The Roles Of Traders And Investors In The Marketplace

July 11 2012

Many people use the words "trading" and "investing" interchangeably when, in reality, they are two very different activities. While both traders and investors participate in the same marketplace, they perform two very different tasks using very different strategies. Both of these parties are necessary, however, for the market to function smoothly. This article will take a look at both parties and the strategies that they use to make a profit in the marketplace.

SEE: Passive Vs. Active Management

What Is an Investor?An investor is the market participant that the general public most often associates with the stock market. Investors are those who purchase shares of a company for the long term with the belief that the company has strong future prospects. Investors typically concern themselves with two things:

• Value - Investors must consider whether a company's shares represent a good value. For example, if two similar companies are trading at different earnings multiples, the lower one might be the better value because it suggests that the investor will need to pay less for $1 of earnings when investing in Company A relative to what would be needed to gain exposure to $1 of earnings in Company B.
• Success - Investors must measure the company's future success by looking at its financial strength and evaluating its future cash flows. 

Both of these factors can be determined through the analysis of the company's financial statements along with a look at industry trends that may define future growth prospects. At a basic level, investors can measure the current value of a company relative to its future growth possibilities by looking at metrics such as the PEG ratio- that is, the company's P/E (value) to growth (success) ratio.

SEE: PEG Ratio Nails Down Value Stocks

Who Are the Major Investors?There are many different investors that are active in the marketplace. In fact, the vast majority of the money that is at work in the markets belongs to investors (not to be confused with the amount of dollars traded per day, which is a record held by the traders). Major investors include:

• Investment Banks - Investment banks are the organizations that assist companies in going public and raising money. This often involves holding at least a portion of the securities over the long term.
• Mutual Funds - Many individuals keep their money in mutual funds, which make long-term investments in companies that meet specific criteria. Mutual funds are required by law to act as investors, not traders.
• Institutional Investors - These are large organizations or persons that hold large stakes in companies. Institutional investors often include company insiders, competitors hedging themselves and special opportunity investors.
• Retail Investors - Retail investors are individuals that invest in the stock market for their personal accounts. At first, the influence of retail traders may seem small, but as time passes more people are taking control of their portfolios and, as a result, the influence of this group is increasing. 

SEE: Institutional Investors And Fundamentals: What's The Link?

All of these parties are looking to hold positions for the long term in an effort to stick with the company while continuing to be successful. Warren Buffett's success is a testament to the viability of this strategy.

What Is a Trader?Traders are market participants who purchase shares in a company with a focus on the market itself rather than the company's fundamentals. Markets that trade commodities lend themselves well to traders. After all, very few people purchase wheat because of its fundamental quality - they do so to take advantage of small price movements that occur as a result of supply and demand. Traders typically concern themselves with:

• Price Patterns - Traders will look at the price history in an attempt to predict future price movements, which is known as technical analysis.
• Supply and Demand - Traders keep close watch on their trades intraday to see where the money is moving and why.
• Market Emotion - Traders play on the fears of investors through techniques like fading, where they will bet against the crowd after a large move takes place.
• Client Services - Market makers (one of the largest types of traders) are actually hired by their clients to provide liquidity through rapid trading. 

Ultimately, it is traders that provide the liquidity for investors and always take the other end of their trades. Whether it is through market making or fading, traders are a necessary part of the marketplace.

SEE: What Can Traders Learn From Investors?

Who Are the Major Traders?When it comes to volume, traders have investors beat by a long shot. There are many different types of traders that can trade as often as every few seconds. Among the most popular types of traders are:

• Investment Banks - The shares that are not kept for long-term investment are sold. During the initial public offering process, investment banks are responsible for selling the company's stock in the open market through trading.
• Market Makers - These are groups responsible for providing liquidity in the marketplace. Profit is made through the bid-ask spread along with fees charged to the clients. Ultimately, this group provides liquidity for all the marketplaces.
• Arbitrage Funds - Arbitrage funds are the groups that quickly move in on market inefficiencies. For example, shortly after a merger is announced, stocks always quickly move to the new buyout price minus the risk premium. These trades are executed by arbitrage funds.
• Proprietary Traders/Firms - Proprietary traders are hired by firms to make money through short-term trading. They use proprietary trading systems and other techniques in an attempt to make more money by compounding the short-term gains than can be made by long-term investing. 

The Bottom LineClearly, both traders and investors are necessary in order for a market to function properly. Without traders, investors would have no liquidity through which to buy and sell shares. Without investors, traders would have no basis from which to buy and sell. Combined, the two groups form the financial markets as we know them today.

Read more: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/07/trading_investing.asp#ixzz20KcDub4Q

Long-Term Value of International Stocks. Europe is a value and dividend play, while emerging markets are a growth play.

Europe’s battered stock markets could fall more, and the emerging markets’ hot streak may be history, at least for a while.

 

Get out?

 

No, says Benjamin C. Sullivan, a certified financial planner and portfolio manager with Palisades Hudson Financial Group in Scarsdale, N.Y.

 

“While you can’t predict how foreign stocks will do in the short run, there’s long-term value there,” he says. “You need the right amount in your portfolio.

 

Europe is a value and dividend play, while emerging markets are a growth play, Sullivan says. And both help protect against a decline in the greenback.

 

Palisades Hudson invests 35% of its clients’ equity portfolios abroad, he says. That includes about 14% in Europe, 11% in emerging markets and 10% in other developed markets, including Japan, Australia, Singapore and Canada.

 

Latin American markets turned in a tidy 16% annual return for U.S. investors over the last 10 years, while Asian emerging markets returned 9% annually, compared to 2% for the EAFE index that tracks developed international markets and 3% for the U.S.

 

Despite that outperformance, emerging nations make up just 13% of global stock-market capitalization while producing 49% of global gross domestic product, Sullivan points out.

 

“There’s more room to grow in emerging markets,” he says. “In the next few years, more than 70% of world economic growth is predicted to come from those regions. By adopting best practices from the developed world — such as advanced technology, better infrastructure, and open markets — these countries will grow their middle class, and investors should benefit as a result.”

 

Active funds vs. index funds

Depending on what market you’re in, there are different investing strategies to rely upon. Use actively managed mutual funds for emerging markets, Sullivan says. Those markets are inefficient enough for a skilled fund manager to earn its fee by outperforming the index.

 

He likes the T. Rowe Price Latin America Fund, which has outperformed the Lipper Latin American funds average over the last 10 years. He also invests his clients’ money in the T. Rowe Price New Asia Fund and Matthews Pacific Tiger Fund.

 

Sullivan avoids Russia and other Eastern European markets, deeming them too risky due to the region’s historic disregard for property rights.

 

Western Europe, in contrast, offers high dividends and deep value. The Vanguard European Stock Index fund Sullivan uses is heavily weighted in big multinationals like BP, Anheuser-Busch, Novartis, HSBC and Royal Dutch Shell that sell their products worldwide. With share prices down, major markets like Germany, France and the United Kingdom sport 4% dividend yields compared to about 2% for the U.S.

 

Sullivan separately allocates 7.5% of equities to real estate investment trusts, including 5% to U.S. funds and 2.5% to an actively managed Morgan Stanley international fund that buys real estate investments in developed and emerging countries. Investing in global property markets boosts diversification, he says.

 

The rest of the world is too big and dynamic for American investors to ignore.

 

“Limiting your investments to the U.S. would be as arbitrary as choosing to invest in U.S. companies headquartered only in New York State,” Sullivan says.

 

But don’t invest in U.S. or foreign stock funds if you’ll need that money within five years, he adds. Equities should be a long-term investment.

Henry Stimpson, Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

Your Money

Playing Penny Stocks (Chan dumps Ariantec and Metronic shares.)

Playing Penny Stocks

At first glance, penny stocks seem like a great idea. With as little as $100, you can get a lot more shares in a penny stock than a blue chip that might cost $50 a share. And, if the two blue chip shares you bought went up $1 you'd only make $2, whereas if 100 shares of a $1 stock went up a $1 you would double your money.

Unfortunately, what penny stocks offer in position size and potential profitability has to measure against the volatility that they face. 

Penny stocks can shoot up. It happens all the time - but they can also crash in moments, and are exceptionally vulnerable to manipulation and illiquidity. 

Getting solid information on penny stocks can also be difficult, making them a poor choice for an investor who is still learning.

Related: 

The Lowdown On Penny Stocks.

Chan dumps Ariantec and Metronic shares

Ariantec Global

Tactical dynamic asset allocation or rebalancing based on valuation, sounds easier than is practical

Tactical dynamic asset allocation or rebalancing based on valuation can be employed but this sounds easier than is practical, except in extreme market situations.  


Tactical dynamic asset allocation or rebalancing involves selling at the right price and buying at the right price based on valuation.  


Assuming you can get your buying and your selling correct 80% of the time;, to get both of them right for a profitable transaction is only slightly better than chance (80% x 80% = 64%).  


Except for the extremes of the market, for most (perhaps, almost all of the time), for such stocks, it is better to stay invested (buy, hold, accumulate more) for the long haul.




Ref: My 18 points guide to Successfully compounding your money in Stocks

Investing isn't easy, but the important parts are simple. Stocks or Bonds: The Easy Choice

Investing isn't easy, but the important parts are simple. 

• Buy an asset when it's expensive, and future returns will likely be low. 
• Buy cheap, and you'll probably do all right. 

There are ups and downs and booms and busts and lost decades throughout, but a basic appreciation of how valuation dictates the future can go a long way. 

Stocks or Bonds: The Easy Choice

No one knows what any market will do in the future. But with hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into bonds and 10-year Treasuries yielding 1.5%, it's worth taking a peek at what history says about the past. This quote, from The Economist, seems particularly relevant: "Investors who bought Treasury bonds at a 2% yield in 1945 earned a negative real annual return of 2.3% over the following 35 years."

Investing isn't easy, but the important parts are simple. Buy an asset when it's expensive, and future returns will likely be low. Buy cheap, and you'll probably do all right. There are ups and downs and booms and busts and lost decades throughout, but a basic appreciation of how valuation dictates the future can go a long way. It also shows why bonds produced such dreadful returns after 1945.

In the 1940s, interest rates had been falling for the better part of 20 years as the Great Depression drove knee-jerk risk aversion, and hit record lows as various policies and incentives moved to cheaply finance wartime deficits. According to Yale economist Robert Shiller, 10-year Treasuries yielded 5% in 1920, 3% by 1935, and 2% by the early 1940s. The consensus came to believe low rates were a permanent fixture. "Low Interest Rates for Long Time to Come," read one newspaper headline in 1945.

But as the saying goes, if something can't go on forever, it won't. By 1957, 10-year Treasuries yielded 4%. By 1967, 5%. They breached 8% in 1970, and zoomed to 15% by 1981 as inflation scorched the economy. Since bond prices move in the opposite direction of interest rates, this was devastating to returns. Deutsche Bank has an archive of Treasury returns in real (after inflation) terms, which tells the story:

Period	Average Annual Real Returns, 10-Year Treasuries
1940-1949	(2.5%)
1950-1959	(1.8%)
1960-1969	0.2%
1970-1979	(1.2%)

Source: Deutsche Bank Long Term Asset Return Study.

Don't underappreciate how awful this was. In real terms, $1,000 invested in 10-year Treasuries in 1940 would have been worth $584 by 1979 -- this for an investment often trumpeted as "risk-free."

No one knows if the same performance will be repeated over the coming years. Japan is a good example of extremely low interest rates sticking around for decades. But the risks are obvious. With 10-year Treasuries yielding 1.5%, there is virtually no chance of high returns over the next decade. The odds of being hammered and suffering negative real returns are, however, quite good.

How about stocks? Here, too, no one knows what the future will bring. But history has an opinion.

The same Deutsche Bank study mentioned above shows that, after inflation, stocks produced an average annual return of negative 3.4% a year from 2000 to 2009. That was the third time since 1820 that stocks underwent a decade of negative real returns. Even during the Great Depression years of 1930-1939, stocks squeezed out a positive return.

Something else that sticks out from the study's nearly 200 years of history: Stocks have never produced back-to-back decades of negative real returns. Big booms have invariably followed long slumps. Stocks logged negative real returns during the 1910s, and followed up with blistering 16% real returns in the following decade. Returns went negative again during the 1970s, then shot to nearly 12% a year in the 1980s.

That may just be a quirk of the calendar. What matters are valuations. One of the best ways to measure the overall market's value is Robert Shiller's CAPE ratio, which calculates market price divided by 10 years' average earnings, adjusted for inflation. Its current value is 21, compared with an average of 19 since the S&P 500 began in 1957. So that's a little high. But here is where stocks' long-term superior gains come into play. Since 1880, the average 10-year return after CAPE at current levels is 7.7% a year, or about 5% a year after inflation. That's nothing to write home about, but it's almost certainly better than you'll achieve in bonds these days.

Unlike bonds, there are several good, high-quality stocks with long track records that can be purchased today at prices that set you up to earn decent future returns. A few I like areProcter & Gamble (NYSE: PG  ) , Colgate-Palmolive (NYSE: CL  ) , and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ  ) .

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/07/10/stocks-or-bonds-the-easy-choice-.aspx

Beware the "yield trap".

Understandably, income investors study dividend yields quite closely. After all, a share on a dividend yield of 5% will pay out twice as much as a share rated on a more miserly yield of 2.5%.

Some investors look at historic yields; some at forecast (or "prospective") yields. It's not a deal-breaker either way, although personally I prefer forecast yields.

But here's the kicker: either way, those yields can be unexploded mines, lurking for the unwary. Looking at yield on its own, in short, can quickly introduce you -- painfully -- to the meaning of the term "yield trap".

Siren call

The yield trap is simply explained. You buy a share, attracted by the high yield. But the dividend is then cut, or cancelled -- leaving you without the anticipated income. Worse, unsupported by the payout, the share price usually falls as well, leaving you also nursing a capital loss.

Let's see it in action.

Company A pays out 9 pence a share, with shares changing hands for 100 pence per share. So the dividend yield -- which is the dividend per share, divided by the share price, and multiplied by a hundred to turn it into a percentage -- is 9%.

But that 9 pence is unsustainable. Company A then halves its dividend, slashing investors' income. What happens to the yield? If the share drops to -- say -- 80 pence, the historic yield the becomes 5.6%. The "yield on cost" figure, of course, is 4.5%.

Dividend cover

How, then, should investors spot potential yield traps? The most obvious reason for slashing the dividend is that the business simply hasn't got the money to pay it.

The business's earnings, in short, aren't large enough to support a distribution to shareholders at historic levels.

Put another way, actual earnings per share aren't sufficiently when large compared to the anticipated dividend per share.

Which is where the notion of 'dividend cover' comes in: earnings per share divided by dividend per share.

Interpret with care

Now, dividend cover shouldn't be followed blindly. 

• Some businesses -- such as utilities, for instance -- can quite happily operate with lower levels of dividend cover than more cyclical businesses. 
• Other businesses -- such as REITs -- must pay out a fixed proportion of earnings as dividends, so again a low level of dividend cover is the norm.
• Still other businesses have very high levels of dividend cover, because they are growing -- and therefore retaining earnings for future investment -- rather than paying them out as dividends.

But as a broad brush generalisation, 

• a ratio of close to one is definitely the danger zone. 
• A ratio much bigger than two indicates a certain parsimony. 
• Personally speaking, a ratio of 1.5-2.5 is usually what I'm looking for.

5 Shares At Risk Of A Dividend Cut

Danger signs

The table below highlights five shares with dividend cover well into the danger zone that I've mentioned. They're all big names, and -- given their yields -- are popular with income investors. And in each case, I've shown the last full year's earnings per share and dividend, yield and dividend cover.

There are shares with lower levels of dividend cover, to be sure -- but they tend to be REITs, or other special cases. The five highlighted have fewer extenuating circumstances, and seem to me to be more in danger of reducing their payout.

Company	Forecast yield %	Full-year earnings per share	Dividend	Dividend cover
Standard Life (LSE: SL)	6.6%	13p	13.8p	0.9
United Utilities (LSE: UU)	5.3%	35.3p	32.1p	1.1
Hargreaves Lansdown (LSE: HL)	4.7%	20.3p	18.9p	1.1
Admiral (LSE: ADM)	7.7%	81.9p	75.6p	1.1
Aviva (LSE: AV)	10.1%	5.8p	26p	0.2

So should holders of these shares be worried? There isn't sadly, a clear-cut answer -- a fact that highlights the importance of looking at the underlying data quite carefully, and considering the full set of circumstances.

Reading the runes

Standard Life, for instance, seems clear-cut, on both a historic and forecast basis: by my reckoning, the dividend is genuinely sailing close to the wind.

But Hargreaves Lansdown and Admiral, though, complicate matters by distinguishing between an ordinary dividend and a more discretionary extra 'special' dividend. But either way, a cut is a cut, and both firms have a level of dividend cover just above one, implying that there's very little margin of safety.

United Utilities may surprise you, depending on which stock screener you use. I've gone back to the annual accounts, and used the underlying earnings per share of 35.3p, described by the company as "providing a more representative view of business performance" -- implying the level of dividend cover that I've shown. Plug the statutory basic earnings per share of 45.7p into the calculation, though, and the dividend cover is a healthier 1.4.

And finally, there's Aviva, where the opposite problem applies. On a statutory basis, the earnings per share of 5.8p delivers a disturbing level of dividend cover of 0.2. Throw in the company's own preferred definition of earnings per share, and a healthier level of earnings of 53.8p emerges, giving a dividend cover of almost 2.

Spend Less Than You Earn

Spend Less Than You Earn And Invest The Difference.


Now, too many people these days always complain about not having enough money for saving and investment... you know, your neighbour, your work colleagues, family members, and so on.  But funnily enough, somehow these people always have the means to buy that new car, travel on that exotic holiday and 
purchase that latest computer gadget.

But spending  your cash on such short-term luxuries isn’t going to help you create life-changing wealth from the stock market. Indeed, if you’re really serious about becoming a stock-market millionaire, then you have to make a serious commitment to your spending. In particular, you’ll need:



• to calculate what you can realistically afford to invest each month, allowing for unexpected bills and emergencies;
• to be willing to trim your current expenditure, remembering that every penny saved is a penny earned — and that such savings can also be invested over time and can count towards your million; 
• to be disciplined enough to fund your investment contributions by automatic direct debit, so you’re not tempted to blow your surplus cash, and; 
• to commit to those regular payments over a long-term timeframe — so there’s no cutting corners and/or giving up when the markets undergo a bad patch.


If you can adopt this necessary spending mindset, then you really could be on your way to building a sizeable share portfolio.




Ten Steps To Making A Million In The Market

This strategy is very safe for selected high quality stocks. Margin of Safety Principle

The downside risk is protected through ONLY buying when the price is low or fairly priced.  


Therefore, when the price is trending downwards and when it is obviously below intrinsic value, do not harm your portfolio by selling to "protect your gains" or "to minimise your loss."  


Instead, you should be brave and courageous (this can be very difficult for those not properly wired)  to add more to your portfolio through dollar cost averaging or phasing in your new purchases.  This strategy is very safe for selected high quality stocks as long as you are confident and know your valuation.  It has the same effect of averaging down the cost of your purchase price. 


 However, unlike selling your shares to do so, buying more below intrinsic value ensures that your money will always be invested to capture the long term returns offered by the business of the selected stock.

Talam for Dummies

Received this in my email.   Peruse this and form your own opinion.

Talam for Dummies

Nathaniel Tan 11:40AM Jul 7, 2012

COMMENT “Confusing” probably describes most of our initial attempts to get to the bottom of what the deal was between Talam Corporation and Selangor.

With a little diligence, clear thinking and attention to detail however, most mysteries can be unravelled and articulated efficiently.

This article attempts to explain in easy to understand terms the background and context of this issue, how Selangor recovered the debt owed to it by Talam, and how this debt recovery differs from the bailouts we have seen at the federal level.

In the beginning

The story begins in the late eighties and early nineties, with an engineer and project manager who worked in Selangor state subsidiary PKNS - one Chan Ah Chye.

This man later goes on to form Talam Corporation, and before long - possibly due to close connections with the ruling elite in Selangor, then headed by BN menteri besar Muhammad Muhammad Taib - becomes a major player in the Selangor property and development scene.

Over time, an extremely large amount of state land is alienated to Talam, who basically gets it for free. A strong imagination is not required to speculate in whose pockets any resulting profit eventually ends up.

Talam’s modus operandi seems to be to pledge this land to the bank in exchange for huge loans, which they then use to finance their development and profit making projects. In essence, since they got the land free, they have successfully achieved money for nothing (it is uncertain as to whether “chicks for free” were involved).

The ‘wise’ businessmen of that era believed in the dictum of never using your own money when you can use someone else’s. This heavy lending continued to characterise Talam’s business approach, and their loans consistently kept getting bigger and bigger.

Tumbling down

Of course, no student of recent economic trends is unfamiliar with the concept of a bursting bubble.

The financial collapse of the late nineties brings Talam’s debt-ridden house of cards crashing down. An overgearing of loans and inability to service them halts various half-completed projects, rendering them idle, half-built ruins.

Incredibly however, this does not prevent Talam and their political patrons from altering their basic modus operandi.

In 2001, under BN menteri besar Khir Toyo (right), three parcels of land are alienated by Selangor to Talam via their subsidiary Maxisegar Sdn Bhd, who undertakes to construct Unisel’s campus at an estimated cost of RM750 million.

It will probably come as no surprise that Talam failed to complete this project. By September 2006, the company had been classified as an affected company under Practice Note 17 (PN 17), indicating dire financial straits.

New sheriff in town

In 2008, when Khalid Ibrahim assumes the menteri besar’s post, he inherits a situation in which Talam owes the state and its subsidiaries (among other creditors), a great deal of money.

Urban legend has it that when Talam was called in to explain why they have never endeavoured to pay their debts, the sheepish reply given was, “No one ever asked us to.”

Thankfully for the citizens of Selangor, there was a new sheriff in town.

Corporate finance is not only an area of expertise for Khalid (left) - it is a passion. With great gusto, he set out to solve this problem, and recover that which was owed by Talam to the people of Selangor.

The problem was undoubtedly challenging, but after some work and careful strategising, a plan was set into motion.

The end goal was simple: to leverage the assets still held by Talam to repay the debt Talam owed to the Selangor and its state subsidiaries.

The technical nitty-gritty

Making this happen was a technically complicated process that required considerable financial acumen.

The summary is this: firstly, the debts that were owed by Talam to Selangor state subsidiaries were properly booked and accounted for - something that, very suspiciously, had not been done before. Once these debts were acknowledged by all parties, the debts were consolidated and transferred to one state subsidiary - Menteri Besar Incorporated (MBI), which was then responsible for collecting the debts from Talam in the form of land and cash.

The rest of this section explains how this was done. It is a boring and complex explanation, but I list it here for the record and for those interested.

Talam owed RM392 million in debt to three Selangor state subsidiaries: KHSB, PIYSB, and PNSB. After acknowledging and booking these debts, the next step was to have another state subsidiary, Selangor Industrial Corporation (SIC), purchase these debts from the other three companies.

A loan from CIMB Bank of RM 392 million was given to SIC to complete this purchase. In November 2009, the state exco and legislative assembly both approve a grant of RM392 million to MBI, who then use the funds to purchase the original consolidated debt from SIC. SIC then uses those funds to pay off their CIMB loan.

The end result is as simple as the transaction itself is complex - without any major or excessive transactional expenses, Talam now owes the same amount of money to just one state subsidiary, instead of the original three.

Restructuring and successful collection

It is important to note that at no point are funds transferred from taxpayer monies to Talam. Funds have instead only been transferred from one pocket of the state to another.

This differs wildly from federal bailouts of corporations like Indah Water Konsortium, MAS, or the Putra/Star LRT, where taxpayer money was injected directly into companies that had probably lost untold amounts via mismanagement, corruption and plundering.

The transfers in the Talam debt restructuring allowed for a structure in which there is a clear acknowledgement and accounting for the RM392 million owed by Talam, and a single company for them to pay it to.

The story does not end there.

Another extremely important milestone in this tale is that MBI has in fact already succeeded in recovering all RM392 million in debt owed by Talam.

For those who would like to keep score, this recovery came in two forms.

RM340.88 million was recovered via acquisition of land and assets: 1,322 acres of land in Bukit Beruntung worth RM150.28 million, 2,264 acres of land in Bestari Jaya worth RM105.3 million, 400 acres of land in Ulu Yam and 60% equity in Ulu Yam Golf & Country Resort worth RM22.2 million, 134 acres of land in Danau Putra worth RM52.1 million and five office units in Menara Pandan worth RM11.1 million.

The remaining RM51.12 million was collected in cash: RM12 million from sales of land in Puncak Jalil, RM5 million in cash assignments from EON, RM7.68 million in payments by Unisel for earthworks, RM9.04 million from the sale of 25.94 acres of land in Bukit Beruntung, and RM17.4 million from sales of 218 acres of land in Bestari Jaya.

Go ahead, count it - it's all there.

Facts trump hype - again

How can we summarise this? For more than a decade under BN, one corporation owed the state hundreds of millions of ringgits.

Within a year or two of taking over, Khalid managed to collect on these debts, instantly increasing the amount of money available to spend on welfare programmes throughout Selangor.

Scandal?

Yes, it’s a scandal that Talam was allowed to get the free lunch it did under BN, and it’s a scandal it took this long for to create the change in government that succeeded in cleaning up the mess.

It would be insulting to suggest that this article is titled specifically in the hopes that Chua Tee Yong (left) would take the time to carefully peruse the facts within. Nevertheless, perhaps he may find the exercise beneficial in his longer term efforts to maintain what little credibility he has left.

Said credibility is shrinking at about the same rate at which he is reducing the amount of money claimed to be ‘misused’ by Selangor - from RM1 billion, to RM260 million, to RM42 million. Before long, he may have to measure in sen instead.

Perhaps Chua fancies himself a Rafizi Ramli. What he fails to understand however, is that Rafizi’s exposes are not just all about ‘glamorous’ press conferences and big numbers. Behind every expose is a ton of hard work and solid research.

Behind Chua appears only to be blind ambition that extends far beyond ability, and a shameful mainstream media that think that hype can overturn facts.

See this video and form your own opinion on the Talam issue. 

Also read:

'PERMANENTLY DEAD' : Guan Eng-Soi Lek debate shows complete public apathy for BN

Written by  Moaz Nair, Malaysia Chronicle

How to Value a Company in 3 Easy Steps

Valuing a Business:
How much is a business worth?
Don't care about the 'asset value' or 'owner's equity' of the business.
We look at the present value of its net free cash flows (FCF) plus present value of its "horizon value".

LPI

Announcement Date	Financial Year	Quarter Number	Financial Quarter	Revenue (RM,000)	Profit Before Tax (RM,000)	Net Profit (RM,000)	Earning Per Share (Cent)	Dividend (Cent)	NTA (RM)
09/07/2012	31/12/2012	2	30/06/2012	265,029	54,531	40,431	18.35	15.00	5.300
09/04/2012	31/12/2012	1	31/03/2012	246,061	37,821	31,477	14.29	0.00	5.070
09/01/2012	31/12/2011	4	31/12/2011	239,323	51,999	39,334	17.85	50.00	5.360
06/10/2011	31/12/2011	3	30/09/2011	236,385	55,948	45,116	20.48	0.00	4.880
07/07/2011	31/12/2011	2	30/06/2011	213,889	41,971	31,418	14.26	25.00	5.210
07/04/2011	31/12/2011	1	31/03/2011	213,412	50,135	38,626	17.54	0.00	5.015

ttm-EPS 70.97 sen
LFY Div  75 sen

Price (7.9.2012)  RM 13.72
PE   19.3x
DY  5.47%

Financial Yr Qtr  EPS(Cent,) ttm-EPS (Cents)
31/12/2012 2 18.35 70.97
31/12/2012 1 14.29 66.88
31/12/2011 4 17.85 70.13
31/12/2011 3 20.48 69.05
31/12/2011 2 14.26
31/12/2011 1 17.54
31/12/2010 4 16.77

SELL THE LOSERS, LET THE WINNERS RUN.

Losers refer NOT to those stocks with the depressed prices but to those whose revenues and earnings aren't capable of growing adequately. 

Weed out these losers and reinvest the cash into other stocks with better revenues and earnings potential for higher returns.

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