put $8,000 into a unit trust. -
30 Mar 2013
The role of forex in stock investing
WE have seen quite significant movements in the foreign exchange in the last few years. Recently, in response to major policy shifts in Japan, the Japanese yen fell by some 20 per cent relative to the US dollar between early June 2012 and early March this year. -
23 Mar 2013
Stock returns in a slow-growth world
THE world is entering a slow-growth phase, economists tell us. The implication of that, stock strategists say, is that investors should perhaps temper their expectations of returns from stocks. -
09 Mar 2013
Unit trusts: Long and short of it
LAST week, I wrote an article on the performance of unit trusts registered in Singapore over the past 10 years, based on data compiled by Morningstar. In that analysis, I found that emerging-country funds were the best performers in the 10 years to end-January this year. -
02 Mar 2013
How profitable is a bullet-proof portfolio?
IN my column in The Sunday Times last week, I wrote about the "bullet-proof portfolio" proposed by US investment analyst and politician Harry Browne in his book, Fail-Safe Investing: Lifelong Financial Security in 30 Minutes. -
25 Feb 2013
A portfolio that lets you sleep at night
A ‘bullet-proof portfolio’ can withstand market ups & downs, preserve purchasing power. -
23 Feb 2013
Lone-founder businesses appear to outperform
OVER coffee this week, a friend shared this study with me. He said that analysis of component stocks of market indices say, the S&P 500, has shown that companies which are run by founders in general outperformed the others which are corporates, run by professional managers. -
13 Feb 2013
Wise investors let compounding work its magic
The magic of compounding is this: the earlier you allow it to start, the greater the benefits. And you will really see its benefits from the seventh or eighth year onwards. -
04 Feb 2013
Diversified versus focused approach to investing
In one, you spread out your bets, in the other, you go with what you know well. -
02 Feb 2013
Slaughtering the sacred cows
WHAT do you know, it has been more than four years since the global financial crisis. What have we learnt from that episode? -
28 Jan 2013
Charting stock performance
This week, let’s apply the concept of comparing the current stock price to the 10-year average earnings on individual stocks. -
26 Jan 2013
Stock investing: It's all about the process
THE friend whom I quoted as saying a trade changes the trader said I missed the subtlety of his comment. "My point is the experience of buying and selling something changes the person who does the buying and selling," he wrote to me. "It is a feedback mechanism or reflexivity that is often... -
21 Jan 2013
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There is a way to time the market
One would need clairvoyance if the stock market operates in a world of its own, detached from the logic we know that operates in the physical world that we live in. But here is a central truth to the stock market: Underneath it all, there is an economic reality. Companies have to make money in... -
19 Jan 2013
When to sell
I WAS with different groups of friends this week. Coincidentally, the same topic cropped up: When to sell the shares you have bought. -
14 Jan 2013
Buy-and-hold works – up to a point
Key still lies in picking low-valuation stocks and knowing when to cash out and reinvest
About the Author
Teh Hooi Ling
Senior Correspondent
