My 2019 In Review

Haven’t been writing a lot this month as I was spending my time doing tons of research on potential investments. However, as 2019 comes to an end, there is a need to do some sort of year end closing for my investment journey so far. So here it goes.

Portfolio Review

All in all, it was a pretty good year compared to the disaster last year. For 2018, I overstayed in the property sector and then got hit by the trade war.

In 2019, I was rescued by the semi cons recovery and pretty much recovery of everything else.

This year I had the opportunity to invest in several good stocks such as SGX(SGX:S68) which came down to $7 early this year and rode it up to $8+ before selling. Another one would be Wilmar (SGX:F34) from $3.2 to $4 which is an opportunistic trade on its potential IPO.

Biggest Winner

Powermatic Data (SGX:BCY) is a stock that I’ve been holding for a few years now and it has rewarded me with around 65% returns till date. Management has finally decided to do something with their huge cash pile and property and that’s something which I’m looking forward to next year.

Biggest Loser

APAC Realty (SGX:CLN) With property developers staging a recovery somewhat, I was pretty disappointed with their performance this year. I mean, their 2016-18 data looks good, high FCF, ROE, margins etc etc.. basically almost everything that a value investor wants in a stock. I guess the straw that broke the camel’s back would be their 1Q or 2Q19 results which is very ugly. I decided to part ways with it and booked a 18% loss.

Holdings

I’m currently holding on to a mixed bag of US & SG stocks.

Vicom, Valuetronics, PNE, CDG & Netlink Tr – These are my main dividend stocks that gives me some consistent cashflow. These stocks have strong cashflows and balance sheets and I don’t think I will be divesting them unless there is a huge run up in prices.

Straits Trading – I have written about Straits Trading previously and explained my thesis. I guess the next catalyst would be their plans for ARA Asset Management.

Boustead – It has a narrow moat due to its geospatial business and it has been beaten down recently (due to oil price I guess) so I took this chance to load up. Will probably elaborate more in future posts.

Powermatic Data, Jumbo – Growth stocks. Jumbo is expanding with a flurry of new openings this year and I hope it will reflect well on their financial results. As for Powermatic Data, waiting for more growth in its wireless business and hoping to get a fat dividend soon.

Scorpio Tankers – The IMO2020 theme is playing out pretty well. A friend of mine working in SG’s bunker industry told me that there are high sulfur fuel has got no home and they are just being stored in tanker ships idling. Hopefully this means that tanker rates will soar and HSFO prices will plunge in the near future.

Uranium Participation Corp – You can refer to my writeup on the uranium industry here. This is a long term play on the supply demand of uranium and I’m looking for supply to drop as the miners stopped production in an attempt to force a rise in uranium spot prices. On the demand side, long term supply contracts for utilities are ending and we could see an increased demand for this yellow metal in the coming years.

Peabody Energy– Peabody is a play on coal ( my upcoming writeup) where coal mines are so hated right now, they did not see that it is valued at 2x P/FCF and looks incredibly cheap.

Stage Stores – This is one where I followed my man-crush Kupperman. Basically it is a retail stock that is attempting a turnaround by converting all their stores to discount department stores.

Altius Minerals – Something I stumbled upon when I was doing my research on the energy sector. It’s main business is investing in mines and receiving royalties in return. Steady cashflow, don’t screw up investing with the wrong mines, nothing fancy here… until they became the first company to sign a royalty agreement in the renewable energy sector (a wind farm). If their initial investment plays out well, they could have first movers advantage in a fast growing sector.

Others

I’m looking at is Keck Seng Investments (HKEX:0184) and I’m still queuing to get a good price, which is hard due to its low liquidity.

In the US markets, Twitter(TWTR) remains interesting to me and I’m closely monitoring. I’m still waiting for its conclusion on the bug that is affecting their monetizable portion of the app the past quarter.

As for SG stocks, a quality value stock that is currently on my watchlist is Hour Glass.

My Man-Crush

So this year, while I was listening to “The Market Huddle” podcast while driving to work, there was this guy called Harris Kupperman who was ranting about investing in down and out stocks like shipping and greek with a strategy called longshorts. Whatever he said just clicked and made sense to me and soon I found myself looking high and low for cheap companies that were ignored by the market.

I also found some research houses like Horus Investments with similar strategies and I’m still studying how to analyze these companies as they are not your average value stocks. I mean, their balance sheets are usually horrible.

He has a blog and you guys can drop by have a look at https://adventuresincapitalism.com/ .

2020

I will try to squeeze out more time to write. Currently I only have about an hour a day to write and most of the time was spent researching.

Time management was a big issue for me this year ( juggling 6 projects at once is not easy) I’ve trying out a method where I list out 6 most important tasks for the day and attempt to complete them by the end of the day. So far it has been working well and also helps me to prioritize my work and make sure I dont miss out anything important.

2019 was pretty good in terms of investing but I made rookie mistakes along the way (luckily nothing major) so I will try to work on that and hopefully I can emulate my returns next year.

Hopefully, 2020 being election year, it will be a good year for everyone in their investing.

Cheers.