Friday, October 9, 2015

The Stock Market Bugger and Portfolio

The recent correction revived my interest in the stock market with some deployment of my hard-earned war chest. Since my last post in December 2014 about the US interest rates, i am getting ready for it by first repricing my home loan to the DBS FHR (1.1%+FHR, no lock-in) and boy was i in the nick of time as they increased it the next day to (1.5% +FHR, 3 years lock) which is no longer attractive in the market currently(UOB 1.68% is better now,imo). My home loan has effectively decreased from about 2.1%(1 month +1 month sibor) to 1.5% currently.

The second thing i did was to sell half of my capmalltrustbonds3.05% at a price of $1.05 (acquired during IPO) immediately after the interest was given. The original intention was to sell all of it but given the current sub-IPO price of about $0.993 with some interest having accrued, heck it, as there is still some uncertainty about when interest rate will rise since US inflation is still pretty low. Selling this was to bolster my warchest to whack the sunken stock market bugger real hard if it ever becomes a 2009 crisis but i doubt it.

The third thing i did was to buy shares, namely, UOB,OCBC, Stamford land, Ireit, Accordia, ST Engineering, Jardine C&C, Keppel and M1. Having experienced the 2009 crisis, learning and profiting from it, i bought the shares 1 lot ( yes 100 shares each time) as it tanks...the more it tanks i increased it to 2,3,4,5 lots, capping my purchase to a max of 5-7K each day to pace my warchest. Having to pay only 0.18% commission with no minimum allowed me to do that. The cold comfort of Wee Cho Yaw buying UOB at about $22 and $18.76 per piece and OCBC's discounted DCA price of $8.71 gave me a benchmark to work with and heck, these bank shares price/book has been the lowest in 5 years with the former giving 4.6% dividend yield and the latter 4% dividend yield. Having ST Engineering director buy STE at about $2.75 with its dividend yield of 5.6% makes me shake off any losses i get hit with as i average down. I try not to average up, only average down, so the purchases came to an end with the recent bullish state of the stock market, leaving me with 2/3 of my warchest still languishing in high-yield bank accounts, namely, ocbc360 and CIMB. 

$14580 per annum of passive income from bonds and equity ( non-CPF). The journey of a trillion miles continues.


Friday, December 19, 2014

Direct From the Federal Open Market Committee


Forget about CNBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, Analysts Reports, Newspapers e.t.c. It's best to be informed from the source. 

"......When the Committee decides to begin to remove policy accommodation, it will take a balanced approach consistent with its longer-run goals of maximum employment and inflation of 2 percent. The Committee currently anticipates that, even after employment and inflation are near mandate-consistent levels, economic conditions may, for some time, warrant keeping the target federal funds rate below levels the Committee views as normal in the longer run......"- Federal Open Market Committee, 17 Dec 2014

Seems like those who are heavily leveraged in loans, especially floating rate home / mortgage loans can heave a great sigh of relief. 

Current US inflation rate: 1.3% as reported by the Bureau if Labor Statistics (BLS) on December 17, 2014.