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Friday, December 17, 2010

Sale of KeppelCorp Warrants, cessation of my short term trading for now

Today I sold off my KepCorp warrant for a tidy 4.37% after accounting for all brokerage fees. As I bought heavily into it, my absolute amount gained is pretty high. :)

Having said that, I bought the warrant on Wednesday and sold it off today. On Wednesday, I was showing a paper loss of about 8%, and today I realised a 4.37% gain. That's a 12.37% swing in just 20 hours of trading. What a difference a day makes.

I will be ceasing my speculation for now, at least until I am more familiar with Technical Analysis. Why do I say so?

1.) Playing with financial derivatives is very risky. As Warren Buffett puts it, "risk is not knowing what you're doing." I understand how warrants and options work, but maybe it's time for me to take a step back and understand more about TA and charting before I plunge into speculating again. Then, playing with warrants would be, by definition, less risky for me.

2.) The way I'm using TA is obviously wrong now.
Example in point:

My top earner: SembCorp Marine, which I held from 3/12 to 10/12, was in my understanding, bearing many traits of a bearish stock. In that period, RSI had negative divergence, MACD was showing negative divergence, PSAR was above the stock price, which were all bearish signs (or so I thought). Only Stochastics was showing an upward trend. With all the bearish signs showing, you'd expect the stock price to drop, but instead it rose slightly, and with my huge leverage, I earned a tidy sum.

My top loser, Neptune Orient Lines, which i held from 3/12 to 15/12, was in my understanding, bearing many traits of a bullish stock. In that period, PSAR was constantly bullish, MACD line was above the signal line AND both of the lines were above 0, Stochastics was showing blue line above the red, AND, both on an uptrend toward 80%, which I believed were bullish signs, and yet, the stock price dropped quite a bit, and I quickly stopped my loss. (which is a good thing, considering that I would have lost another 25% had I sold off today-NOL dropped again)

This leads me to the conclusion that:
1.) My TA is too simplistic and hence largely incorrect, AND/OR
2.) I'm interpreting the signs wrongly,
3.) I'm too caught up in the excitement and anxiety that I make rash decisions.

Hence, I will be ceasing my warrant trading at least until CNY. This is also to help me take a step back and not make rash decisions like buying warrants on a whim, and to analyse them closely before making a purchase. As I have been on leave the whole of last week, I've been waking up and reading the finance news before logging on to POEMS/sgx.com at 9am. Which is not a good sign.

I will also be using the few weeks to CNY to brush up on my TA, of which I am only somewhat familiar with MACD, Stochastics, RSI, Volume, Moving Averages, PSAR and Bollinger Bands.
I will of course look out for good stocks to buy. 
My current KIV Stock list:
1.) Dapai
2.) CapMallAsia
3.) SATS
4.) STI ETF (Thought I'm reluctant to buy into STI now, many of the stocks are pretty overvalued, like Genting, City Development, Jardine, DBS, Olam, SGX, ST Engineering and our favourite way to fly, SIA, with PE of 84x)
5.) First REIT (div yield of 9.5%)  


I have also just applied for an OptionsXpress Cash Trading account, which allows me to trade in the United States market with a MUCH lower commission rate (USD 14.95) than POEMS, and with no custodian charge.

I will be researching on the Standard and Poor's "dividend aristocrats", which are companies that have given rising dividends every year for >25 years running).
I am most interested in McDonald's, ExxonMobil, the Standard and Poor's S&P 500 ETF (Otherwise known as SPDRs-Standard and Poor's Depository Receipts) and of course, Berkshire Hathaway B shares.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year to all. :)

7 comments:

  1. I was once think like you. :-)

    Read? Stock picking is part science, part art, part luck, part intuition, and always uncertain - "not precisely knowing."

    As for warrant trading, may be you should ask those ex-young warrant warriors why they have chopped their fingers?

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  2. Wow, i think you are way more knowledgeable than me. You're going into warrants and even the US market. Theres more to learn for me.

    I'm more inclined towards FA than TA but i have been reading FA and TA for dummies.

    SATS & CapMallAsia are on my watchlist too!

    We can link our blogs for sure!

    Till then, happy holidays!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Youthvestor,

    I was very excited when I came across your blog.
    Not only are we both starting out, our capital base is in the below 50k range, we're both serving NS (but I ORD in 2 months tee hee). Do you stay in? Cuz I notice you post on weekends only. haha. anyway, yep,so I believe we can learn alot from each other.

    Anyway, I'm neither inclined to TA nor FA. FA tells you what company is good to buy, whilst TA tells you when to buy it. FA can't tell you if the stock is in a downtrend (like capmallsasia), neither can TA tell you whether the company you're planning to invest in is crap or not. So i think a holistic approach will be the best.

    ANyway, my reason for going into warrants is that I can't buy the underlying (too expensive, like eg. 1 board lot of KepCorp is already $10800, Friday's price). I've learnt alot about warrants, and I still believe it's a good leveraging tool, but sometimes the market makers are quite notorious for giving poor prices.

    also the reason for going into the US Market is because there is alot more accessible and free info on US Companies than on Singapore companies. Moreover, many quality foreign companies are listed on the NYSE or AMEX, e.g. PetroChina.

    Yep! I've been making use of my NS Time(Im PES C and stay out so I've alot of time) to read up many books. I recommend you read "secrets of millionaire investors" by adam khoo. SImple, concise. Also, I've read "Naked Trader 2" by Robbie Burns (u can borrow from Library) Very simple english and the way he writes is very entertaining. haha.

    Merry xmas to you too!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Createwealth8888,

    Great post you have there! Yup I definitely agree with you. No matter how much i study FA or TA, i'm bound to be wrong sometimes.

    Thanks for visiting my blog!

    Could you please link me to people's blogs/forums where they got burned by warrants?

    would you be interested in a link exchange?

    happy holidays!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi, Isaac and Youthvestor, do u guys use msn? Would be good to continue this conversation online..

    I'm 23 myself, and I agree that combining TA with FA is the way to go..each method has its pros and cons, TA only deals with probabilities...

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hey Hubert.

    Yea I do use MSN but rarely.
    Would you like to link blogs? Though I notice you don't post much anymore...
    One thing I find vexing about the SIngapore market is the dearth of information. For US Stocks I can just go to google/yahoo finance and find out almost everything I want, whereas for SG stocks I have to calculate PE, PEG etc etc myself :(

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hi Isaac, I think yahoo.sg finance also has some FA data for sg stocks, not sure if it's the latest though.

    http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=C31.SI

    ReplyDelete