As of 1st Feb 2023,
STI Index Fund returns 2.93%
Hong Kong Tracker Fund returns 7.84% (wow)
S&P 500 Index Fund returns 4.19%
My portfolio, excluding bonds (Singapore Savings Bonds ("SSB") and 6 months T-Bills) which I invest solely for my mum, returns 7.15% or 4.75% with it.
Performance trails the Hong Kong Tracker Fund, which is expected since it had a terrible, abysmal year. In terms of cost, 44.7% of my funds are invested in HK stocks, 48% in SGX and the remaining in US.
Current market sentiments towards the Chinese recovery remain positive to some what cautious. The main focus so far seems to have shift from the property debt crisis to what America is currently doing.
I do not believe the property crisis is behind us, just because the market prices has recovered some what. Bond prices for Central China notes are still very much below 50% of face value. The following screenshot taken from Bondsupermart:
We are only 2 months away from the next call...
The current favor of the moment are Artificial Intelligence plays. The acquisition of OpenAI by Microsoft was the catalyst. The writing on the wall is that Google's search could be displaced, and Google's implementation does not impress.
Stocks which took a beating last year staged a strong recovery. IMO, I don't give a rat's ass how they do because they still look overpriced, and I would not change my game just to suit the market's taste.
I have not purchase any stock this year as yet. I have wrote a modestly priced call for Alibaba at 135 HKD, and for a while that position was in the red. This was due to how volatile and positively charged the market was. Nevertheless, it expired out of the money.
As most of my HK holdings are not large market cap stocks, an options market does not exist for them. Hence option selling (and buying) is not a big part of my portfolio.
***
Hinderburg Research had released a short report on Adani's Enterprise and its various subsidiaries. Unsurprisingly... the focus in the local papers were the impending stock purchase of the said enterprise by Temasek. Temasek's bad run seems to continue. I believe many would question the amount of due diligence, esp after the FTX incident.
IMO, shortist such as Hinderburg are formidable-- not only are they riding on the prospect of infinite losses, they could be threatened with legal muscle, viewed with skepticism (because of vested interest).
The outcome of this episode should follow the usual playbook: a heavily in-debt company tries to raise funds cheaply by issuing bonds or stocks that have the lowest cost of capital. It seems inevitable that great wealth generated by leverage would eventually face a moment of reckoning.
At the end of the day, the rich would be less well off, but it is always the poor that suffers. Labourers working in these firms face retrenchments. Politicians rarely makes a decision that overrides their self interests, be it to stay in power or to enrich themselves.
My expectation is that unless someone could prove that political connections are involved, nothing will happen. On the contrary, if political connections were present, I would expect the accused be swiftly put to his/her place, and any previous political relation be severed just like a ballast weighing down an airship.
Till next month.
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