SGX Stockfact Screener and Hong Kong Land

I believe that you need very little capital expenditure to be a value investor. If someone like Seth Klarman does not have a Bloomberg terminal, simple, free and easily accessible tools online is usually enough.

Heck, even Walter Schloss depend on Valueline reports all his life, read annual reports and doesn't usually attend AGMs.


So one of the available screener is StockFacts. There are very little parameters available, and also a maximum of 4 parameters that you can set at any point of time.

If your appetite for risk is big, you can increase the market cap allowance to a minimum of even 1.3million (that is the market cap of the smallest stock in SGX).

I look for a dividend yield of at least 2%. Fix deposit rates lies at about 1.8% in Singapore, but it could be as low as 1.4% now. The whole idea is I want to be rewarded for waiting and holding stocks.

I don't have a fixation for any industry, but usually P/BV (Price over Book Value) stocks of 0.5 or less are currently property stocks, who are largely cyclical stocks. Cyclical refer to stocks that are highly value during good times and vice versa.

As you can see, companies that didn't see a dime of profits like Hyflux is screened. You can add a Price/Earning ratio and set it to 0.001 or some sort of value.

Right from the bat, I will take special notice of a few companies above.
Tiong Seng Holdings - Construction and Engineering... how good is its PE over the years? How valuable are the assets? A large value for PPE (Property, Plant and Equipment) is not desirable.

If dividends are important to you, www.dividends.sg will be indispensable. A check at this extremely valuable website reveals that Tiong Seng actually cut dividends over the years...

From the list of companies, one of them which I am keen in is Hong Kong Land, a subsidary wholly owned by the conglomerate Jardine Strategic Holdings.
It is also listed in STI, which brings about a great deal of liquidity and attention. Looking at its annual report, this company is so well regarded by bank. Most of its loans are unsecured.

This is the dividend history of HongKong Land:
http://www.dividends.sg/view/H78

Clicking on HongKong Land within Stockfacts bring you to this page where it throws up some past history of this large company. I am inclined to click on the "Download/Print" page which will display a nice 3-4 page PDF.

Selected items that I am interested in are:

Consistent Cash Flows in Operations. I believe the large outflow of cash in FY2015 in financing is to service its debt. Hong Kong Land has an extremely strong balance sheet at the moment.

 Payout ratio refers to the % of earnings it is paying as dividends. During the pre-2011 days, this company has fast-growing revenues. I can only assume at this moment that it is re-investing its profits for growth. As revenue growth slows, it is paying out a decent amount as dividends.

Who are the major shareholders?
I will only be worried in Jardine starts paring down ownership..

 You will still need to read the annual report to understand the business. For its latest report in March, it appears that HKL is a property rental collector with large revenues from its rental in Greater China, particularly Hong Kong. Almost 70% of its income is from property investment. The rest is from property development, in which most of which are in China.

If you believe in the direction of this business, I think HKL is a worthy buy.
Will it pay off handsomely? Not really. But is it safe? Sure is.