‌$McDonald's(MCD)$  ‌ If you haven't heard of McDonald today in this era, you are probably living in a cave. Founded in 1940, the chain business was once a hamburger stand, which later turned into a very successful franchise business. At its core, McDonald Corporation today is one of the world’s largest fast-food chains, known for its burgers, fries, and various other menu items. The chain operates thousands of restaurants globally, serving a vast array of food and beverages to over 69 million customers daily in over 100 countries. What many people doesn't quite know or realise is that the corporation is also a substantial real estate player in the business, and has generated massive rental income as part of their revenue generating strategy i

‌$Comcast(CMCSA)$  ‌‌$Nike(NKE)$  ‌‌$adidas AG(ADDYY)$  ‌‌$DraftKings Inc.(DKNG)$  ‌ The Olympics fever are finally back here again! According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, they found that stock markets in host countries particularly often show positive abnormal returns in the lead-up to the Olympics, reflecting increased economic activity and investor confidence. The Grand Paris Express Project is a prime example, with infrastructure being built for the events that will substantially benefit the citizens and its own people even way after the Olympics ends eventually. Major events su

‌$Lululemon Athletica(LULU)$  ‌ Lululemon has caught the attention of many value investors lately, as it has fallen almost half from the start of this year (since hitting the peak in Dec last year) due to the slower growth and weak spending consumption, impacting many other consumer discretionary and luxury stocks particularly this year. With the stock currently trading at the ~$250 range as of writing, can we see this an opportunity to purchase a quality business at a reasonable valuation? Is this an appealing opportunity for investors to initiate a position in this stock? Let us dig in more to find out. Business Overview: Lululemon Athletica, is a Canadian athletic apparel retailer known for its high-quality yoga pants, leggings, and other a

‌$YIXIN(02858)$  ‌ Yixin Group Limited (HKG: 2858) shares have had an impressive past couple of months, gaining +16.2% YTD after a shaky period beforehand. This outperforms the HSI index which at the moment YTD has only gained +2.5%. The stock is currently under consolidation mode for about a month now going directionless. With the recent rebound in share price, there still wouldn’t be many who think that Yixin Group’s Price to Earnings ratio of 7.5x is worth a mention when the median average Price to Earnings for the sector industry is about 18.5x. One possibility for the relatively moderate P/E is because investors might not be confident of the company’s earnings going forward. The stock market is usually forward looking so investors can o

‌$Netflix(NFLX)$  ‌ A lot has happened since my last coverage on Netflix which was many quarters ago. Since Netflix's founder Reed Hastings gave up on his position as CEO, the company has taken a different direction altogether with its strategy on password-sharing and also advertising focus. As a result of its curb strategy on password-sharing and tiered pricing, the company has done extremely well in the streaming front with many more net subscriber growth, but they are about to change this key metric which they have been tracking for so many years into hours of engagement from subscribers instead. They felt that the more the subscribers and users are engaged by staying in Netflix ecosystem longer, either through watching movies or playing

‌$CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc.(CRWD)$  ‌‌$Palo Alto Networks(PANW)$  ‌‌$SentinelOne, Inc(S)$  ‌ Imagine if there's a day that technology would brought the entire world to a pausing halt. That was yesterday. CrowdStrike Holdings has long dominated the market for cloud-based software which is meant to protect customers’ networks from hackers, but a botched software update has other plans that brought businesses from airlines to banks to a screeching halt which impacted billions of dollars in the market. The massive outage linked to cybersecurity company CrowdStrike could be the largest ever seen after the issue caused disruption to Microsoft's systems around th

‌$Warner Bros. Discovery(WBD)$  ‌ If you have not familiarized yourself with Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. (Nasdaq: WBD), maybe you might be interested to find out more after reading this article. Subscription videos on demand and streaming have been prevalent over the last decade and consumers have a plethora of choices to choose from these days, from the likes of Netflix (currently the largest streaming company in the world by market cap) to Disney Plus and Warner Bros Discovery. Competition is intense but it is good for the consumers and the markets. These companies are increasingly focus on refining and streamlining their operations, including providing more choices for consumers at a fraction of what they used to pay. Last year, the spin-o

‌$ARM Holdings Ltd(ARM)$  ‌ Arm Holdings Limited (“Arm”) has on the 21st of Aug 2023, announced that it has publicly filed a registration statement on Form F-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) relating to the proposed initial public offering of American depositary shares (“ADS”) representing its ordinary shares. This will represent one of the biggest initial public offerings we have this year with Softbank looking to raise up to $4.87 billion at the top range, offering 95.5 million American depository shares for between $47 to $51 a piece. The proposed range would value the company at between $48b to $52b, which is higher than the failed $40 billion deal Softbank was trying to sell to Nvidia Corp last year because of ant

‌$Roblox Corporation(RBLX)$  ‌ If you have children, or if you are a gamer yourself, there is a good chance that you might have heard about the popular game Roblox. In fact, over the past couple of years since making its inception in 2006, Roblox has been making waves in the gaming community and its popularity has skyrocketed among both the kids under 13 and young adults. Roblox is one of the beneficiaries that resulted from the pandemic growth as gaming took stage centre, but it has fallen by more than 70% since hitting the peak at $134.7 back in Nov 2021. Is there value at this company after falling so much, and what is the projector trajectory growth going forward? Let’s deep dive to find out. Roblox Business Model and Platform Stickiness:‌

‌$Alibaba(BABA)$  ‌‌$Alibaba(09988)$  ‌ Alibaba Group Holding (NYSE: BABA) just reported earnings for the quarter ended 30 June 2023. Let us take a look at its reported financial results in a nutshell: Revenue was up 14% year on year to RMB 234,156 million (USD 32,292 million). Income from Operations was up 70% year on year to RMB 42,290 million (USD 5,860 million). This was due to the one-off reversal of share-based compensation expense of RMB 6,901 million (USD 962 million) which helped to boost. Without this, income from operations would still have been up but lesser by 43% year on year. Net Income attributable to ordinary shareholders was RMB 34,332 million (USD 4,735 million). Non-GAAP net

‌$Meta Platforms, Inc.(META)$  ‌‌$Twitter(TWTR)$  ‌ Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg announced the initial version of Threads, an app built by Instagram for sharing and networking with text. Most people would be familiar with how Instagram works where billions of people around the world connect with photos and videos, so the vision with Threads is an expansion of the ecosystem to create a space to express your ideas with words. It has already occupied the number one spot in the charts for social media apps in store this week so you can quickly see how that escalates. Latest news is that Threads has passed 2 million sign-ups in the first two hours launch in App Store, and 30 million sign-ups in le

‌$Alphabet(GOOGL)$  ‌ The stock market is a voting machine in the short term but a weighing machine in the long term. Investors might recall just about in the past three-month, Alphabet was hit by a slew of bad news. These include Google AI Chatbot Bard flubbing its answer during the demo, followed by threats about Microsoft Bing potentially replacing Google Search as the number one engine in the years to come. As a result of these bad news, shares of Alphabet plunged to the $90s sometime in Feb and since then, it has continued to struggle against the other mega peers who have been picking up momentum. Google keynote 2023 presentation done earlier this week has embraced AI and many other updates in its revolution – the full article which you

As today is a public holiday due to labour day, I had an opportunity to quickly update the blog. As there are no changes to the positions in the portfolio from both buying and selling side, this will be a relatively short update. The market continued to trade in range for the month of April with no major big movement either to the upside or downside. Because of this, there was no real compelling reason to add to the position further at this juncture – although I had written a couple of options from both the call and put side, and all had expired safely by the end of the April month. For now, my strategy remained doing the same until I see some real compelling position to add further. Meanwhile, the similar likes of the Chinese and US tech continued to see range of weaknesses respectivel

‌$DigiCore Reit USD(DCRU.SI)$  ‌ The prospect for a Data Reit centre demand was so hot last year that when Digital Core REIT decided to list in SGX last year, there were many that jumped into the bandwagon – benchmarking its performance to the very resilient Keppel DC REIT which has been around longer. Myself included – I subscribed to the IPO and successfully received 2,600 shares which I have kept till today. Since it is a relatively small position, I have not looked at it with much detail but have been keeping a tab on its development since the share price plunged over the last year or so. The funny thing about this is a lot of the REIT structure, sponsor support and asset quality are pretty much the same, but the two tales of the REIT a

As part of this newly featured series I am making to refresh the segment, I will be interviewing people from all walks of life into looking what they do for their day job, what they do outside of their day job, what their plans are for investment, and what are their thoughts for retirement. In the fourth instalment series of this segment, I had the privilege to interview the 3 co-founders of the renowned The Joyful Investors (“TJI”) blog at the same time, and here we’ll look at what are some of their priorities towards investing for income, creating value for their readers and fulfilling their own retirement plans. For those who are not aware yet, TJI is run by the three co-founders on a full-time basis – Hazelle, Kathy, and Keith since 2020 and they’ve grown prominent in the past recent

Apologies for the lack of posting in the past couple of weeks as I’ve been swamped with work lately due to the unexpected internal audit coming in to audit the company. Together with financial year end audit, that means two audits going on at the same time, which is not a very nice one to have when you are battling on two fronts. The good news however is that this month we’ll be having our increment cycle as well as bonus pay-out, so more moolah to come over the next few weeks which will be nice to put in some allocation into the market. I’ve also been traveling in the past week during the school holiday and our family went to Seoul for about a week. It was a nice breakaway from the routine and the weather in Seoul was between 0 – 10 degrees throughout so it did still feel like winter mi